["Dead"] is this novel's final word, and a familiar one to Beryl Bainbridge's readers. This time the death is prefigured by forebodings, so that it arouses empathy rather than that gasp of anomic glee jerked from us by her grimmer comedies. "Another Part of the Wood" … is less darkened by the dye of its author's particular sensibility than are some of her late books. Like them, however, it was a good read the first time round and is a better one now.

The main differences I detect between the new and old versions are cuts. Miss Bainbridge, enjoying the rare opportunity of revising with a decade's hindsight, has pruned with the skill one would expect from a writer for whom cutting is an intrinsic part of narrative technique. The satiric effects for which she is admired are often achieved by splicing together incongruous slices of life. People in her books break off, fall silent or fail to say what is on their minds. The choppy rhythms establish a sense of general alienation, and speed drama. Timing and juxtaposition are as important in her narrative as they are to a comedian, and it is worth noting that Miss Bainbridge was an actress before becoming a full-time writer.

Her title is a theatrical echo. It suggests scene-shifting: a curtain dropped on one set of characters, then raised to reveal others unraveling their hopes in some more or less allegorical wood. The wood is in Wales, and of the people who came there to camp, several have emblematic names. Joseph, whose main preoccupation is with interpreting his own dreams and whose small son will die at the novel's end, is twice associated with the Bible….

It is Miss Bainbridge's style that makes her a seductive writer—her manner, not her matter, that is so good. Summaries do her no justice. Her genius is for a tapestry of ephemera. Detail is a component that she handles with a miniaturist's skill, often in a close-up so obsessive as to create a tension between her naturalistic accuracy and queerness of perspective. Objects can be so sharply perceived that (this happens in the description of George) people associated with them seem reified. Like automata, they tick over, the tapes in their heads going haywire as they fail to plug into each other's circuits and end by getting each other hilariously or tragically wrong.

We are not, however, given time to brood on tragedy. Cut, goes the authorial knife. Splice. Sheer movement keeps potentially depressing material in ebullition and releases that secondary resonance which makes anecdotes interesting. (p. 14)

If you chop up, then you must reassemble, and Miss Bainbridge has cohesive agents for this: unifying metaphors, such as Lionel's reflection that "life was war, in a more subtle form, that lasted forever." Lionel is presented as a fool whose harping on this subject bores people stiff. Fools, however, have traditionally been held to have vision, and he hits here on a theme the author will use again. The War and biblical allusions are an authentic part of ordinary English people's consciousness and are here used to cast their signifying shadow over random events. So is the Monopoly game that keeps Joseph busy acquiring unreal property while, unknown to him, his small son is dying in bed of a pill overdose. In this case, irony is perhaps a shade too neatly packaged, and Miss Bainbridge emerges as a more conventional moralist than one might have imagined on the evidence of her later work. Yet, even in this early novel, she had already found the dark dynamic of her siren voice. (p. 23)