[In the review below, Annan praises the satiric tone of Palace without Chairs.]

The crown prince's name is Ulrich; his brothers, the archdukes, are called Balthasar, Sempronius, and Urban; the youngest child is the Archduchess Heather, a butch seventeen-year-old; their father rules the modern kingdom of Evarchia. All this, with the subtitle "a baroque novel", suggests a Firbankian romp, or something like Muriel Spark's The Abbess of Crewe. That was a send-up of politics and the media; they are sent up here too, but fundamentally [Palace without Chairs] is a moral fable in a pretty and entertaining guise: poetic descriptions of animals, landscape, and the weather relieve a steady flow of wit and humour, and passionate convictions lie beneath.

The plot is ten-little-nigger-boys: the whole royal family (except for one member) is gradually eliminated. The dropping out and dying does not seem unduly sad when it starts, and gets blackly funnier by accumulation. All the same, there is an undertone of sadness: "tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse", as one of the characters observes. The story begins with Ulrich hastening home from his mistress, Clara, to the bedside of his dying father. The king gets better: the person who dies is the charmer Sempronius, shot during the thanksgiving celebrations for the royal recovery by a lunatic who mistakes him for the crown prince. The crown prince, meanwhile, renounces his right of succession and goes into exile. That gets rid of him, and Balthasar succeeds him as heir to the throne and Clara's lover: her affair with Ulrich is over.

The king falls dangerously ill a second time, but again it is others who die. Balthasar is accidentally killed in the Brophyan pursuit of rescuing a wounded bird from a cliff top; Clara topples after; the queen, a gentle, dotty intellectual, dies unexpectedly and painlessly during her siesta; and her death frees the slightly autistic Urban to do what he has always longed to do—commit suicide; and he does it with glee. The king recovers a second time. Heather is now the heir apparent. She has always been unsympathetic towards her father, and it turns out she was right: he is revealed as a pious, selfish fraud: even his illnesses were at least partly sham. Nevertheless, a third bout carries him off: Heather promptly renounces the throne and thunders off to England accompanied by the young English governess—once her lover and now her friend. The book ends cheerfully with Heather embarking on a new lesbian affair in London, while the governess catches the tube home to her family, and a military dictatorship takes over in Evarchia.

The chairs of the title are the subject of a sub-plot. There are not enough chairs in the palace and none at all in the royal nursery. The archdukes have to take it in turn to sit on the old rocking-horse until it finally and symbolically gives way under Heather's colossal weight. Balthasar decides to ask for chairs, and what follows is a lampoon on red tape and officialdom: a committee is set up to consider the whole matter, right down to the possible definitions of a chair, because, as the comptroller of the royal household says to the exasperated Balthasar, "his Highness wouldn't want to endorse sloppy thinking". News of the committee leaks into the press and a columnist attacks the archduke and the whole institution of royalty:

Not content with living at public expense in the lap of luxury, Archduke B. is trying, it seems, to get the whole interior of the Winter Palace made over…. The country's foreign exchange problems evidently don't weigh with the man who's always had everything. Prince Charming, did I hear you say? Or was it Prince Greedy?

This kind of satire is not new, but it is funny if it is good and good if it is funny, and Brigid Brophy's is both. Among her targets are Iron Curtain espionage, the security services, communism in capitalist countries, trade unions, strikes, court-room procedure, and public holidays with the time they waste. She also rides her familiar hobby horses with style: animals' rights, homosexuals' rights, writers' rights (PLR), language rights (i.e. the right of languages to be properly spoken and written), vegetarianism, atheism, and so on. She is not at all savage this time: a Shavian good temper prevails.

Her favourite device is to lead the reader up a garden path which appears to be bordered with clichés, and then to clobber him when he bends down to enjoy their scent. For instance, the opening scene with the lonely figure of Ulrich riding through the snow is full of potential pathos: if his father dies, as one assumes he will, Ulrich will be forced to give up Clara. But it is not really sad at all: not because the king recovers, but because Ulrich is no longer in love.

Love, especially romantic love, and conventional ideas of honour are among the values that get devalued: Ulrich explains to Heather that if he renounces the throne he will have to marry Clara, otherwise it would be dishonourable. "Your concept of honour is ludicrous", says Heather. "It's so punitive…. Is it an act of honour to put [Clara] in the role of the person who makes you miserable?" Ulrich agrees, but is unhappy because "to pass from one seeming true love to another was to devalue them all, since it was to admit that one's love had been founded on illusion". The anti-idealist Heather has accepted that long ago. She is the one with the motto "tout passe, tout lasse, etc." This crucial conversation comes about halfway through the book and is the first indication that Heather may turn out to be its heroine (which she does). Up till then she has seemed the least attractive of the royal children: hoydenish, insensitive, and crude. Could it be a wicked self-caricature? Certainly Heather's seem to be the author's.

All the chief characters have enough attributes and idiosyncrasies ingeniously and unexpectedly assembled to make them engaging; they are not totally real, but that would be than you could expect in an allegorical comedy of this kind. They also have—a very difficult thing to bring off—a lot of charm. It comes from the way they talk. In Heather's case the charm is only unveiled by degrees, because her transformation from ugly duckling to swan—or rather, from what would, by conventional standards, be an ugly duckling, but is, in the Brophy scale of values, a swan from the beginning—has to come as a surprise.

What is the scale of values? Aesthetic and intellectual fastidiousness come quite high up, love nowhere much, reason, friendship, compassion, and tenderness right at the top; "the passionate affection" between Heather and the governess, for instance, or the bond between Ulrich and his mother. As these two wait to open a court ball together, they look embarrassed. "But as a matter of fact, Ulrich and the queen were seldom so conscious of the tenderness between them as when each felt compassion towards the other's public embarrassments." Brigid Brophy used to be a bit Voltairean in her Weltanschauung and attack; now her sensibility seems mellower and her views more akin to Montaigne's.