Near 80, Verdi composed "Falstaff", at 80, England's Frank Swinnerton writes "Quadrille." "Quadrille" is no "Falstaff," to be sure, but it is a like example of perdurable creative power. Mr. Swinnerton has composed upward of 50 books in his lifetime. Of this number, at least 35 are novels…. This novel is certainly among his best. The final installment of a quartet (the others were "The Woman From Sicily," "A Tigress in Prothero" and "The Grace Divorce") it continues the author's observation—again, over more than half a century—of the changing tactics in another, timeless war, this time between men and women. The wit, marksmanship, spanking pace and impeccable technique are still there, brighter than new.

It is a rather old-fashioned novel, in that it has a forthright plot, assertive characters and no more allegorical lint than a scalpel; but its grasp of the moneyed and artistic life in St. John's Wood is as up-to-date as Kansas City. The title may be taken in either meaning: the book covers the "game" of life and the "dance" of life equally well. Reminiscent of Maugham's lucidity and shrewdness, it meshes like clockwork, without a waste word. Sniffers at Maugham (or at literary clock work of any kind) may sniff at "Quadrille," but it is whacking good and substantial entertainment nevertheless.

The time is 1960, and the story pivots on young concert pianist Laura Grace, through the hurdles of career, involvement with some way-out esthetes (deliciously skewered) and a fateful infatuation, to true love at last with a solid fellow artist. The Grace clan … are all "good" people. It is the author's prime feat that he makes each of them also distinctive and interesting.

They are not quite so interesting, though, as the seamier types whose lives involve theirs….

There is plenty of good melodrama, including a cliff-hanger inquest … but the book's chief force lies in its unerring blend of detail and occasion. The epigraph is: "In tragic life, God wot / No villain need be! Passions spin the plot / We are betrayed by what is false within." It is taken from Meredith's "Modern Love," which charts the dark undertows that menace fervency. The subject here is less restricted and the over-all tone nothing like as grim as Meredith's, but in this case (see the chapters labeled "Panic," "Bitterness," "What Is Jealousy?"), the novelist renders such carcinogens of the spirit more tellingly than the poet.

Mr. Swinnerton dips into no psychological arcana. Though he avoids such immersions, his eagle eye and darting net miss little that is galvanic in human relations. "Quadrille" really swings.