[In the following review, King offers a generally positive assessment of The Old Jest, but criticizes certain unbelievable elements in the story.]

We all have lists of things that, though there is nothing intrinsically wrong with them, just happen not to be to our tastes. My own list would include restaurants in which the service is better than the food and the décor than either; cars, however large or powerful, with only two doors ocean-cruises; and literary fantasies. The last of these aversions makes it impossible for me fully to enjoy Orlando, Lady into Fox or The Master and Margarita, much though I admire Virginia Woolf, David Garnett and Mikhail Bulgakov, and it also makes it difficult for me to be sure of being fair to Wild Nights, much though I admire Emma Tennant too.

This novel functions simultaneously on two levels: the realistic and the fantastic On the realistic level, this is an account of a family of landed gentry—father, mother, child—living on their estate in an inhospitable valley in the North. Each autumn, they receive a visit from the father's sister, Zita. Since she brings with her the ghosts of the past that she and her brother shared together but from which the brother's wife is excluded, her presence has about it a mingled attraction and disquiet for the child narrator. The mansion, from the far corners of which all life has been perpetually withdrawing, to concentrate itself into a smaller and smaller space, suddenly fills up again with the footsteps of servants long since dead.

After Aunt Zita's visit, there follows the Christmas one of the mother's sister, Thelma, a woman of a totally different stamp. Unlike Aunt Zita, she awakes no ghosts; she belongs to the present and there is nothing of the sorceress about her, as there is about Zita.

After Christmas, the family, yearning in its northern fastness for the long-delayed Spring, makes its way south to the house in which Uncle Rainbow—in fact, not an uncle but a cousin—lives with his faithful housekeeper, Letty. A long line has trickled to its end with Uncle Rainbow, who effetely spends most of his time lying on his bed, who has done nothing distinctive and who has produced no issue.

On the fantastic level, Aunt Zita—a female equivalent of Forrest Reid's Uncle Stephen—is a true sorceress, who transports the enraptured child to mysterious trysts and secret celebrations. The villagers dread and deride her, burning her effigy as a witch on the night of their Hallowe'en ball. On the same fantastic level, there is Uncle Wilhelmina, who is arrested after wandering down the main street of the village, stick in hand, asking to be beaten; and many of the descriptions of life with Uncle Rainbow, ‘in a house in a maze of tall hedges’ some-where between Glastonbury and Stonehenge.

In its combination of what one would guess to be autobiographical elements and an intensely poetic style of presentation, this novel is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. The general hyperaesthesia and elaboration of imagery also recall that masterpiece—in particular, its middle section, masterly to some and irritating to others, in which Virginia Woolf describes how the days, months, and eventually years eat into a deserted house. Miss Tennant can survive this comparison cum summa laude. I must confess that, as I have indicated, this kind of pale, smoky Lapsang Souchong, served in the finest of bone-china, is not quite my cup of tea; but to those for whom it is, Miss Tennant's skilful decoction should give a lot of pleasure.

More to my personal taste is Jennifer Johnston's The Old Jest, a realistic novel about a young girl coming to painful maturity in perpetually troubled Ireland soon after the first World war. Nancy is 18 but, like many 18-year-olds of that period, she behaves, in her innocent gaucheness and vulnerability, more like a 12-year-old today. An orphan, she lives with her kind, slightly pathetic maiden aunt, and her grandfather, a former general and now senile, in a delapidated and mortgaged house. Miss Johnston's evocation of the day-to-day life of this family and their neighbours is always splendid. The aunt returns slightly tipsy from race-meetings; the old man spends his time chanting hymns and watching the nearby railway line through binoculars; the young girl moons over a conventional, virginal young stock-broker, who is himself in love with a self-composed girl, adept at the piano.

It is when Miss Johnston introduces a mysterious stranger—is he perhaps the heroine's father?—and the complications of insurrection against British rule, that the realism, elsewhere so rich, thins and drains away. I found it hard to believe in the emaciated, war-scarred intruder, who says things to the girl like ‘I am as unknown to you as a locked room might be’ and even harder to believe in the murderous conspiracy into which he sweeps her up, until, by the last page, she is herself committed to the cause of revolution. Whereas all the other details of Nancy's life—her nail-biting, her solitary walks by the sea, her romantic yearnings—are totally convincing, there is something factitious about the melodramatic core of her story. This is a pity, because in every other way this is a first-rate novel.