[In the following review, Bailey offers a negative assessment of Mr. Bone's Retreat.]

Margaret Forster's Mr. Bone's Retreat is another cup of tea: Earl Grey, with lemon, though some Brooke Bond may have got left in the caddy. William Bone, retired civil servant and life-long bachelor, lives on the top floor of his genteel Richmond house, with an old girl friend, now in her 70s, on the ground floor. There's an empty flat in between, being fancied up, into which long-haired Alex and his pregnant Sophie intrude, and stay. Alex is one of your young, modish freaks. The book gives a dry pleasure on almost every page but in sum seems unluckily vacuous; mostly, I think, because Mr. Bone's territorial claims are supposedly violated, but Mr. Bone himself never seems particularly unhappy about it—perhaps because Alex isn't on the scene very often and Sophie comes across as another old lady, which makes three of them. Though disturbed by sounds of love-making and the toilet being flushed past the hour of 10 pm, the usual curfew in the Bone retreat, Mr. Bone enacts no original displacement activities. One character—Germaine, thwarted daughter of the downstairs old lady—indicates Margaret Forster's potential if pushed. The novel has the somewhat flamboyant copyright ‘© SHELTER 1971,’ but I don't think this is to blame for the feeling of claustrophobia the book induces. Living in tents isn't like living in sin, on a lease, in Richmond, but it has to be wilder and wickeder.