Good Behaviour was a dark, subtle, savagely amusing study of the decline of a well-born Irish family after the First World War.

The members of that family destroyed each other, and that they did so with all due courtesy made the destruction no less cruel. But compared to the Swifts in Time After Time, the St. Charleses of Good Behaviour were angels of kindness.

Time After Time describes a family already ruined…. They more or less dislike each other, and yet they remain together, sniping and bickering and scratching out some shabby kind of life for themselves….

The novel's pacing is perfect. Roughly the first one-third of the story sets us within the routine at Duraghglass as it has been practiced without change for years…. Each person has a particular interest, and each (it is hinted) a shameful secret.

There's a point at which the family's stasis becomes so vivid that the reader himself experiences a kind of claustrophobia. It's here that the perfect pacing comes in; for precisely when we feel we have to get out of this book for a breath of air, the tempo changes. Enter Cousin Leda, who was last seen as a flirtatious young girl…. [She is] a catalyst if ever there was one, restless and probing and intuitive and more than a little malicious.

The irony is that Leda, who was always coldheartedly curious about Jasper's maimed eye and May's maimed hand, is now maimed herself. She is blind. Unaware of the signs of her own aging—her wrinkles and obesity, her utterly faded charms—she is also unaware of any alterations in her cousins….

Does all this sound a little grim? Does it strike you as a story to avoid if you're struggling through a winter depression? Well, it is. The Swifts are grotesque and often unlikeable. Leda is so consistently, uniformly the villain that she might have stepped out of an old silent movie.

On the other hand, the novel also happens to be exceptionally funny…. [Observe] the shattering breakfast at which Leda stages a confrontation. It's a genuine, old-fashioned climax, the kind we used to diagram in English class, and all the more effective because the Swifts, true to character, manage somehow to sail above a large part of it.

Time After Time is a shade overstated. It is less believable and less sympathetic, if more humorous, than Good Behaviour. But there's no denying Molly Keane's skill. She's as sharp-eyed as Barbara Pym, as battily comic as Beryl Bainbridge, as mordant as Jean Rhys. Bundle up warmly before you start reading this cold little dagger of a book.