[Our Father] is an awkward, squalid, hurrying affair, but then so is the society in which, about which and presumably for which it has been written. How good an excuse this can be held to be is a large question, and Thomas Hinde's is not the only case in which it arises; but Mr Hinde does pose the problem in a particularly acute form, since he seems more intent than most novelists on flinging society in its own face. Moreover, the search for a moral authenticity which, on the whole, he does not find in English behaviour gives his work an enragé air that is particularly strong in Our Father. Many parts of the novel manifest a nervous anger that goes beyond the requirements of energetic narrative, and whose true source and purpose are never quite revealed.

The central difficulty is the figure of Hugh Burkett, one of those "impossible" characters it is so tricky to bring to life…. [It] is difficult to keep step with a figure who consists so entirely of reactions and resentments as Hugh Burkett does, and whose intransigent peevishness so dominates the author's chosen style….

One could say that Hugh tore through the book shaking [the other characters] out of their complacency, except that they have none to speak of. What makes them even more infuriating to Hugh (it's a fury he sometimes exercises by putting on bogus voices over the phone, a very British-fiction thing to do) is that they are not really worthy of his majestic paranoia. Neither are they worthy, which is more to the point from the reader's angle, to stand for the society to which Hugh feels himself so superior. Society, and London society in particular, can do better than this in the line of humbug and viciousness, as Mr Hinde seems to recognize every time he lets himself go on the subject of the capital.

The story is propped between two bookends; an introduction and epilogue…. Like a good deal else in the book, it requires dismantling, a job which only mechanically-minded readers are likely to take on.