[In the following review, Goodwin offers a positive assessment of Loving Roger.]

In the midst of this mediocrity and boredom, Roger Cruikshank arrives to work as a typesetting executive at T. T. Tall, blond, middle-class and egotistical, he seems to Anna to have stepped from the pages of the romantic novels she constantly reads. The relationship they embark on is conducted in terms of deepest secrecy. Only Neville, Roger's closest friend and a Cambridge academic, is allowed to know of their mutual involvement. When Anna becomes pregnant, Neville is the only outsider to know the identity of the baby's father.

As the novel proceeds, the pressures engendered by the relationship become increasingly hard to control. Roger goes to America on behalf of TT and is, predictably, unfaithful. Anna, left alone to endure her pregnancy and the birth of the child, examines her commitment to Roger and begins to understand the dangerous nature of her feelings. We realize that her self-assertion will be violent, bloody and irresistible.

In Loving Roger Tim Parks exhibits an astonishing control over the tone of his writing, and it is this discipline which makes the novel such an impressive achievement. Roger is a nightmare of self-regard, his attraction to Anna partly physical, but largely based on his desire to “write.” He regards her as an excellent source of material—she recounts the office gossip, which he intends to use in a play, with an honesty and perception that Roger finds fetching and surprising.

The bulk of the novel is written in the first person, and it is the voice of Anna we hear explaining her obsession, describing the humiliation and anger she feels with the same honesty which so amazes Roger. Anna is a triumph: her experience points to the truism that none of us is ordinary. Even those who read The Far Pavilions are also capable of anguish. Those who ignore this do so, as in Roger's case, at their peril.

It is Roger, for all his pretensions to artistic status, for all the hours spent at the typewriter composing his poetry and plays, who is ultimately mundane. The excerpts from his diaries are characterized by an entirely adolescent desire for self-dramatization. Therein lies the core of the problem; Anna is an adult, and Roger simply refuses to accept life on adult terms, insisting on remaining a sort of enfant terrible, living by a set of rules formulated at school and university: all of which will lead, inevitably, to the violent denouement of the novel.