This novel is set in England during the second world war. Relations between employer and employee figure prominently, and there is some interaction between the principal character, who is middle class, and his neighbours (same class). His boat, and his problems in using it, seem to have symbolic significance for the author: probably an expression of the tensions between him and his neighbours downstream.

Not as compelling as the Go-Between, but partly autobiographical too. Like his hero, Hartley lived by a river. ( )