John Bayley’s new novel is largely about those who are had on, or taken in, and this may well include his readers, who need to keep their wits about them. To begin with, he conjures up a couple of innocents. There was an innocent, too, as hero in his last novel, In Another Country, published in 1955. But Oliver, a young officer with the British army of occupation, was a worrier and a sensitive, risking trouble for the sake of his German girlfriend, and contrasted with his hideously successful rival. In Alice the two innocents are uncompromisingly green, in the sense that the Vicar of Wakefield, or Daisy Miller, or Crocodile Dundee, are green, their misfortunes illustrating the world’s vanities.

Ginnie, the more important of the two, is round about thirty-five, born therefore in 1960, although it seems to be much earlier (she remembers when people made lamps out of chianti bottles). She is on holiday in Sorrento, an intelligent, unworried, quite well-off virgin with her guidebook. We’re told that she takes bicarb for her indigestion, while her idea of fun is that of a seventy-year-old. ‘To go frankly to bed in the afternoon and have a sleep, instead of feeling drowsy at work; to feel the blessed heat and yet not to lie in the sun; to look forward to her dinner and before that a drink in the café.’ Her fantasies, as she frankly admits to herself, are from women’s magazines. The intensities of love and friendship, as she sees them occupying other people, look like too much of a strain: a quiet life, therefore, for Ginnie. What’s more, she believes she is not exceptional, and that there are ‘really many more people like her than the papers and the television cared to know’. One of them, apparently, is a tweed-jacketed solicitor, Mark Brassey, who asks her out to dinner. Ginnie enjoys a sedately greedy evening. ‘His lack of emphasis was more soothing every moment.’

Meanwhile, within sight of the hotel, the cruise liner Achille Lauro soundlessly enters the bay, bringing with it a dark memory of hijack and murder. To Ginnie the ship means almost nothing. On the other hand, she has to admit to an overwhelming feeling, ‘something like desire’, at the sight of a superbly strong and dark and astonishingly whiteskinned woman climbing out of the sea. This, she thinks, must truly be the White Witch of Sorrento. In fact, she is Alice, one of the holiday room-maids, and it’s Alice – certainly not Mark Brassey – who comes that night to share Ginnie’s cramped hotel bed.

Alice is a magnificent six foot, broad-shouldered, broad-minded. Her Australian accent (as Germaine Greer said of Neighbours) is cut out of whole cloth, but this is partly accounted for later, and in any case there is something unaccountable about the way people talk in this book. Even the youngish ones seem to be in a time-warp, referring to rotters, to being a good sport, to giving the glad eye and even to popping the question. Ginnie reflects several times on the difficulties of slang. ‘The modern era often struck her as no longer able to keep up with itself.’ This might well have been one of the first notes for the whole novel, but would mean nothing to Alice, whose name suggests a combination of the heart of Australia with the logic of Victorian nonsense.