Geographically Madrid is right in the middle of the Iberian peninsula, which might have seemed convenient, but it doesn’t have a navigable river, which was a serious disadvantage in those days.
And there wasn’t even a cathedral. But Philip wanted it anyway, perhaps just to show that the king could do just as he liked. Four centuries later, on a warm spring day, it seems an entirely happy choice, but at the time it hardly made sense at all. Rose Macauley comes to mind, too, as the spiritual concerns surface from the insouciant prose. This is a stylish clearing of the fence, and if it does not touch the heart as poignantly as the debut, its skill and humour make one anticipate the next one with pleasure.. For more than 600 years after its foundation, Madrid was an undistinguished little town on a hot and dusty plateau.

Then, in 1561, King Philip II decided to come on an extended visit, bringing with him the entire royal household. The visit never ended; Philip had never intended it to, for he’d already decided to make Madrid the new capital of Spain. Simon, though, is having an affair with Gillian, a blonde accountant, and is torn between his desire to be with her and his love for Flora and the children who he, perforce, neglects.The novel is circular in shape, opening as Simon and Gillian are spotted in a brasserie by one of Flora’s friends, retracing their affair and concluding with its end. Their three “bright and beautiful” children are at fee-paying schools. They drink gin in the evenings and it cheers rather than depresses them, and yet they feel something is missing.

Simon, who fears the “naffery” of Flora’s abandoned faith concedes she may fill the void by becoming an Anglican: “Further than that I’m not prepared to go Honestly, Flora. I mean it, the Pope and Days of Obligation and plastic Virgin Marys with light bulbs inside them…” Flora laughs and thinks, yes, “it was naff all right”, but that is not the whole story, and neither of them wishes to go any deeper. Flora, a lapsed Catholic, embraces High Anglicanism, a vicar and his wife have a go at being written by Barbara Pym, and handsome twins on leave from a Mary Wesley drop in.
Flora, who has “gone into business with a woman friend importing and selling third world textiles” has been married for 15 years to Simon, a director of TV drama who once dreamed of being “the Jean Renoir de nos jours.” These are people who shop at “Horrids” and holiday in gites in the Perigord and use French phrases for emphasis. Meanwhile, the vicar’s wife, assessing Flora as an “English rose, slightly faded” in “good tweeds” surmises that she will come up with “some absolutely first-rate jumble”.This must be the first time “good tweeds” have had an outing since the heyday of Penguin Crime, and it’s nice to see them back. In 1993 Madeleine St John published a first novel of such charm than any succesor was bound to provoke comments on “the hurdle of the second novel”.

The Women in Black was set in a 1950s Sydney department store, and its heroines were the uniformed sales staff of that beautifully evoked emporium. For A Pure Clear Light, St John, an Australian now living in London, leaves behind the certainties of that hierarchical and more innocent world for present-day Hammersmith and a middle-class cast with jobs as nebulous as their characters. In this sly take on English middlebrow fiction, they are as smooth as mannequins who, sensing they are not quite real, converse in dialogue like that of middle-class sitcom, and aspire to be the people in some churchy, risque novel. Some of the book’s strongest parts are those that deal with Trixie’s childhood. Her mother likes to inflict a creepy and cruel punishment on her, making her sit alone in a room staring into a warped mirror, “until you recognise the Devil, all your badness and lies”. The effects of this on a small girl are compellingly communicated, providing the key to her later behaviour.As Trixie grows rapidly madder and more turbulent, the other woman’s middle-class existential angst is shown up for the self-indulgent exercise that it is, although this is not perhaps the author’s intention.Glaister’s sympathy with Inis suggests that her protagonist’s destructive behaviour is all justified in the greater cause of her search for herself, but personally I couldn’t help feeling that her family were a lot better off without her A dark book about two unloveable women..