Wain has written an utterly convicing, honest and sensitive account of the deep, inarticulate, agonised love of a father for his brave, confused and lonely child.

Fast reading of a great novel will give us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious.