Synopsis

AN INTERVIEW REVIEWED: This novel was written just after CROSS-PURPOSES and is both more complex and subtler than its stylistic precursor. Basically, the plot revolves around the efforts of Anthony Keating, a young correspondent for an arts periodical based in London's West End, to conduct a prearranged interview with a world-famous composer when, to his dismay, the person who would normally have conducted the interview had got sick at the last moment. Owing to lack of experience in this field Keating fails to complete his assignment on the specified day and is obliged to accept an alternative date for later that same week, when Mr Tonks is due to return from a professional engagement in Birmingham. However, the composer is detained there an extra day and, due to a combination of unforeseen factors, Keating ends-up seducing his daughter ... with disastrous consequences for both of them! For they are discovered in flagrante delicto by Mr Tonks' elderly housekeeper, and word eventually gets back to the composer himself, causing serious allegations and misunderstandings which put not only the interview, but Keating's very career as a correspondent in jeopardy! Ultimately only Howard Tonks' daughter, Rebecca, can save Anthony Keating from additional humiliation, though not before several turns in the plot have led him into deeper trouble with his boss and colleagues and duly resulted in his dismissal. But thanks to Rebecca's influence with her father the interview eventually goes ahead, and the resulting dilemma for 'Arts Monthly' is whether to publish or shelve it, in view of the surrounding circumstances and the dismissal of its principal instigator. It is the composer himself, however, who has the final say, and it comes as both a shock and a delight to Anthony Keating. – Those looking for philosophy in AN INTERVIEW REVIEWED will find much food for thought, as will those for whom humour is a sine qua non of literary entertainment.