The story: The narrator is Ashenden, a name that Maugham used in others of his stories. Edward Driffield, a famous writer (loosely based on Thomas Hardy) has recently died, a biography is planned, and Ashenden is approached for information, because they had met when Ashenden was a boy and Driffield was a struggling unknown author living in the same village.
Ashenden reflects on this, and also on how they met again several years later in London, when he was a medical student and Driffield was at long last beginning to achieve some recognition. But it quickly become clear that the biographer (a literary hack called Alroy Kear, who is mercilessly dissected) will be producing a fundamentally dishonest book, because he intends to leave out all the most controversial aspects of Driffield's life; particularly the strange case of his first wife, Rosie, a former barmaid.
There are marvellous depictions, in a restrained but lethal manner, of the horrors of growing up in a village riven by social snobbery, the awful people hovering on the fringes of the London cultural scene, and the ridiculous tourists visiting Driffield's last home; now preserved as a shrine to his memory.
All in all; a wonderful novel, which I would unhesitatingly recommend to anyone.
