Extremes of passion: What Will Survive of Us, by Howard Jacobson, reviewed

There is not going gently into that good night, and then there is teetering into it on spiked-heel boots while strapped into a leather corset in search of clandestine kicks among like-minded fetishists. If it sounds an exhausting and chilly way to spend an evening, well, it is. At least, that’s how it feels to Sam Quaid, the middle-aged playwright who is beset by misgivings – he himself is dressed in ‘the more chicken-hearted guise of a fallen Quaker who had never seen the sun’ – but gamely determined to accompany his lover, Lily.

In fact she’s not entirely convinced either, but, with an ‘icy, fateful mutuality’ leading them on, they are committed to pleasing one another. This is how it goes when your union is founded on transgression – he has a suspicious wife at home, she has a placid, long-suffering partner – and you feel obscurely obliged to misbehave.