Lovely house, silly answer

The first half is exactly what I want out of an evening. Noemi turns up at a mouldering English house bolted onto the side of a Mexican mountain, everybody in it is pale and awful and won't let her smoke, and the house is doing something. Nobody will say what. That's the good bit. That is one hundred percent the good bit.

Then it tells you what. And what it turns out to be is quite silly, and once you know it you can't un-know it, and all that lovely creeping business in the wallpaper turns into a mechanism you can see the wires on. Why do books do this? I would rather have been left in the dark — I liked the dark, the dark was working!

Noemi herself is great. Vain, clever, entirely unbothered, turns up on a mountain in completely the wrong shoes and refuses to acknowledge it. Catalina gets a bit lost as a person somewhere in the middle, a shame, when the whole thing starts with her letter.

Six. The atmosphere in the first half is a nine and the back half is a four, so I've averaged them, which isn't how art works but it is how I rate things.