Everyone had read this except me, until March.

I came to this fifteen years late because a woman in my book club said "oh, you'll hate it", and that is a red rag.

Here's my problem with reviewing it. This is a book that tells you a great deal about itself very early on, and every review I read beforehand treated that as a licence to tell me the rest. So I'm going to be stricter than usual. I'm not naming a character. I'm not naming the college. I'm not telling you which season anything happens in.

What I can give you is texture. Students. A small class, five or six of them. A teacher who makes them feel chosen, which is a very old technique and works best on clever people. Snow. A great deal of drinking, described so well that I had to go and eat toast at half eleven at night. And a narrator who warns you at the start that he doesn't come out of this well, and then spends the whole book being considerably worse than he has admitted to.

The first half is the best writing I've read all year, and I include the Christies in that. The second half is about what comes afterwards, and that's where people fall out with the book, and I do understand why. It slows. It circles. People behave in ways that made me set the book down on the floor and say something out loud to an empty room. But the slowness is deliberate, because the whole back half is about the specific weight of having to sit at breakfast with people.

I guessed one thing on about page 90 and I was right, and it spoiled precisely nothing, because knowing doesn't help you here. That's rare. It's also why this gets an eight from me rather than the seven I was heading towards at the two-thirds mark.

Things I didn't love: one character is a device rather than a person, and every review I've seen pretends otherwise. The Greek is showing off. And there's a chapter near the end I'd cut whole; my book club voted five to one against me on that, so possibly the problem is me.

Reading conditions, for the record: a rented cottage in January, a wood burner I could not work, three days of horizontal rain, and a cold. Perfect. If you can arrange the flu, arrange the flu.

Fourth for my year, behind two Christies and a Highsmith, which tells you everything about what kind of reader I am.

I'm reliably informed the long one about the painting is better. I don't believe any of you.