This is a book that is trapped in its own premise, a kind of snow-globe full of glittering prose that delights when shaken a bit but which stays dutifully within its bounds.

Deakin is a man enamored of rural late-empire Britain, a smallish island, talking of a shortish period where his world had rickety beachcomber cottages and noisy lidos and wild and healthy rivers. His spiritual homeland is for the earth and the people and freedom.

But even his lush prose cannot hide the fact that this world was a candle in the wind, long blown out, and his narrative in many ways was a romantic simulacrum of a place that may never have been.

Come for the words and the love and the innocent grace of the story. Stay for the icy cold plunges that Deakin almost makes you feel viscerally. A lovely man with a lovely pen talking about a lovey way of life.

There are worse ways to spend 400 pages.