My first impression that the author is more than a little in love with his own writing. This is florid text with not much in the way of story going on but rather a lot of “admire my marvellous descriptive lyricism”. The characters don’t engage and there is no motivation to read on. I think the author is labouring under the delusion that he is the next Great English Novelist - no, sorry I still think that belongs to Dickens, Austen, AS Byatt, Margaret Drabble, DH Lawrence, Forster etc. This really doesn’t come up to the mark.