VERY FEW TABOOS remain in our irreligious, self-centred society. There is one, however, which still sends a shiver of righteousness down the spine of the most hardened renegade - child abuse. The idea that any adult should want a sexual relationshp with a child is abhorrent, and when the child is under that person's care the crime is even greater.

So it is very brave of Zoe Heller to write her second novel on ths subject. Brave and, in the way she approaches it, clever. The adult in question is a forty-two-year-old teacher, who enters into an affair with a pupil. More interestingly, the teacher is a woman and her