No Laughing Matter is partly a book about escaping the past, as a condition for staying open to change. Thus the three shorter sections in Book Four, each of which tests and chronicles the Matthews children's adaptations to post-war realities, have a particular importance. 1946 opens with a direct recall of Proust in Time Regained, with its musings on the mysterious subjection of human identity to ageing, chance and death. This clearly recalls the final party at the Princesse de Guermantes's, where ageing weirdly defamiliarizes everyone: ‘Everyone in the room appeared to have put on a disguise … which changed him completely’. Thus Marcus is ‘window-dresser? a ladies’ hairdresser? a portrait photographer?’ (p. 423).

The children, now middle-aged, return home to dispose of it in two senses, both materially, and also to judge and assess their childhood, what it has made of them and what they have made of it. It is – no accident, this – the year of the Nuremberg trials, which Quentin will attend. Margaret judges their communal childhood as a ‘life of desolation’ (p. 426); indeed the fearful recollection of it makes Sukey weep. And yet it was not wholly bad. Rupert at least owes such success as he has attained to his mother's gadfly spurring of him onward. And it is wholly apt that the final Game should concern techniques for surviving humiliation, and lavatory jokes. The Game has throughout been group therapy for acting out shame, and publicizing private pain. A discussion about growing up, forgiving the past and letting it go follows, albeit one whose smug tidiness Marcus at once parodies, enraging Quentin in the process.

Evidence of his characters’ capacity to continue to stay intelligently open to change comes in the final two sections, where post-colonial politics and television provide opposing tests. 1956 is the year of the disastrous Suez intervention, and brutal Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, and of Moroccan independence. Quentin's betrayal of his early liberal idealism has turned him into a mercenary iconoclast and demagogue, a glib and nihilistic television ‘personality’ with the exact voice of Malcolm Muggeridge. As Quentin declines in moral stature, Marcus and Margaret gain. Theirs is the judgement on the expatriate world of reactionary delusion – the ‘Peacehaven and Frinton life’ (p. 466) the British bring with them and impose abroad – in the post-colonial epoch.