Daisy Godwin’s lament about the lack of redmption in so many of today’s novels – made whilst chairing the Orange Prize judging panel – put her in good company. Samuel Johnson famously endorsed Nahum Tate‘s sugar coated revision of Shakespeare’s King Lear. The play had been too bleak, by far, for a Restoration audience, prompting Tate […]
The more I think back on Louise Welsh’s latest novel, Naming the Bones, which I finished just over two weeks ago, the more quietly impressed I am by it. And if that seems like damning with faint praise, nothing could be further from the truth. While the novel has a narrative arc that brings its […]
Coming off the back of reading more than my fair share of European crime-fiction (culminating with Stieg Larsson’s posthumuous sales-phenomenon The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) – a genre where plot, reasonably enough, is tight and pragmatic, where the reader must above all else understand what’s happening – it was a palate-cleansing delight to dive […]
When I first saw the candy crusted bunny leering at me from a shelf in a bookshop, I thought ‘ah…another post- modern whatever self-absorbed ramble from a worthy author’s jadedness’. I have a particular weakness for being both attracted to and repelled by such narcissism which is why my eye wandered up to ‘The Death […]
Should the laws of physics apply to a novel? There are readers who, not without reason, demand that yes, the laws of gravity, and thermodynamics must apply at all times if the work is to be taken seriously. For example, if a character is to cross a room, they should do so – with or […]
