There is a fashion in contemporary fiction to scorn the idea of the disembodied third person narrator. Who is it who knows all this, one can’t help but ask. And why are they hiding in the shadows, writing this book? Samuel Fisher turns this issue on its head in his debut novel by having his narrator be the book itself, writing itself. Not just any book, but any book: ‘every word that is written . . . every great work and every pulp entertainment, every suicide note and every shopping... [read more]
The press release for this complicated and blackly comic book pitches it somewhere between Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings and JM Coetzee’s 1974 debut Dusklands. Though less accessible than James’s Booker winner, Three Pioneers follows in its ambitious footsteps by updating postmodernist methods and ideas most current writers lack the patience, skill or inclination to go near. Through three bizarre, unconnected narratives – from a researcher of black sites in... [read more]
Horatio Morpurgo, The Paradoxal Compass: Drake’s Dilemma
reviewed by PK Read
Whether going east or west, a northern maritime route skirting the Arctic was long a European fever dream. Northern passages have recently become more realistic due to declining levels of sea ice, and nations are bringing to bear their territorial claims along with the latest exploratory technologies for mineral and resource exploitation. Drilling and shipping are already on the rise, even before biologists have had an opportunity to learn more about the undiscovered life present in newly... [read more]
Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley (eds.), 'Tomorrow Belongs to Us': The British Far Right since 1967
reviewed by David Renton
The editors of this book are also authors of previous accounts of British fascism. Nigel Copsey's Anti-Fascism in Britain (1999) told the story of the conflict between fascism and anti-fascism since the 1920s; Matthew Worley's No Future (2017) explored how the left and the right related to post-punk after 1979, lengthening the story of the relationship between politics and music beyond the demise of Rock Against Racism in 1981. This volume is intended to showcase the work of a generation of... [read more]
John Kelly, Contemporary Trotskyism: Parties, Sects and Social Movements in Britain
reviewed by Ian Birchall
Among the many moral panics aroused by Jeremy Corbyn's accession to the Labour leadership has been the return of the spectre of Trotskyism. Lord Hattersley has warned that ‘the old gang is back’, referring explicitly to the Militant grouping of the 1980s; Labour's deputy leader Tom Watson has produced ‘evidence’ that Trotskyists were exerting influence within Momentum, the pro-Corbyn organisation. It makes good headlines; whether it bears any relation to reality is another... [read more]
In ‘You and Whose Army’, the penultimate essay in White Girls, Hilton Als writes:
‘We find truth – human truth – by pretending to be people we’re not. That frees us to explore the metaphor of being.’
Als pretends to be several people in White Girls, writing about his subjects with an emotional intimacy that is occasionally provocative but always illuminating. What Als has often referred to as a ‘Stanislavski’ method of writing is what makes the New Yorker theatre... [read more]
James Attlee, Guernica: Painting the End of the World
reviewed by Mike Gonzalez
Pablo Picasso’s extraordinary commemoration of the bombing of the historic Basque town of Guernica is an iconic image. In Guernica: Painting the End of the World James Attlee explores the work in depth, and shows how the meanings of each figure on the canvas have been remade in every age and place. So powerful are its resonances that when Colin Powell announced the launch of Operation Shock and Awe at the United Nations, where a tapestry reworking of ‘Guernica’ was normally displayed,... [read more]
Catherine Maxwell, Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture
reviewed by Stuart Walton
Sillage is a French borrowing adopted by the perfume industry. Originally meaning a ship's wake, it refers to the vapour-trail of scent left in the air when its wearer passes by. Some perfumes have a delectably – or perhaps notoriously – long sillage that appears to cling to and infuse everything in the vicinity, evoking the olfactory equivalent of an electromagnetic image of the departed presence. The long-posited alliance between scent and memory, ratified by investigations in the brain... [read more]
A reader coming to Rachel Cusk’s work for the first time with Transit may find their reception of the book influenced by certain preconceptions. For a writer of novels mostly confined to the safe literary territory of middle-class England and constructed out of spare, minor-key sentences, Cusk has a gained something of a dangerous reputation. She is, we are led to believe, a radical and rager against tradition; a hardened realist whose rejection of artifice might undermine the edifice of... [read more]
Ray, the 34-year-old anti-hero and narrator of Joe Dunthorne's The Adulterants, can't stop thinking about diffusion. Early on, he signals his comfort 'in the abstract' with the idea that 'when we smell something we absorb tiny bits of that smell's source. Fine.' But when his friend Dave 'draws his bottom lip up over his top lip and pulls down remnants of, in this instance, Picpoul de Pinet,' creating a 'fine, near-imperceptible mist of what we can safely assume is a mix of wine and mouth... [read more]
