Loren Ipsum is a peculiar kind of debut novel. It is a book that to some extent already existed, with significant portions having previously appeared in various literary publications, online and in other books. The novel depicts an Anglo-French literary community under attack from a militant organisation. Their graffitied slogans (‘Language Is Murder’, for example) are ‘culled from [the] obscure works’ of the reclusive writer Adam Wandle. Otherwise known as Lord Biro, Wandle is the modern-day torchbearer of the French avant-garde tradition closely associated with the work of writers including Maurice Blanchot and Stéphane Mallarmé. Over the course of forty-two chapters we jump between Paris, the French Riviera and London as novelists, publishers and critics gather for parties, chase one another through the streets, are interrogated by terrorists and die in increasingly ludicrous ways (garrotted by an Hermès scarf; battered to death by a baguette). We also receive hints that, regardless of these attacks, the biggest threat faced by this international coterie comes from its own ‘champagne anarchist’ tendencies. 

Gallix provides little in the way of solid narrative or character development. Loren Ipsum herself, a female academic preparing a monograph on Wandle’s work, is a shadowy presence largely depicted from other perspectives, and one of the few members of the novel’s vast cast who never addresses the reader in