THE IMAGES OF two birds adorn the cover of Geoff Nicholson’s fourteenth novel: the head of a dodo and the torso of a babe with casabas like cannon balls. Extinction, Nicholson’s characteristically cunning narrative reminds us, awaits both varieties of beauty. Dodos drop dead, dumplings droop downward. Only art, by stabilising and concretising even the most labile of ephemera, can make a stab at transcending the depredations of time. As Nicholson’s porno-picture producer Jack Rozin puts it: ‘Smut [is] a memento mori, but I think that’s what all movies are when you get right down to it.’

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