Jonathan Barnes
Dr Finlay’s Casebook
Ros Barber’s first novel, The Marlowe Papers, was a miraculous oddity – a 400-page blank-verse sequence that built artfully into an elaborate conspiracy narrative. Purporting to reveal the long-suppressed truth about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays (the faked death of Christopher Marlowe; a life spent in secret but prolific exile; the sly assumption of another man’s name), its numerous pleasures lay as much in the mischievous ingenuity of its plotting as in the flamboyance of its form. A marriage of scholarly wit and technical expertise, it also, unexpectedly, proved to be thoroughly compelling. On its publication, I wrote in these pages, with a slightly clumsy enthusiasm,
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The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties