David Jays
Feather Men on Muddy Ground
Popular fiction is not, necessarily, light. Tristan Sadler, narrator of The Absolutist, travels to Norwich just after the First World War. He is reading White Fang by Jack London, and he meets on the train an Agatha Christie-like crime novelist who cheerfully describes the crisp justice she dishes out. John Boyne too is a popular novelist (best known for The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas), but neither London’s adrenalin-stoked adventure nor Christie’s neat parcels of motive and retribution are his models here.
Boyne’s historical fiction can read like a cousin to the misery memoir – there’s a similar sense that people are fundamentally the sum of their traumas. The reader’s journey in The Absolutist does not just involve learning what happened to Will Bancroft, a young soldier who died during
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'We nipped down Mount Pleasant ... me marvelling at London all over again because the back of a Vespa gives you the everyday world like nothing else can.'
Ali Smith writes this month's diary.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/temple-of-vespa
We were saddened to hear of the recent passing of the novelist Elspeth Barker, a valued contributor to Literary Review over the years. (1/2)
Jean Rhys 'had been channelling unhappiness since the publication of her first volume of short stories in 1927. The four novels she published before the war chart journeys that go from bad to worse for heroines who end up alone in dreary hotel rooms.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/she-went-down-well-with-vicars