David Annand
Having a Wales of a Time
I don’t suffer from synaesthesia, but occasionally I find that novels evoke colours, or at least a colour scheme. James Salter’s Light Years comes to me as if through a filter that turns everything a soft crepuscular yellow; Woolf’s The Waves is a murky, mythic, Pre-Raphaelitish green; Wallace’s Infinite Jest is similar but kaleidoscopic, packed with vibrant colours like the hundreds and thousands on children’s ice cream. This is pretty much the opposite of The Red House, Mark Haddon’s new book, which, despite its name, will be forever fixed in my mind as a washed-out blue-grey, the colour dramas used to be on BBC Two.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
This 'jaunty narrative raises fundamental questions about the role of popular history. Should this just be a matter of telling tales, as the general public often seems to think?'
@DrLRoach weighs up Charles Spencer's account of the White Ship Disaster.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/wholl-take-the-helm
'Amis clearly belongs to the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do school of pedagogy. More or less everything he says is demonstrably contradicted by elements of his own work, be they here or elsewhere.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-without-a-hitch
'The bar is set high at the outset, and readers are primed to wonder if Mikhail can make his case.'
Does Alan Mikhail's new life of the Sultan Selim I really overturn 'shibboleths that have held sway for a millennium'? Caroline Finkel investigates.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-of-the-universe-3