Alice Jolly
Homage to Orwell
The biographical novel is a problematic form: it is always likely to contain too much fact for some and too much fiction for others. The problem only increases if the life being described has already been thoroughly analysed. In his debut novel, Dennis Glover takes a risk, therefore, in writing about George Orwell. Do we really need to know more about him?
Surprisingly, it turns out that we do. Glover has previously written a nonfiction book about Orwell and is familiar with his subject, but it is not his knowledge that impresses so much as his ability to select and condense. Orwell left behind masses of diaries, letters and books, and although his life was tragically short, it was full of incident. But how to decide what should be dramatised and what excised?
Writing in short, sharp scenes, Glover miraculously sketches in the whole life. He links disparate events neatly and moves fluently back and forwards across time, giving us Shiplake, Wigan, Barnsley and Barcelona. Realising that most readers will already know Orwell, he wisely decides that much can be left unexplained.
Glover’s intention,
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
'As it starts to infect your dreams, you realise that "Portal 2" is really an allegory of the imaginative leap: the way in which we traverse the space between distant concepts, via the secret conduits we place within them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony
'Any story about Eden has to be a story about the Fall; unchanging serenity does not make a narrative.'
@suzifeay reviews Jim Crace's 'eden'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trouble-in-paradise
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf