Simon Willis
I’ll Take the Low Road
Near the beginning of Waterline, Ross Raisin’s second novel, Mick Little dashes around his house in Glasgow collecting up family photographs. His wife Cathy has recently died from cancer; his two sons, Craig and Robbie, are estranged; his job as a cabbie isn’t there for him to go back to. Rifling through the photographs, he looks at the face of his wife – ‘a crowd of Cathys laughing and posing’ – but he can’t relate to it. ‘Even if he stares for minutes at each one, trying to mind what the occasion was, what she’d been saying as the picture was took, it’s no use.’ The same is true of the objects in his house: the rooms of familiar things, put to familiar uses, have become uncanny. Things have fallen apart, and the rest of the novel traces the progress of a man whose life seems irremediably broken.
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
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw
'Thirkell was a product of her time and her class. For her there are no sacred cows, barring those that win ribbons at the Barchester Agricultural.'
The novelist Angela Thirkell is due a revival, says Patricia T O'Conner (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me