Jonathan Barnes
Life’s a Blur
Geoffrey Talbot is a schoolteacher in the 1930s who seizes on the outbreak of war as a way to escape his dull provincial existence and a role that has settled ‘on to his shoulders as easily as the black gown he hung up on the door’. We follow him through six years of international conflict – he aids the French resistance, enjoys a brief love affair with a Gallic spy and spends a hideous time as a POW – and for some decades beyond, observing his return to civilian life, a disappointing vacation, a nervous breakdown. In unvarnished prose, and in less than eighty pages, we track the majority of this man’s life, seeing Geoffrey almost to old age and to the moment when he wakes one morning with a new sense of purpose, having found ‘with joy and resignation that he was not the same’.
Four more such biographical sketches follow, written (though two are presented in the first person) largely in the same aloof and colourless style. These are the stories of Billy, a Victorian workhouse boy who, upon his release from the institution, becomes a successful landlord and entrepreneur; Elena, a scientist who
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
'It’s long been known that there is an optimum reproductive window and that women enjoy a considerably shorter one than men. For both sexes this window is opening and closing earlier than it used to.' (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-end-of-babies
Sixty years ago today, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to enter outer space. @Andrew_Crumey looks at his role in the space race.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/one-giant-leap-for-mankind
On the night of 5th July 1809, a group of soldiers kidnapped Pope Pius VII on the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte. Munro Price looks at what happened next.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/bonaparte-meets-his-match