Michael Delgado
Lifting the Curtain
Shadowplay
By Joseph O’Connor
Harvill Secker 320pp £14.99
On 20 April 1912, a 64-year-old writer and retired theatre manager named Abraham Stoker died quietly at his home in St George’s Square, London. The Times was one of the few major newspapers to carry an obituary. It’s a modest piece, buried on page fifteen, and you have to wade through accounts of Stoker’s sporting prowess, civil service duties and friendship with the actor Henry Irving before you get to the elephant in the room: his ‘lurid and creepy kind of fiction, represented by “Dracula” and other novels’. Even then, ‘his chief literary memorial’, the obituarist asserts with confidence, ‘will be his Reminiscences of Irving’.
Nowadays, Bram Stoker’s association with Irving is grist to the mill of Dracula scholarship, since the vampiric Irving is thought to have been the main inspiration for the bloodsucking count. It is refreshing, then, that Joseph O’Connor’s Shadowplay, a fictionalised account of Stoker’s 27-year stint working under Irving, is not
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
Twitter Feed
Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm