Philip Womack
Man of Mystery
Jonathan Barnes’s new book is a labyrinthine literary thriller that cleverly plays with ideas of authorship and text, while satirising our obsession with money and celebrity. With the rise of the internet and e-books, the terrifying question arises: can a text be stable? Would we notice if, say, Orwell were edited, subtly, year on year, until the text became something entirely different? What if it weren’t a human editing the texts, but something else entirely? And what if those edits had an actual effect upon reality itself?
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