Adrian Turpin
Memory Sticks
If Jonathan Coe and Iain Banks collaborated in rewriting Mary Shelley, it might look something like Strange Bodies. Marcel Theroux’s fifth novel is filled with crazed Russian scientists, locked psychiatric wards and a reincarnated Dr Johnson roaming the streets of 21st-century London. But it’s also the tale of a rather grey, middle-aged academic surveying the ruins of his marriage. Gothic melodrama collides with bathetic English comedy: Strange Bodies is a Frankenstein’s monster of a story. Fortunately, Theroux delivers enough energy to jolt it into life.
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'Typical of Dickens to leave us with an unsolvable game of Cluedo. Was it John Jasper with the necktie in the cathedral, Stony Durdles with the fibula in the graveyard or Mrs Crisparkle with the arsenic in the close?'
Frances Wilson does some sleuthing.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/murder-he-wrote-2
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They 'disliked Georgian architecture because it was identified with the enclosure movement ... their preferred style was Elizabethan: half-timbered and gabled'.
Jane Ridley on the houses Edwardian Liberals built.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/liberal-habitats