Anthony Cummins
Something Colourful, Something Black
These icy soliloquies of disenchanted womanhood tear up the familiar soft furnishings of fictional narrative. Characters don’t have names or obvious occupations, though one speaker – or are they all the same? – mentions working with children’s books; she is, like the author, a successful illustrator. It’s tempting to see Vertigo as a moonlit flit to the anti-pictorial, with no scene-setting, unless you count occasional, almost comically precise itemisations of fixtures and fittings, such as the seating arrangements in a restaurant where a cheated-on wife wearily contemplates tit-for-tat infidelity with her pompous dining companion.
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