Tim Martin
Surreality Bites
Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City, a novel that pays extensive homage to the mystic paranoid genius Philip K Dick, takes place in an alternate New York engulfed in a thick grey fog after a nameless national disaster. Somewhere else in the world a war is being fought: but although everyone knows the basics, which include a carpet of Chinese space-mines that bar access to Earth’s orbit, the New York Times has begun printing a ‘War Free Edition’ to leave space for the city’s own problems. These include a semi-mythical tiger that gulps down whole city blocks when it strikes – though paranoid conjecture suggests that it may instead be a sentient earth-moving machine – and a pair of nesting eagles in the façade of a prestigious brownstone.
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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