Richard Smyth
Sussex Apocalypse
The Stone Tide: Adventures at the End of the World
By Gareth E Rees
Influx Press 364pp £9.99 order from our bookshop
This novel, if we can call it that, plots a course towards apocalypse with an admirable lack of overexcitement. It’s a novel in which things fall apart, in which the centre cannot hold, but in which there is always time for a detour into local history. It’s a hallucinatory piece of work – Gareth Rees, narrating, sees Dungeness ablaze and tells of an eel with a head the size of an armchair in Dover harbour – but it’s seldom lurid. It’s essentially about breakdown (his, ours), but it’s a controlled fall, a strangely methodical collapse.
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
'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
Sign up to our e-newsletter and get highlights from the new issue and gems from the archive, as well as exclusive competitions and subscription offers straight to your inbox.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/freenewsletter
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