John Dugdale
The Assassin’s Agony
ADVANCE COVERAGE OF Checkpoint depicted it as a novel appearing to advocate, or at least take seriously as an option, the lulling of the US president. This was wholly misleading. To begin with, any text of little more than 100 pages is not a novel, however much it protests it is one; and Checkpoint also fails to fit the bill in taking the form of a dialogue between two men, without any narrative commentary. It’s really what is sometimes called a ‘chamber play’, a work in dramatic form – resembling in this case the male dialogues of Edward Albee or David Mamet, and perhaps also indebted to Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot – which is nonetheless intended for reading rather than performance.
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
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings