James Riding
What Lies Beneath
Anticipating her imminent transformation into a vixen, Sophia – the subject of ‘Mrs Fox’, the unsettling, erotically charged short story that opened Sarah Hall’s previous collection, Madame Zero – ‘dreams subterranean dreams, of forests, dark corridors and burrows, roots and earth’. Two years later, Hall has produced a new set of ‘subterranean dreams’. Sudden Traveller returns to the burrow of primal preoccupations from which much of her previous short-story work emerged – in 2016, as if formalising these themes, she even edited a collection called Sex and Death – but this time her writing is even tighter, angrier and more sublime.
The first story is the best. ‘M’ (the symbol historically branded on the thumb of those convicted of manslaughter, according to Duhaime’s law dictionary) begins almost as a parallel ‘Mrs Fox’, with a woman, this time a lawyer, who defends the vulnerable, experiencing ‘medieval’ pain and seeing brutal
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
Surveillance, facial recognition and control: my review of @jonfasman's "We See It All" https://literaryreview.co.uk/watching-the-watchers via @Lit_Review
I reviewed Diary of a Film by Niven Govinden for @Lit_Review https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-directors-cut
'Retired judges have usually had long careers on the bench, during which they have acquired an ingrained reticence when it comes to speaking on controversial topics. Not so Sumption.'
Dominic Grieve reviews Jonathan Sumption's 'Law in a Time of Crisis'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-case-for-the-citizen