Bethanie Blanchard: Tony Birch at the Melbourne Writers Festival, reaction to the death of Seamus Heaney and all this week's reviews in Guardian Australia's round-up of the week in books
Saturday, August 31, 2013
Laura Cococcia: Why Poetry Makes Sense: An Interview With Stephen Burt
Poetry can be an excellent teacher. It educates readers on places we know well and those we've never been. It honors celebrated people and ordinary ones. Without pretension or over-analysis, poetry teaches the most practical lessons on love, friendship, romance and the loss of all these things.
The trick to appreciating poetry? Seeking out and finding the poetry that really speaks to us, that we find instructive, enriching, useful and perhaps even beautiful. Through a few excellent poetry teachers and writers I've worked with during the past two years, I've discovered there is poetry - a design of words -- to fit any lifestyle, taste and set of beliefs.
At TEDGlobal 2013 in June, I connected with Stephen Burt, who presented a TED Talk at the conference. Burt, an acclaimed poet, critic and Harvard professor, helped describe the variety of genres and subjects connected with poetry. We discussed the instructive and useful nature of poetry: how it's a vehicle for self-expression, a valuable means of understanding the world and a resource that is written for an infinite set of audiences. Burt's expert point of view offers advice for beginning poets on how to build a successful career, acquired tips for readers on how to avoid the trap of picking poems apart for "messages" and gave me more than a few poets to my reading list.
Laura Cococcia: Did you always love poetry? How did you come to the realization that you wanted to become a poetry critic and professor?
Stephen Burt: I loved Yeats and Milton and, um, Matthew Arnold and a lot of rock lyrics, when I was a middle schooler with no social skills: I had this idea that I could relate to the rest of the world and reach other people if I could only get good enough with the music of language. I still have that idea. I don't know if it's true, but it seems intuitively plausible, and I have been professionally, as well as emotionally, rewarded for its pursuit.
LC: Many people who don't often encounter poetry tend to think of it as an art form that is somewhat archaic. Who are some modern and contemporary poets that might make good starting points for exploring poetry?
SB: In no particular order, if you don't read any poetry but you already read realist literary fiction, Laura Kasischke, Louise Gluck, Randall Jarrell, Lucia Perillo, Frank Bidart. Perillo, in particular, is funny, without insulting your intelligence. She's quite smart too. If you don't read any poetry but you already read "theory," philosophy or other demanding nonfiction in the humanities, all of the above plus Rae Armantrout, Jorie Graham, Allan Peterson. If you are interested in sex, ecology, California or GLBT history and politics, D. A. Powell. If you are interested in elaborate patterns, African-American music genres or African-American life, Terrance Hayes.
If you want humor and compression, Armantrout and Kay Ryan. If you have a strong interest in photography and modern visual art, Joseph Massey. If you like travel writing, August Kleinzahler. If you are a parent, especially if you are a dad, Dan Chiasson. If you are a parent, especially if you are a mom, Kasischke. If you are a mom and you like the Beats, Rachel Zucker. If you like elaborate older art (say, the Italian Renaissance, or midcentury couture), Angie Estes. Maybe that's enough for now.
LC: Technology and the Internet are making it easier for people to share and read poems. Do you think we might be able to harness new technologies to foster a love of poetry in a larger portion of American society?
SB: We already are. So many poetry blogs! Some well-trafficked and edited (such as the Best American Poetry blog, Boston Review's blog (for which I write) and Cold Front, the Volta, etc.; and then all these blogs run by students and young people and relative outsiders, idiosyncratic, able in principle to reach who knows how many people. That's just words-on-a-screen technologies. There's also multimedia: audio, video, MOOCs; Al Filreis's modern poetry MOOC out of Penn, much as I disagree with some of its emphases, has introduced modernist and contemporary poetry to quite possibly hundreds of thousands of people who would not have heard of Gertrude Stein or Lorine Niedecker before.
LC: Billy Collins, the former US Poet Laureate, has a fantastic poem called Introduction to Poetry in which he laments his students' intensity in picking apart poems: "all they want to do/ is tie the poem to a chair with rope/ and torture a confession out of it," he writes. How can we overcome the habit of reading poetry like simile-circling and margin-note-writing high school students?
SB: I teach high school students in summer school and I meet them regularly; they want poems to move them and speak to them. Some of them have been mis-taught to count similes and dutifully name techniques, but more often, and more harmfully, they've been mis-taught to look for "messages," as if all poems proposed solutions to the problems that they embody or describe. I want readers, of any age, to look and to listen. Once they do that we can, as William Empson says, rely on the poem to tell us the way in which it is trying to be good, to tell us what it is trying to do.
LC: What are some of your personal favorite poets and poems? Why do these speak to you?
SB: My critical books are the answer to that question! In the contemporary moment, I'm very excited about a Welsh poet named Robert Minhinnick, who hasn't broken through here yet at all; Lucie Brock-Broido's new book is great, and I'm looking forward to the new Angie Estes. I've been enjoying Deborah Woodard's new book of prose poems organized around retold or deformed fiction and nonfiction, including Hamlet and post-ruin Detroit. As for older poets and poems, Jarrell, "The Player Piano"; Armantrout, "Our Nature" and "Fiction"; Bishop, "Poem (About the size of an old-style dollar bill)"; Niedecker, much of New Goose; Stevens, "Crude Foyer"; Marianne Moore, "The Pangolin," "The Paper Nautilus"; James K. Baxter's late sonnet sequences; epigram-sized poems by Langston Hughes; Song of Myself; Browning, "Andrea del Sarto"; Pope, "Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot"; Coleridge's Dejection Ode; I'll stop there.
LC: What advice do you have for young poets and critics trying to start a career in today's publishing and academic climate?
SB: Give yourself deadlines. Try several things in case one fails. Explore; don't sign yourself away to one style or one approach. Read widely. Don't just read contemporary America. If you don't have another language, get one. If you do, translate! Make other languages' poems into your own, and don't worry about accuracy if that is not what you are trying to produce. So many major poets have learned their own technique from rendering Latin or French or Spanish or, these days, Arabic or Kannada.
Benjamin Britten honoured with first coin to feature poetry
Composer's centenary is marked with a 50p coin inlaid with Tennyson's line that Britten set to music
The centenary of the birth of composer and conductor Benjamin Britten will be marked tomorrow by the issue of a new 50p coin, the first of Britain's decimalised currency to feature a line of poetry.
Instead of an image of Britten himself, the designer of the new coin, artist Tom Phillips, has taken a line from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls, which was set to music by Britten in his Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. "Blow Bugle Blow, set the wild echoes flying" is written around Britten's name. Phillips joked that he wanted to preserve the nation's ability to toss a coin and cry "heads or tails".
"We couldn't have two heads – the Queen's being on the other side – on a coin. How on earth would the country start its cricket matches with such a thing?" said Phillips, who previously designed a £5 Royal Jubilee coin and a souvenir Olympics coin, which weighed a kilogram. In 2005 he produced another 50p, struck to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Samuel Johnson's dictionary. That, too, featured words rather than an image.
"Who wants to look at a dull picture of an uninteresting old man, even if they are wonderful composers or talents?" said Phillips. "What I like about this design is the very modern fact that you can read the lines on the coin and then go and look them up. If you do, you can go straight away to hear a recording of Peter Pears [Britten's partner in both his personal and professional lives] singing those very words in a scratchy old recording on YouTube. I thought that was a new approach to a coin in a world like today's."
There's not just the one new coin on the block tomorrow, with two new versions of the 50p coming into circulation. The second commemorates the 100th anniversary of the birth of Christopher Ironside, one of the earlier designers of the first British decimal coins.
That coin will feature Ironside's own design, a royal crest, which lost out in 1969 to the more popular image of Britannia, which was chosen amid much public interest by the Royal Mint Advisory Committee after being labelled "sexy" by the Sun.
Phillips thinks our currency and the Royal Mint are both a little staid and stuffy. "But as an artist you are used to perhaps producing a few prints and being delighted if they sell, so when 18 million bits of your work go out there, you have to be quite pleased.
"I don't know who approved my design this time round – it used to be a committee with the Duke of Edinburgh in charge. I rather liked that. He had two responses. One was 'bloody awful' and the other 'jolly good'. Luckily I got a 'jolly good' for the Samuel Johnson."
It was in 1969 when the first 50p coin appeared, the world's first coin to be struck in the shape of an equilateral curve heptagon. By 1997 it had shrunk to its present size.
The new coins will be struck for collector's editions in gold and in silver and for everyday use in cupro-nickel.
British coins have traditionally been heraldic in theme and for 1,000 years have been produced by the Royal Mint in London. There were estimated to be 28.9bn UK coins in circulation on 31 March 2013, with a total face value of £3.9bn. In total, 1.4bn UK coins were issued during 2012-13.
The Royal Mint also makes currency for other countries. It serves more than 100 issuing authorities around the world and meets around 15% of global demand, making the UK the world's biggest coin maker.
Tom Phillips's latest show opens this week at the Flowers Gallery , Cork Street, London
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From the Observer archive, 28 August 1983: A boiled egg and a slice of Sartre, s'il vous plait…
Jean Paul Sartre's favourite Paris cafe has been sold, but the ghosts of existentialism live on
France's best-known postwar literary cafe, the Flore in St Germain-des-Prés, has changed hands for more than £1.2m but the new proprietors have had to agree that it will remain a shrine for Jean-Paul Sartre and his friends. The former proprietor, Paul Boubal, now 74, is to keep his own table in the corner of the cafe on the Boulevard St Germain, retaining links with the days when Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir were among his regulars during and after the war.
The red moleskin seating and the 30s-style interior which Boubal installed when he took over in 1939 will be preserved, while visitors will still be able to sit at Sartre's corner table and use de Beauvoir's teapot.
Boubal, a round, shrewd man from the Auvergne, has himself become a monument in the quartier, while the price of the cafe's sale is an indication of the continuing profits St Germain-des-Prés makes out of the golden postwar period. Its new proprietor, Miroslav Siljegovic, already owns other Paris cafes, including Le Depart on the nearby Place de St Michel.
The Flore may be the last identifiable intellectual cafe in Paris in the traditions of Cafe de la Paix at the Opera or the cafes around Montmartre and Montparnasse. It began its rise to fame in the mid-30s when poet and scriptwriter Jacques Prévert gathered around him a group of dissident surrealists who shunned Montparnasse. During the war it became a casual recruiting centre for the French cinema and stage. Among those "spotted" there was Simone Signoret in 1942.
When Sartre moved from Montparnasse to a hotel in St Germain-des-Prés, he used the cafe to write in. "He came from opening time until midday and from the afternoon until closing," Boubal said. "I didn't know him by name, and he usually came with a woman who sat at another table in the corner."
The woman was de Beauvoir and during the afternoon the couple went to the room upstairs where "you would see them with huge files writing interminable articles".
It was not until months later when Sartre had completed his 350,000-word philosophical study L'Etre et le Néant and de Beauvoir published her first novel L'invitée, that he discovered their names. Later in the war, Sartre became so well known that a special phone line was installed for him, but when his popularity surged in 1946 and the bar became full of literary tourists he worked only from his flat in the Place de St Germain.
By then, Sartre and de Beauvoir were surrounded by friends who included Camus, then editor of the Combat newspaper, and Juliette Greco, who later became the best-known singer in St Germain-des-Prés's youth cult known as "existentialists" after Sartre's philosophy.
The Flore will continue to serve two of its specialities – boiled egg and bread and butter and Welsh rarebit with worcester sauce. The Flore's boiled egg – 25,000 are sold every year – is so much an institution that the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, another member of Sartre's group, commemorated it in a sculpture which he gave to Boubal.
This is an edited extract
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Pierdom by Simon Roberts – review
Photographs of Britain's 58 surviving piers capture the abiding otherness of seaside towns
"Piers provide a walk on the sea without the disadvantage of being seasick," declared the poet of all things quintessentially English, John Betjeman, "and are havens of fresh air and freedom which we can ill afford to lose." Betjeman was one of the founders of the National Piers Society, an organisation that continues to campaign to safeguard the future of the 58 surviving piers in Britain. He would have been delighted with this book.
Pierdom is another instalment in Simon Roberts' ongoing visual documentation of modern England. He has photographed every British pier using a 4x5 plate camera, which has also captured the landscape from which they extend, the sea around them and the sky above them.
Roberts has photographed some piers from a distant elevation and others up close from underneath their steel and wood structures. Thus, Deal pier in Kent seem to stretch to the horizon, while Aberystwyth looks like an industrial sculpture. Others, like the "lost" pier of Brighton West or Hastings pier, both greatly damaged by fire, seem like malformed things that may at any moment fall into the sea. (As I write, work has begun on the reconstruction of Hastings pier, but Brighton's West pier remains lost, though there are ambitious plans to build a towering pier in the sky at its entrance. This does not seem right, somehow.)
Like his previous book, We English , Pierdom is a kind of topography of England and Englishness. There is a similar sense of stillness in many of the large-format landscapes, as well as a sense of the abiding otherness of the English seaside town. Blackpool now looks much like Blackpool then, or is it just the almost Kodachrome colours that make the ornate entrance look oddly old-fashioned? Sandown Culver pier on the Isle of Wight is a different kind of study in muted colour and atmosphere, with a hint of silver sunlight on the horizon where the grey of the sea meets the lighter grey of the sky.
This is a much cooler and detached approach than, say, Martin Parr's seaside photographs, and shares a certain similarity of style with John Davies's documentary photographs of British landscapes. Here and there, though, there are hints of John Hinde's postcard vision of Britain as one big unreal leisure theme park, especially in Roberts' wonderful diptych of Walton-on-the-Naze pier.
A homage, then, to the enduring vision of the Victorian pier designers, but also to an England that still values the bracing benefits of "a walk on the sea without the disadvantage of being seasick". And a very beautiful book from a master of stillness, light and landscape.
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The Siege by Arturo Pérez-Reverte – review
Unlikely characters cross paths in 19th-century Cádiz in the bestselling Spanish novelist's finest book yet
The last thing you need in a walled city under siege is a serial killer on the loose, flaying young women to death. But this is the situation that confronts police comisario Rogelio Tizón during the 1811 siege of Cádiz in Arturo Pérez-Reverte's bold new thriller.
Though the victims appear to be chosen at random, the murders occur at sites where a French bomb has just fallen. Tizón begins to perceive the city as a giant chessboard, as he tries to anticipate his invisible opponent's next move without knowing who is behind the attacks or why.
In the confined atmosphere of the besieged town, unlikely characters cross paths and become entangled in one another's lives: the French professor turned officer; the young heiress who runs her father's shipping company; a taxidermist who works as a spy; and, behind them all, the complex Tizón, trying to decipher the pattern amid the chaos of war and murder.
Fans of Pérez-Reverte, one of Spain's bestselling authors, will recognise familiar themes from previous novels: the fascination with chess, the love of maritime history, the obsession with puzzles and enigmas and the old-fashioned qualities of romance, adventure and intrigue that places his stories firmly in the mould of Dumas and Stevenson.
The Siege is his best yet, in an excellent translation by Frank Wynne: an ambitious intellectual thriller peopled with colourful rogues and antiheroes, meticulous in its historical detail, with a plot that rattles along to its unexpected finale. It's hard to think of a contemporary author who so effortlessly marries popular and literary fiction as enjoyably as this.
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For quick-thinking Laurie Penny, digital works like a dream
The journalist and activist's new ebook is a perfect illustration of the pros and cons of digital publishing
Last month, journalist and activist Laurie Penny was in a safe house after bomb threats were sent to her Twitter account. The essay she wrote while she was there, Cybersexism: Sex, Gender and Power on the Internet (£1.74, published by Bloomsbury), is now available to download as an ebook.
The ease and speed of digital publishing is perfect for this kind of reactive long-form journalism. Penny was an early practitioner of the form: her short ebook, Discordia: Six Nights in Crisis Athens , was published last year as part of Random House's Brain Shots series.
Cybersexism is more brain dump. Penny writes in raw, engaging prose about how blogging was a liberation from her troublesome teenage body, about the joys of being a geek, and – most interestingly – about what it is like to be on the receiving end of sexist abuse. Her insights into the psychology of trolling are fascinating, and her honesty about how online bullying makes her feel is endearing. When she describes how young women tell her they dream of going into journalism or politics but are put off by the abuse they might suffer, it makes you sad and angry.
It's when she wades into wider debates about censorship and pornography that Penny seems out of her depth. Generalisations (anyone worried about the impact of porn on children must be a rightwing loon) and contradictions (an upbeat conclusion that it is up to geeks to save the world seems at odds with her observation that the internet is simply a reflection of society) abound.
A danger of digital is that the rush to publish while the topic is still fresh means editing is sacrificed. Cybersexism would have been infinitely more powerful had it focused on Penny's personal experiences. Still, a worthwhile and provocative read.
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Jonathan Coe: 'Britain has sleepwalked into a crisis'
The novelist on England in the 50s, his teenage rock band, and how having children changed his writing
Your new novel, Expo 58, is set in Belgium in the 50s – why?
I'd been looking for a way to write about England in the 1950s but couldn't find anything at home that grabbed my imagination. I'd spent time in Belgium through a wonderful organisation, Het Beschrijf, that runs a writers-in-residence scheme near Brussels. I was taken to the Atomium [an iconic Brussels building] and found out about Expo 58. I realised how it looms in Belgian consciousness – their greatest moment of post-war glory. I started asking what the British had done at Expo 58. No one in Belgium could remember. I came back here, dug in the archives and found the pavilion had been designed by James Gardner after the success of the Festival of Britain. It had that wonderful air of 1950s modern design. And slap in the middle, Whitbread had stuck a pub: the Britannia. You couldn't get a more readymade metaphor. I ran with it immediately.
You're a huge name in Europe – more feted than here – where do Belgians come in your European fanbase?
Second tier, after France, Italy and Greece.
Interesting, this European devotion – in that defining Britishness has always been one of your strong suits. What did it mean to be British in 1958?
We lagged behind other European countries in modernism (Gardner was the exception). And, actually, I was writing the novel during the Olympics when Danny Boyle and Frank Cottrell Boyce staged their fantastically impressive version of exportable Britishness for the opening ceremony. An inspirational moment: Britishness doesn't have to be as grumpy or muddle-headed as our presence at Expo 58.
I enjoyed the letters between your main character, Thomas, and his wife, Sylvia. What is the art of writing a love letter?
Understatement. Not saying straight out what you want to say. The British have a gift for it. We're a highly emotional people but were, until recently, completely buttoned up. I found it a struggle writing the dialogue because nobody in the 50s said what they felt. No British person would ask another British person: how do you feel about this?
Thomas's naivety is comical. Is it period naivety?
It is, but naivety is also a contemporary British theme. People occasionally ask why I'm not writing angry books. It's because we voted Blair in on a wave of enthusiasm in 1997, and now feel like chumps. We were taken for a ride. We yielded so much control of our lives to financial institutions. We've sleepwalked into a crisis. The past 15 years have made me feel naive in a way I didn't when I wrote What a Carve Up!
Do you enjoy the solitude of writing?
I love it. In the final scene of my last book: The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim , Janine – my wife – appears and asks: "Talking to your imaginary friends again?" She's never said these precise words but it's a feeling she has. My real world becomes unreal, the imagined world too real… The only other thing I have to do professionally is go on the road, which forces me to become a centre of attention. I'm more comfortable in the corner, watching everyone else chatting.
How would you compare your Birmingham grammar school with Cambridge University?
This is going to sound crazy because my family background is not especially humble. My dad was a research scientist in the car industry, my mother a PE and music teacher. I went to a direct-grant school where you were made to feel special. It gave you a slightly inflated opinion of yourself. This was knocked out of me very quickly at Cambridge. I was at Trinity, a big, intimidating college full of Harrovians, Etonians and Westminster school people who would not give me the time of day. I didn't know what had hit me but eventually found other provincial grammar school boys cowering in their rooms. We emerged timidly, nodded to each other, and long-lasting friendships were formed.
And after that?
An MA at Warwick and a PhD on Fielding's Tom Jones – my great inspiration, the English novel that towers over everything else. Eighteenth-century literature has influenced my writing most. I have a children's version of Gulliver's Travels coming out in the autumn.
As a teenager you played in a band called the Peer Group…
We wondered about calling ourselves the Train Set… I played piano and wrote most of the music but not the lyrics because I need 300 pages to say what I have to say. For the same reason, I can't write poetry.
Do you listen to music when you write?
I used to – minimalist music, Philip Glass, Steve Reich. The pop music I listen to now is mostly from the 80s: Everything But the Girl, Prefab Sprout, Aztec Camera. My daughters, nearly 13 and 16, don't get it because it's sung by ugly old men. Sometimes they find me watching archive concerts of bands like Cream on BBC4. Who are these Neanderthals making appalling faces as they masturbate their guitar necks? They find it grotesque.
Does having children have any impact on your writing?
Totally. It has transformed my work. I don't want to stick on adjectives to my writing but I think there's a tenderness to everything I've written since I had children, from The Rotters' Club onwards. I'm married to someone who has always stayed at home and looked after the kids. I'm very lucky. Children expand your emotional range massively. If you have empathy with them, you live with an emotional intensity you didn't have in your 20s and 30s. I'm a protective father – possibly over-protective. I've become squeamish about violence in films since having kids. I'm not sure I could write a book as cruel as What a Carve Up! now.
You dedicated Expo 58 to "Dad, who never got to finish it"?
He was halfway through when he died, and enjoying it – he didn't normally enjoy my books. Jeffrey Archer was his favourite author. But this was about his era. In January he went into hospital for an operation. I said: "Are you going to take the manuscript with you?" He said: "It's too big, I'll carry on when I get back." He never came out.
Do you know what's next?
Cameron's Britain (odd to call it that), a subject I found too depressing to consider writing about. But I may now have found a way in that works for me, although these could be famous last words.
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Unexploded by Alison MacLeod – review
The story of a young family struggling with love and fear in wartime Brighton is bold, clever and reassuringly uncomplicated
May 1940, Brighton, wartime, the constant threat of invasion. Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont and their eight-year-old son Philip are struggling to keep their small family together in the most uncertain of times. Geoffrey, a banker, is doing his bit for the war effort as the head of an internment camp, Evelyn is bored and listless and volunteering at the camp, largely against her husband's wishes (although he is too pathetic to stop her).
Philip is lost in his own fear and imagination and has become convinced that Hitler is going to take over the Brighton Pavilion and install his evil henchmen. This apparently was a real rumour at the time.
This is a reassuringly uncomplicated literary novel, and is deservedly longlisted for the Booker prize. It has a natural ease and absence of artifice. It's meticulously researched without showing off about it. It's full of character studies and psychological insights but doesn't shove them down your throat. It's poetic without being pretentious – even though there's a whole Virginia Woolf thread running through it.
MacLeod, a professor of contemporary fiction at the University of Chichester, was raised in Canada and has lived in England since the late 1980s. Unexploded is her third novel. It has an intimacy that drags you in, partly through an intense, claustrophobic portrait of the Beaumonts' marriage. They have ended up together more by accident than design and things have soured between them without either being able to say anything about it. Life became worse when Evelyn had difficulties in childbirth and her doctor made her promise that she would not try to get pregnant again. Then came the war. And that definitely wasn't going to be a time to let the stiff upper lip start wobbling.
As a result Unexploded is full of simmering tension, resentment and unexpressed passion. Geoffrey begins a half-hearted liaison with a prostitute he suspects may be Jewish. He loves her with a tenderness he cannot feel for anyone else. But he cannot bear to be close to her either. There seems a futility to everything Geoffrey undertakes. On the surface, he's a successful man – he has money, ambition, responsibility. But underneath he is morally weak and cowardly, unable to face up to what is really going on. Evelyn, meanwhile, is developing a strange attraction for Otto Gottlieb, a "degenerate" German-Jewish painter in her husband's internment camp.
Evelyn goes to the camp to read to the men to lift their spirits. When one dies, she discovers that Gottlieb had painted a beautiful picture of him. She is bored, lonely and lost, and this artistic gesture of solidarity and respect makes her forget all sense.
Philip, the Beaumonts' son, is beautifully drawn, his chapters seen through his own eyes as he roams the streets with boys that he should not be friends with, and hides in corners where he can listen illicitly to the radio. Philip serves as a way of showing us how frightening things are for the adults: he is bemused (but also terrified) at the prospect of Hitler arriving. The adults cannot bear to think of it. But the prospect of Hitler in the Brighton Pavilion is so extraordinarily real to Philip that it's not so much a question of whether it will happen, but when. His story gives us a window into a more entertaining picture of life during the war: "Father Christmas was not put off by the Luftwaffe."
With its mixture of suspense and wistfulness, Unexploded is original and unusual. I sometimes wished it hadn't been quite so doom-laden from the outset: the reader knows Evelyn is not going to end up in a happy place. But overall this is a bold, cleverly told story from a writer who knows exactly what she's doing. I'd be happy (and not surprised) to see it on the Booker shortlist.
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