Up Against the Night by Justin Cartwright review – brilliant but frustrating

Justin Cartwright’s novel is curiously lifeless until a revelatory change of narrator

In his review of a previous Justin Cartwright novel, 2002’s White Lightning, DJ Taylor noted: “It is a desperately worrying thought that in another 10 years Justin Cartwright’s work might… prove in the end to be merely plausible but essentially flimsy pieces of manipulation, in which a stack of carefully marshalled and faintly exotic material and a decisive authorial voice mask what is actually a fairly large hole.” More than a decade later, Up Against the Night returns to similar themes as those explored in White Lightning, and for a good proportion of it, Taylor’s worries look to be well justified.

Taylor called Cartwright “one of the finest novelists currently at work”, but also, rather stingingly, catalogued his recurring schema and structures: a male protagonist from a moneyed trade drawn to a moment from history; women troubles; generational tensions; and a grand gesture to bring all these elements into sharp relief.

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