Dying Falls

John Lanchester

  • Temporary Shelter by Mary Gordon
    Bloomsbury, 231 pp, £11.95, July 1987, ISBN 0 7475 0060 6
  • Bluebeard’s Egg by Margaret Atwood
    Cape, 287 pp, £10.95, June 1987, ISBN 0 224 02245 8
  • The Native by David Plante
    Chatto, 122 pp, £9.95, May 1987, ISBN 0 7011 3247 7
  • The March of the Long Shadows by Norman Lewis
    Secker, 232 pp, £10.95, May 1987, ISBN 0 436 24620 1

As well as having themes, preoccupations and voices, writers often have a favourite cadence, which is sometimes apparent as the shape towards which their fictions tend. If they do have such a cadence, it will be more apparent in short fictions than in their longer work, for very prosaic reasons: because the beginning and the ending of a short story are more likely to be read in the same sitting, and because you get more endings per volume to judge by. In poetry the tendency is more marked still – so marked, in fact, that a lot of contemporary verse seems to have the same shape, with the poem moving towards the ironic, downbeat shape that Terry Eagleton has called a ‘pulled punch’.

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