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Richard Lloyd Parry

• A Good Place to Die by James Buchan
  Harvill, 343 pp, £10.99, September 1999, ISBN 1 86046 648 6

Early on in his new novel, James Buchan employs an image of which he is evidently fond: that of two mirrors placed face to face, and the unique and disconcerting effect which they produce, of reflections endlessly reflected in reflections. The same mirrors turned up in Frozen Desire, Buchan’s autobiographical meditation on the meaning of money, where they served as a symbol of financial investment and the silent accumulation of compound interest. In A Good Place to Die, they describe the state of mind of its narrator, a young Englishman named John Pitt, as he stares into an antique photograph, straining to make out words contained in a frame depicted within it. ‘I am drawn into that silver frame within a frame,’ John reports, ‘am cast back and forth between them and between the centuries, in an infinite and darkling enfilade as when two mirrors are placed to face one another. In my vertigo, the writing is forever trembling on the lip of sense. I feel it struggle to take form ... and fly at me; and yet there is something hopeless about the writing, left-handed, disconsolate, dead, forgotten.’