Brocaded
Robert Macfarlane
- The Mulberry Empire by Philip Hensher
Flamingo, 560 pp, £17.99, April 2002, ISBN 0 00 711226 2
Several years ago, Philip Hensher decided that he wanted ‘to do something impossible: to write a 19th-century novel’. To that end, he has composed each of the many chapters of The Mulberry Empire, which fictionalises the First Afghan War of 1839-42, in imitation of a 19th-century prose writer. He has gleefully scrumped the styles of Dickens, Surtees, Tolstoy, Custine, Thackeray, Eliot, Austen, Gogol and possibly dozens of others – ‘possibly’, because he never names the writers he’s pastiching: it’s up to the reader to identify them.
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Vol. 24 No. 7 · 4 April 2002 » Robert Macfarlane » Brocaded
page 34 | 2035 words