Lager and Pernod

Frank Kermode

  • The Man Who Walks by Alan Warner
    Cape, 280 pp, £16.99, May 2002, ISBN 0 224 06294 8

Reviewers rarely feel it prudent to begin by confessing bafflement, but the admission may sometimes be unavoidable. This is my sentiment as I contemplate the four novels of Alan Warner. He has been highly praised (‘dazzling’, ‘classic’, ‘significant’, ‘vastly gifted’, ‘a genius’, ‘one of the most influential literary mould-breakers ever’), and I’m sure none of these eulogies, understandably preserved on the covers of his books, is entirely unmerited. But it is one thing to praise, and another to describe, the work that earned these compliments.

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[*] Gray’s article appears in ‘Stalin on Linguistics’ and Other Essays, a posthumous collection edited by Colin MacCabe and Victoria Rothschild (Palgrave, 288 pp., £50, 22 May, 0 333 79282 3).