Returning from a party late at night I went to use the basement loo and saw a mass of heaving spikes and bright black eyes and swore I’d never touch champagne again until I realised that it...
A parable, an allegory, a moral fable, must convince us first on the literal level to have full effect in its symbolic message. In ‘The Metamorphosis’ and The Trial our attention is...
In Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, the Prince found by the River Thames ‘a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber’. Of...
This is Alasdair Gray’s funniest novel, his most high-spirited, and his least uneven. All of which does not necessarily make it his best, but certainly means that we have a nice surprise on...
Mess is one of the distinguishing features of Janette Turner Hospital’s writing, but also one of its abiding themes: and part of the reader’s difficulty has always been to decide how...
The jacket photo for Kafka’s Clothes shows him without any, sitting tailor-fashion on a beach, smiling above naked shoulders and a thin chest, the prominent ears rhyming with prominent...
The title sounds apocalyptic, but all it means on the face of it is that this novel is set in New Zealand now. Doubtless it could be interpreted as having other implications, and there is some...
Can a penis sleep like a sea horse? The question arrests us on the first page of The English Patient: Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet ... ...
Seen from London WCI, New Zealand looks to bear about the same physical relation to Australia as the British Isles to continental Europe – just offshore. In fact, although we are...
Britain’s two leading campus novelists have long broken out of the small worlds mapped in Eating people is wrong and The British Museum is falling down. David Lodge’s latest, Paradise...
Darryl Pinckney is a black American man of about thirty-eight who lives at present in Berlin. Up until now, he has been best-known as a literary critic. Although he comes originally, I believe,...
‘Sex’ seems to be a word that most people understand, so there is a fair chance that the woman will understand what the man is getting at when he mentions the subject. Perhaps he is...
The novel is a natural vehicle for superiorities. In an age which took competition for granted, the novelist possessed a means of distancing himself, morally, socially and sexually, from his...
Diplomatic Delicates at the piss conference. The Recovery It isn’t that the pieces are in place – The places is in pieces. d.g.pres. Salinas de Gortari or One Man’s Mexico The...
The collocation of these books suggests a moral: it is easier to write well about living authors if they annoy you than if you worship the very paper they write on. Rob Nixon is censorious and...
The last few years have been rich in Oxford Books, and I have read three of them: 18th-Century Verse and 18th-Century Women Poets, both edited with great skill and...
Pine Waking early, and riffling the pages of a book edge-on to watch the ghost pass through, thinking of the sexual opening of pine needles, the woman being absent from that opening; this is not...
Versions of the future (1). The year is 2021, human life is dying out. The last human being was born in 1996, and has just been killed outside Buenos Aires in a pub brawl. Infertility is...