In his first novel in eight years, Welsh-born author Sinclair turns his fictive eye from London, site or subject of much of his work, to the Ewyas Valley on the border of England and Wales, where nineteenth-century author Walter Savage Landor established an estate. In the thinnest of plot lines in this dense collage of a book, narrator Norton, commissioned to write a novel about Landor, traverses the area, getting field reports about conspiracies and a series of defense industry suicides. Charged with murdering Prudence, his paramour of an evening, Norton is institutionalized then reunited with the woman. All the while there are interactions between fictional characters and historic personages. Peppering his prose with mostly British cultural, historical, and literary allusions, Sinclair is like a researcher unable to omit a single fact. There are gems of insight, wit, and wisdom here, but unearthing them may not be worth the effort except for fans of the author and well-read Anglophiles with a high tolerance for flights of imagination and ambiguity.
Michele LeberCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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From Library Journal
British literary biographer Peter Ackroyd has called Sinclair (Lights Out for the Territory: Nine Excursions in the Secret History of London) most inventive; he is also relentlessly self-referential and wildly allusive. In his latest, Sinclair simultaneously plays the roles of author and narrator critiquing his own fiction. The narrator of this tale is writing a fictional version if the life of volatile poet Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), author of Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen. Landor's life is bracketed by earlier artists (twins Thomas and Henry Vaughan) and later ones (Robert Frank, David Jones), as well as by politician Jeremy Thorpe. These figures are all related to the bleak landscape of the Wales/England border, where 25 suicides in England's defense industry have recently happened. Provocative ideas regarding the permeability of time can be teased out of these stories, but not without difficulty. Occasional blasts of outrageous humor enliven; biographies of the myriad figures in this Byzantine tale are appended. Recommended for libraries whose readers are familiar with Sinclair's earlier work and those who wish to immerse themselves in postmodernism.Judith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll. Lib., Bronxville, NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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