PanLondon Review of Books (UK)Gottlieb suffers, like others before him, from a distinct lack of new information about Garbo’s life ... He neatly fillets Garbo Mark III—almost fifty years of retirement—into a series of brisk thematic chapters ... There isn’t a great deal more to say.
John Mullan
PositiveLondon Review of Books (UK)Mullan wants to argue—ambitiously—that Dickens’s sleights of language amounted to a ‘formal daring’ or ‘experimental verve’ which ‘gave prose new dramatic powers’ and thus transformed the novel as a genre ... Mullan...rightly insists that the purpose of the performance is to tell a truth that could not otherwise have been told ... ‘Another kind of novelist might tell you Merdle’s thoughts,’ Mullan observes, ‘or at least the symptoms of his anxieties.’ Dickens, by contrast, insists on seeing him ‘only from the outside’, by means of fantastic analogy. Mullan finds plenty of evidence to support this contention. His argument thus reinforces the long-held assumption that Dickens, unlike Eliot, say, or James, wasn’t very good at representing the ‘inner life’ ... Mullan’s accounts of key preoccupations—‘haunting’, ‘laughing’, ‘foreseeing’, ‘knowing about sex’, and so on—are as incident-packed as those that have to do with technique, but sometimes lack their clarity of focus. A romp through the many incidents of drowning in the novels leads to the splendid conclusion that Dickens was an ‘epicure of fear’ ... Mullan devotes a thought-provoking chapter to Dickens’s fondness for describing the sort of ‘visceral event’ staged, above all, by olfaction. Of that, too, he can be considered an epicure ... I’m not sure that it helps to describe this proliferation of visceral event as artful, let alone as a trick or ploy. Orwell seems closer to the mark when he notes that Dickens’s imagination overwhelms everything like a kind of weed.
