RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)This uncompromising novel denies its readers many of the pleasures of fiction. More concerned with the ambiguity of ideas than with clarity of plot or character, it is a heartfelt celebration of the life of the mind – though its defiance is qualified by the wryness we would expect from Julian Barnes ... The story of Neil’s life – his only story – turns on his experience of a year-long course for mature students on \'Culture and Civilization\' that he once took, and its enduring legacy through years of reflection. But, as Neil often tells us, \'this is not my story\'. It is the story of Elizabeth Finch, the enigmatic woman who delivered the course ... A third character, embedded in the ambiguities of textual record and legend, becomes prominent in the narrative: Julian the Apostate, the philosophical Roman emperor ... His elusive example, intertwined with the lives of Neil and his fellow students, leads the reader from a personal narrative to the broader framework of history ... Several features of this novel are located in recognizably Barnesian territory. The story turns on a long relationship, which changes through the decades; it focuses on moments of evocative return ... Yet it would be a mistake to think that Barnes is simply repeating old tricks in Elizabeth Finch. Alongside the characteristically self-deprecating tone of Neil’s hesitant ruminations stands something more steely. The novel is in part a fierce defence of the intellectual values that have directed the course of Barnes’s writing from the first ... A book that is, among its many layered identities, a manifesto ... This is a novel that rejects the rigid convictions of cultural polemics while constructing a qualified but resolute polemic of its own.
Gwendoline Riley
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Her distinctive first-person voice, uncompromising and clear, is once more telling a story of baffled disaffection ... The pleasures of inventive plot are not in evidence. Instead, the exercise of exact observation, and an extraordinarily accurate ear for the rhythms of dialogue, seize the reader’s attention. Riley misses nothing, and her icy evocations of dysfunction and distress are unforgettable ... Hen’s defenceless vulnerability emerges more clearly, and Bridget’s edged memories of her valiantly useless gestures of defiance are punctuated with moments of profound pathos ... she tells her story with such lucidity that it is hard not to delight in her piercing gaze. But we are also conscious of an element of self-justification hidden in the twists and turns of Bridget’s story.
Marilynne Robinson
PositiveTLSThis is not a book that has been designed to please. Its pace is deliberately slow, and character is sometimes overwhelmed by a weight of significance that verges on the allegorical ... Those who are willing to grant the imaginative patience that this novel requires, however, will find themselves rewarded.
Margaret Atwood
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Though The Testaments is primarily a political novel, ideological commitment is not its only characteristic. It is also a thriller, with a fast-paced plot featuring many entangled concealments and dramatic confrontations ... Of course the women write with a chiselled articulacy that could hardly be an authentic reflection of their circumstances: the blunt and shapely sentences and sly observations are all Atwood. But the fact that there is only ever one voice in this novel is not necessarily a weakness. Atwood’s writing is at its incisive best throughout this novel ... the cinematic feel of The Testaments, with its emphasis on a pivotal mystery (who is the mole in Gilead who is helping the Mayday resistance movement?), a gripping plot and a dramatic denouement, does seem to owe something to the tone of the Hulu series ... this remains a very personal novel. Atwood is not simply responding to our current anxieties, though she is clearly aware of what is on the collective mind... Her book is written to entertain, for that is a novelist’s business; but it is also her own testament, and a renewal of the warning of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Alison Moore
PositiveThe GuardianThe opening story, When the Door Closed, It Was Dark, confronts the reader with an insistent physicality, shadowed with violence. An inexperienced girl works as an au pair, homesick and evidently disliked by her employers. She is looking after a baby whose mother has disappeared, as mothers often do in these stories ... The story ends with a painful jolt, but the shock is not unexpected, nor is it graphically described. The inevitability of disaster is conveyed by oblique suggestion ... Moore\'s taut stories construct, detail by careful detail, the prisons in which her characters will be destroyed.
Marilynne Robinson
MixedThe GuardianThough the political context is urgent (‘We have surrendered thought to ideology’), it is not the point of what she is attempting. Her studies represent a call to seriousness, as Christians used to understand that term – not as an unsmiling severity, but a steady determination to look beyond our immediate worldly concerns. Among the most affecting essays in this book is a disquisition, or perhaps sermon, on the nature of hope, considered (alongside faith and love) as one of the three ‘theological virtues’...The argument is sophisticated and persuasive. But the exhortations of sermons are alien to modern literary sensibilities. Her religious essays are removed from the provocative strangeness of her novels.
Brendan King
RaveThe GuardianKing’s vivid biography reveals the interplay between remembering and inventing in her work ... King, who worked as Bainbridge’s assistant throughout the last 23 years of her life, weaves a gripping narrative from the ups and downs of her entanglements with men ... Among the thought-provoking connections to emerge from this rewarding biography is the association between Bainbridge’s self?dramatisation and the steady discipline of her creativity.
