PanThe Times (UK)An inferior remix. Here is a writer in his seventies who cannot leave his younger, fresher work be. In that way there is a touch of late Wordsworth, obsessively revising his early poetry and taking out the energy, blunting its force. It is a sorry twilight.
Paul Murray
PositiveThe Times (UK)Another huge, marbled wagyu steak of a novel that confidently ranges from humane to horrifying ... On the narrative turns, carefully paced, brilliantly convincing and helped along by plenty of subtle satire. Murray captures ironies and parallels between the family members and environments ... As with everything else in the novel, the truth turns out to be much bleaker and more complicated. It perfectly encapsulates Murray’s skill for swings from gentle comedy to deadliest seriousness. Leave the worthy comparisons to Joyce aside: this may not be a groundbreaking book, but it is an immensely enjoyable piece of craftsmanship with an expert pair of hands on the tiller.
Eleanor Catton
RaveThe Times (UK)With Birnam Wood...it seems Catton no longer feels she needs to show off quite so much. The back cover mentions the words \'thriller\' or \'thrilling\' four times — insisting, with slightly over-solicitous enthusiasm, that this is a gripping book ... Happily, Birnam Wood is shrewd, serrated and, yes, eventually thrilling ... Catton is an excellent prose stylist with a pleasingly old-fashioned interest in probing the psychology of her characters ... Although it’s not consistently jokey enough to be a black comedy, the novel is backlit by a winning, winking self-awareness ... Many-layered.
Marcel Theroux
PositiveThe Sunday Times (UK)Imagine the film The Princess Bride, but with more malnutrition and predatory overtones ... The novel is brisk and crammed with ideas. It draws on and fictionalises elements of North Korean memoirs such as Jang Jin-sung’s Dear Leader, adds a touch of The Kite Runner’s coming-of-age melancholy and slots in some thriller-inspired set pieces. The depictions of famine are striking ... The narrative is taut, which is generally to the novel’s benefit. Unfortunately, the end arrives in a frantic rush. The final pages flirt with an emotional gut-punch, then resolve it before it has a chance to make an impact. It feels cheap, especially as there is already plenty of urgency supplied by the thrusting prose ... Theroux treats the fourth wall as a semi-permeable membrane with the narrator showing signs of being a fictionalised version of the author recounting Jun-su’s story.
Barbara Kingsolver
RaveThe Times (UK)... it’s like Dickens directed by the Coen brothers ... Kingsolver proved a master mimic in The Poisonwood Bible, a book with five narrators. Demon Copperhead demands only one. The risk is that without Dickens’s sustained inventiveness, which drew on his own biography, the format becomes relentless. Thankfully, Demon is brilliantly multidimensional: breezy, sassy, lustful and phlegmatic. His Appalachian slang, Anglo-Saxon compound words and pithy putdowns approach a rough kind of poetry. He is especially alive to the injustices of childhood ... There are countless skilful tweaks to the source material ... doesn’t, then, capture Copperfield’s alternating layers of melodrama and comedy. Humour is not completely absent — in a macabre vignette, a town hangs a circus elephant with a giant noose — but it could be more generously served ... Kingsolver has produced a novel that is daring, entertaining, symbolic and highly readable — and therefore authentically Dickensian. I can’t think of higher praise.
Kamila Shamsie
PositiveThe Times (UK)Shamsie has the chance to write her most intimate story yet and trace a broad sweep of social change. She succeeds with the former, even if the latter becomes increasingly frustrating ... This first section elegantly captures the strength and pain of being young. Shamsie excels at the paradoxes of desire, of being able to see right through someone and still be drawn to them, and the \'strange new awfulness\' of a maturing body. Karachi’s bazaars, beaches and cricket pitches simmer with possibility and the girls’ respective father figures are subtly turned ... The skulking threat of male power, so potent in the opening chapters, is neutered by the characters’ staggering success, and an influx of state-of-the-nation themes does little to supplement the lost tension. There are still reptilian men to contend with, but time and distance have reduced them to a bad smell ... The friends have a galvanic final confrontation — Shamsie knows how to write a climax — but it hinges on one character’s resentment that she \'lost everything\', when it is hard to see how either woman could have achieved more than she did ... despite the disappointments of the second half, those quiet early scenes of teenage affection vindicate a smaller scope and do justice to the joy of friendship.
Lindsey Fitzharris
PositiveThe Times (UK)With rich, glossy strokes The Facemaker restores a sense of immediacy to the daily struggles facing Gillies and his colleagues as they improvised under constant pressure ... hits its stride when it is explaining Gillies’ surgical methods ... Although the fixation on gritty minutiae is the book’s best characteristic, it does leave the narrative open to tangents. Several pages are devoted to retellings of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination and the Battle of Jutland, which are enjoyable but extraneous...Fitzharris struggles to remove her close-up lens when a wide-angle would be preferable ... ertainly, however, The Facemaker enriches our impression of Gillies.
Guy Leschziner
PositiveThe Times (UK)Leschziner...uses synaesthetes such as Valeria as striking examples of the way everyone experiences a slightly different form of reality. The verbal gastronome of the book’s title feels tastes and textures alongside sounds ... Leschziner has [a] flair for digressions into medical history and his own life, as well as a steady dignity that ensures the book never becomes exploitative or trivial ... The book’s episodic nature leads to an element of repetition as concepts are explained and re-explained, which benefits readers dipping in and out but detracts from the experience of reading it front to back. And some of Leschziner’s scene-setting can be a little prosaic ... But this is a lucid evocation of big ideas that will make you grateful for your health, and both more appreciative and more sceptical of our symphony of senses with its brilliant, capricious conductor, the brain.
