PositiveThe Times Literary SupplementThe novel’s present-tense narration might suggest a sense of immediacy, but Scharer’s account is shot through with nostalgia: this is the 1930s Paris of our collective cultural imagination. Everything is dazzling, everyone seemingly either a genius or beautiful, or, in the case of Miller, both. Though it occasionally verges on the overblown, there is a sensory pleasure to be taken from this \'opulent world\', in which opium dens are hidden behind bookcases, drunk party-goers debate art versus commerce, and everybody knows everybody ... When Ray’s sense of entitlement to Miller reaches too far, there is a cathartic joy in witnessing her react with righteous anger. The brilliance of this portrayal is in Ray’s bemusement: it had not crossed his mind that her work was not, essentially, his own.
Elizabeth Lowry
MixedThe Times Literary SupplementThere is, at times, a mismatch between the authentic horror of this subject matter and [the protagonist] Carver’s narration. Very little is \'said\' in the novel: it is \'cried;\' there is swooning and pounding blood and a lot of uncontrollable shaking. This is all deliberate on Lowry’s part of course—Dark Water is an exercise in the neo-gothic—but the broad-brush of melodrama risks seeming an inadequate tool with which to portray the subtle strangeness of the human mind ... Carver is not always written to the height of his intelligence: he is a qualified doctor, and something of a visionary in developing compassionate talking therapies as a treatment for mental illness, yet much of the novel’s plot hinges on information he has, implausibly, failed to understand ... There is a brilliant, strange, important book inside Dark Water: it is about deception, violence, trauma, communication and bisexual desire. Lowry’s complex character, Hiram Carver, is a compelling protagonist in this story, but perhaps he is not the man to tell it.
