PositiveThe Guardian (UK)The farm itself is robustly run by Liv, his no-nonsense wife. It is depicted with vivid clarity, the downbeat note of memoir occupying the place of narrative drive ... This framing device creates a mise en abyme: the selections from Jimmy\'s unpublished works illustrate his belief that the historian should be included in the historical picture, and are further set in the context of the narrator\'s own mainly childhood memories ... While the subsequent presentations of the black slave Olaudah Equiano\'s dubious 18th-century travel narrative and the story of Kitchener\'s death (and ensuing hoax) might be interesting in themselves, Hildyard\'s treatment illustrates the narrator\'s insistence that \'all histories are a kind of fruitless pursuit\' ... Whether it soars to new altitudes or flaps its single wing helplessly very much depends on the individual reader\'s patience.
