PositiveThe Spectator (UK)Ackroyd generally writes in a style that is decently sober. He eschews the cliffhanger and ends most chapters with bracing flatness, none more so than the very last one ... Though Ackroyd makes us feel like we know Auden the man, he gives us little sense of Auden the craftsman ... The book reads like the finished article, crisp and polished, but it almost asks us to believe that the poems were born as the finished article, too.
PositiveThe Spectator (UK)The characters are all despicable in their own ways, and readers will lose no sleep over Dolman’s unravelling. That said, they will probably stay awake to finish the book.
Colm Toibin
PositiveThe Spectator (UK)Much has been written of Toibin’s style, which at its worst confuses plainness with flatness and at its best hypnotises the reader into heightened sensitivity ... Toibin’s narrative voice, for all its omniscient chatter, is equally, teasingly discreet.
Don Paterson
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)There is something Joycean in how Paterson destabilizes the voice ... This personal trench is the crux of Toy Fights, which should probably have finished shortly after. Instead, the last fifty pages follow Paterson on the pub, club and wedding circuit with a number of bands, where the lead guitarist’s vice of self-indulgence starts to infect his prose ... I would add that a book is a joy to review when it is a joy to quote, and on a verbal if not a structural level, Toy Fights is a work of dazzling craft.
