PanThe Times (UK)Achieves something that is really rather impressive — turning the great moral dramas of the 20th century into breathless melodrama ... There are occasional glimpses of the funnier, more enjoyable and psychologically acute book that Love in a Time of Hate might have been ... It leaves one wondering who the intended reader of this odd book is. Anyone superficial enough to have their attention sufficiently engaged by the mere fact of so many famous characters being mutually romantically involved with one another will surely lack the patience to see the thing through to the bitter end.
Adam Nicolson
PositiveThe Times (UK)The reader is treated to detailed accounts of the symposia ... Vivid ... Veers between detailed and sometimes tedious enumeration of material condition.
William Boyd
MixedThe Times (UK)A sprawling cradle-to-grave tale ... Reading it, one is reminded that Boyd does not write beautiful sentences. But he does write lots of them. He takes, it seems, an enviably pragmatic attitude to his work. His books are dependably solid and well made. Less the brooding artist, more the contented craftsman ... Entertaining ... The faux-novelisation that follows, however, is a barely credible romp through the century ... This grand caper is sustained winningly enough. The sense of pace achieved is largely owed to Boyd’s casually buoyant, if sometimes artless, prose ... I wonder too whether even the most sincerely entertained reader might close the book with a dying expectation of something more in the way of reflection. It is not, I hope, an unacceptable kind of literary fatphobia to insist that a 450-page novel might have to justify its weight to the reader.
Alice Winn
PositiveThe Times (UK)In Memoriam threatens at points to overdose the reader on sepia-tinted sentimentality. That the book is for the most part saved from degenerating into outright mawkishness is owed to Winn’s intelligent feeling for her historical material, careful treatment of character and well-paced style ... She does an intelligent job here too at simulating the male imagination, and although the sex remains carefully speculative, there are occasional observations of striking acuity ... What kind of life awaits Ellwood and Gaunt in England, still 40 years away from the Wolfenden report? In attempting to solve this problem in the closing stages of the book, Winn, it seems to me, opts for wish-fulfilment over realism. Nevertheless, In Memoriam remains an affecting, if rather misty-eyed debut.
Tom Crewe
MixedThe Times (UK)There is much to admire in The New Life. Crewe has a confident feeling for his historical moment — with its stifling norms, intellectual neuroses and crushing high-mindedness — and an atmosphere that’s all the more impressively evoked since the principal drama of the age, Wilde’s arrest and imprisonment, is kept off stage throughout ... The book more or less lacks a comic dimension ... Come the denouement, Crewe thrills a little too indulgently at the moral complexity of the situations he contrives for his characters. It is as if the complexity, rather than anything else, is the point; and once all the moral ambiguities have been thoroughly spelt out the book ends a little lamely ... Nevertheless, The New Life is an accomplished debut, on a stimulating theme, by an obviously talented new writer with the promise of more and better to come.
Ian McEwan
PositiveThe Times (UK)Lessons is an untypical McEwan novel, meandering and digressive ... But, for all that, its unshapeliness is undeniably well suited to the expansive subject matter of a whole life ... Regarding our lives in retrospect can induce a vertiginous feeling, a sense of their fragile shape being owed to many little decisions and blank contingencies. McEwan’s masterful handling of his timeline and Roland’s shifting perspective within it allows him to capture this unsteadying sensation extremely well ... Of course, this being a McEwan novel, his underlying conceit must be parsed into scientific idiom, preferably that of speculative physics ... Some of the most stimulating passages of Lessons are those in which McEwan offers intelligent and sensitive reflection on his novel’s evergreen themes — the tension between the artistic impulse and moral imperative, the vanity and the splendour of self-assertive human action in the face of a disordered world, and the fraught relation between abuse, agency and blame.
Jessie Burton
PanThe Times (UK)Some may feel that to point out that The House of Fortune is a bad novel is mean-spirited and unsporting...Mindless fodder is supposed to be this bad, they will say...There is, though, something cynical about the manner in which novels such as Burton’s are pressed on the public — marketed in the lucrative intersection of commercial and literary fiction, their potboiler credentials laundered by a superficially researched historical setting and overripe prose...At the sentence level, The House of Fortune is a disaster zone of overwriting...This is a book that deals not only in clichés of expression, but clichés of structure and thought too...The characters’ 21st-century sensibilities are ill adapted to their historical setting...As with homosexuality in The Miniaturist, the protagonists’ unaccountably progressive attitudes about race strike the reader as frivolous anachronism in the service of lazily sympathetic characterisation.
Emmanuel Carrère, tr. John Lambert
RaveThe Times (UK)In among the allusions and calculated omissions in Yoga, the reader can readily trace the redactions left by the red pen of an expensive lawyer (or, no doubt, several expensive lawyers) ... It is a testament to Carrère’s gifts as a storyteller, the cleanness of his prose and his Gallic ease with an eclectic spread of cultural reference that his style of writing, which could so easily grate away the reader’s patience, is in fact completely arresting. He has the talent, possessed by few neurotics, of showing us his foibles without demanding that we identify with them ... The novel — apparently given its baggy, haphazard shape by chance event — on closer inspection reveals deep and pleasing unities of concern. Carrère is obsessed with the question of whether yoga, the ultimate act of self-effacement, is in some way antithetical to the enterprise of writing, the ultimate act of self-assertion. Carrère twists himself in knots over this dilemma on almost every page. Yoga, then, turns out to be more to do with yoga than we were led to believe, leaving the reader a victim of another deftly executed double-bluff.
Lara Williams
PositiveThe Times (UK)Much to its credit, however, The Odyssey turns out to be something quite other than a seasick riff on Normal People. The characters, for one thing, are far from normal ... Williams has a deft touch in developing, by the accretion of small details, a sense of the strangeness of her characters and their situation — the feeling that all their gears are cranked just a few degrees short of sanity and that the world is spinning imperceptibly off its axis. It is also an interesting discovery that a novel that — with all its atmosphere of glib despondency and bodily dissociation — seems at first sight to be composed of the familiar materials of all interchangeable millennial fiction, in fact turns out to be about people who are barely in their right minds. Perhaps this is all part of a wicked literary trick Williams is trying to play on the kind of reader likely to be attracted to it.
Douglas Stuart
RaveThe Times (UK)Young Mungo appears at first sight to be the second outing of a writer nervous of deviating from a winning recipe. Much of the novel’s social fabric and atmosphere is familiar ... This, though, is an altogether more accomplished novel, a touching story of forbidden love pursued in the face of sectarian violence with a plot that unfolds with all the urgency and dread of teenage yearning ... Where Shuggie Bain dwelt on captivity and the incorrigibility of its fallen characters, Young Mungo is about self-realisation and the possibility, however remote, of escape. The novel has some of the universal potency of a fairytale and it is a skilful thing to combine this, as Stuart does, with a very concrete sense of social reality.
