MixedThe Guardian (UK)At its best, the prose in O’Donnell’s first novel is glorious, combining an ear for deep cadences of language with a phenomenal acuity of vision ... The narrative makes no distinction between events of importance and incidental actions. Everything is described in the same luxuriant, ponderous prose style. Later on, Clara takes two full pages to focus a pair of opera glasses – a skilful, even lyrical evocation of the experience of getting to grips with binoculars, but the activity is of no great consequence, nothing is at stake and we learn nothing about her character ... While it would be gauche to demand that every sentence be shovelled like so much coke into the great furnace of plot, the density of information begins to tell. And while some sections are well observed, others are merely overlong, the narrative sagging into ersatz pastiche ... This is partly a function of O’Donnell’s decision to hold back for as long as possible the exact nature of Mr Crowe’s talents and the secret order to which he belongs. The result is page after page of characters speaking in Zennish innuendos, in a manner that does not excite the reader’s intrigue so much as strains credulity. Even the characters seem exhausted by this ... In moments like these you suspect O’Donnell of not playing fair with the reader. It’s one thing to reference tantalising morsels of nuggets not fully explained, quite another to make your characters so coy that they struggle to understand each other ... But then, when the prose is good, it’s so very good that you feel like an ingrate for complaining. O’Donnell has a remarkable aptitude for capturing a character in a single action ... O’Donnell is clearly a major talent, but this effort suffers from a preponderance of nest-circling and a dearth of eggs.
