Might...sound like a relatively conventional work of historical fiction, but it is nothing of the sort ... As the story unfolds, it becomes increasingly apparent that Thirlwell is doing something strange and playfully subversive with the form ... The plot is filled with event and intrigue ... Slippery ... At times, this slipperiness can be frustrating, as though Thirlwell is gesturing elegantly but vaguely in the direction of meaning ... A strange and evasive novel, but it has a beauty and a mysterious power that reflect its enigmatic protagonist. Even when I wasn’t quite sure what Thirlwell was doing, or why he was doing it, I was never in any doubt that he was very good at it.
Sweeping yet tentative sentences ... Thirlwell has a history of cultivating lightly adversarial relationships with his readers ... To read a Thirlwell novel is to be forced to stroke one’s chin.
t’s not that his new novel, The Future Future, is without sex, it’s just that it’s all gone a bit flaccid, a common problem for those put under much scrutiny ... The obsequious tone of the novel might be forgivable were there anything to distract us from it. Thirlwell has never been interested in plot or character (he has relied on a Kundera-style moreish narratorial voice instead), but in The Future Future he takes the sprawling novel of ideas to the extreme. The novel bounces around like a pinball ... I say bring back the old Thirlwell. His early novels had many things wrong with them (not least an overly inflated sense of their greatness), but their playfulness and unabashed depictions of male desire are just what is missing from today’s literary scene, which, like The Future Future, has lost its libido.
Surreal ... The narrative is delivered in Thirlwell’s recognizable voice: droll and engagingly cocky ... One way to read it is as a translation that takes liberties with the original – an assortment of historical sources – the better to roll fact and fiction into a single engrossing tale.
Isn’t easy to get a handle on. Seemingly set in pre-revolutionary France – the specifics are hazy ... Establishes its trick-mirror ambience well before those shenanigans, thanks to the oddly nonspecific vantage point implied by Thirlwell’s wantonly anachronistic diction ... Thirlwell’s distinctive cadence – always above the action, more commentary than narrative – initially makes us feel in safe hands ... A puzzle: a writer as smart as this has no business being boring, but then neither does a novel whose heroine walks the moon and wrestles Napoleon.
Enigmatic ... The almost sterile tone, combined with the characters’ repeated musings about what, exactly, the point is, may have readers echoing such sentiments. Thirlwell offers moments of insight, particularly when touching on the persistence of misogyny throughout history and the intersections of gender and language, but these are obscured by a narrative that feels both aimless and almost deliberately opaque. This strange outing provokes and frustrates in equal measure.
The enigmatic ending is likely to frustrate anyone who hasn’t already been frustrated by a text that seems to go out of its way to be disorienting and alienating. Some interesting ideas in search of a coherent fictional framework.
