Manages to transcend the hurdles of its subject matter and take us along as rapt voyeurs ... The Violet Hour offers a convincing and compelling portrait of a very rarefied world.
Impressive ... There’s a thriller element that keeps you reading ... This is an enthrallingly intricate novel ... This novel, which plays so much on ideas of memory and illusion, can perhaps only be fully grasped on rereading ... This is a text that demands – and repays – the reader’s attention.
We have to negotiate some absurdly fruity writing ... However, Cahill pulls it back from the brink. There is real feeling in some of the relationships ... One thing Cahill gets absolutely right is the way in which even insiders of the self-obsessed art world talk about it as a separate entity, always located at one remove from themselves ... By the end, Cahill brings many of his characters to some self-recognition ... In the end, this is a novel about a struggle for integrity, and that is how it finds its own.
Blends predictable satire with a more unusual, earnest approach ... While Cahill’s twists and reveals are fun, there’s just too much going on, and a number of the characters come across more as ideas for characters than real people ... It doesn’t help that Cahill’s prose can be rather expository and uninspired. At the same time, though, there are flashes of emotion, moments of flair ... The descriptions of artworks, both real and imagined, are lucid and evocative.
