Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail ... Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves ... What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place. That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
A rich, alluring concept, offering much literary fun ... In some ways, the glassy quality of Mackintosh’s descriptive prose serves the purpose of the uncanny ... There’s much to admire here. I enjoyed Mackintosh’s willingness to centre two unlikable characters behaving carelessly. The timeslips are fun and the allegory is inventive and convincing. I just wanted prose that takes and gives more sensually in a novel whose engine, in theory, is pleasure and play.
Mackintosh’s writing hums with elegance — she paints her landscapes like still lifes built out of objects loaded with meaning ... But is love enough? Can you ever be satisfied in a world that contains nothing beyond your partner? ... Permanence refuses to resolve these questions too easily. It’s the kind of book that you’ll want to read in one long gulp, the literary equivalent of a crisp glass of rosé. But in its final pages you must force yourself to slow down — Mackintosh has conjured up an enthralling atmosphere, one that needs to be savoured.
The city changes as Clara and Francis’ relationship evolves, and throughout the novel, Mackintosh creates a remarkable landscape for the characters and story to unspool. An astounding work centered on the private worlds built for love.
Painful, meditative, and beautiful, yet still readable in a plot-forward way, this translates the facts and fantasies of alternative lives and desires into something legible while retaining the amorphousness of feelings and of the lives lived, versus the lives that might have been.
