It's the eighteenth century, and Celine is in trouble. Her husband is mostly absent. Her parents are elsewhere. And meanwhile men are inventing stories about her—about her aff airs, her sexuality, her orgies and addictions. All these stories are lies, but the public loves them and spreads them like a virus. Celine can only watch as her name becomes a symbol for everything rotten in society. This is a world of decadence and saturation, of lavish parties and private salons, of tulle and satin and sex and violence. It's also one ruled by men—high on colonial genocide, natural destruction, crimes against women, and, above all, language. To survive, Celine and her friends must band together in search of justice, truth, and beauty.
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.
