Demob Happy

Dignity and denial – the noble art of butlering In a comment on my post reviewing ‘When we Were Orphans‘, John Self of Asylum pointed out that many of Ishiguro’s novels are about ‘blindness’. While that novel has not warmed on me, it was with ‘blindness’ in mind that I read ‘Remains of the Day’, [...]

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A river runs through it 8/10 ‘South of the River‘ is an insightful and often moving novel revolving around the lives and loves of several inter-connected, mostly South London-based characters. It looks specifically at the changing fortunes of these individuals against the backdrop of New Labour and Tony Blair, from the landslide election night to [...]

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A life in the mind of Mike “Toilet” Engleby 9/10 Setting aside the fact that ‘Engleby‘ is a gripping psychological thriller of sorts, Sebastian Faulks’ new novel is also a brilliant meditation on the unreliability of memory, on the things lost by the fallability of the human mind. It also examines the unattainability or brevity [...]

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No sex please, we’re British 7/10 Ian McEwan’s ‘On Chesil Beach‘ is conspicuous in its brevity. It has the air of a quickly written novella, an act of catharsis to exorcise some thematic threads between novels. Sadly one is left with a feeling that more could have been made of this scenario and the characters, [...]

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