Anything reported as just having happened requires an auxiliary verb, so that one has to learn to live with narrative language containing remarks like ‘She sips her drink. Moreover it creates avoidable problems in the handling of the pasts, so to speak, of the narrative present. Given that it violates a doubtless lazy expectation on the part of conventional readers, this device can, in a shorter run, be agreeably defamiliarising, but continued over eight hundred pages it tends to become tiresome. However, respice finem a fair reader will withhold condemnation on that score.Ī more serious objection, for me at any rate, is that the long narrative is conducted in the historic present. This judgment could be disputed on the ground of generic precedent, the Bildungsroman habitually tending to length: but in these days blockbuster sizes tend to be associated either with the 19th century or with airport bookstalls, always excepting an occasional highbrow freak. First of all, at around four hundred thousand words it could be thought on the long side for a book principally concerned with the life of a PhD candidate from childhood to the age of thirty. This remarkable novel labours under what some might think serious disadvantages.
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