Literary reviews by Tim Love.
Warning: Rather than reviews, these are often notes in preparation for reviews that were never finished, or pleas for help with understanding pieces. See Litref Reviews - a rationale for details.

Sunday 17 March 2024

"Dream Lover" by William Boyd

An audio book. Short stories. I listened while doing other things so my notes are confused, and the audio book didn't show a list of titles.

In Lizard Killer, a boy (whose family has moved to Africa from the UK so that his father can become prof) sees his mother being intimate with another man. The boy kills lizards.

An American ex child actor, now divorced, wanders the beach each day looking for Christopher Isherwood.

Because of epilepsy, a man has had his celebral hemispheres separated. His old friend stays with him, with his unsuitable wife. His previous lover was much nicer. He finds the wife dead. Suicide? The previous lover breaks the news to his friend that she's about to marry someone else. Apparently the man killed his friend's wife (tying to be helpful) using only one side of his body, the other side unaware. His friend saw him murdering.

The narrator is a boarding school boy who's joined the school opera choir because local girls allegedly join it to meet boys. He meets Alison and feels pressure to lie about the nature of their relationship. He has the chance to be alone with her one evening. He falls asleep (and equally unexpectedly Alison just waits!) as they start cuddling while in the next rooms his friends get much further. He walks her to the bus stop. He doesn't like "the idolatry of masturbation" that school life enforces.

I'm 4 stories in, and I'm not yet convinced.

In "The care and attention of swimming pools" the narrator takes his job seriously and gets his comeuppance

A diplomat is about to leave Doala in Africa. He learns he has gonnorrhea. He's offered farewell sex with a wife. Before it gets too serious he rejects her, for moral reasons, he says, but he's in pain. She's angry and upset.

"Gifts". He lands in Nice. 18, a student. He's short of money, works out schemes to keep himself and his clothes clean. On the night his landlady becomes a widow, money arrives from England and a girl shows him her tits, so he's happy.

A shy boy in France, soon to return to England is given a chance to have sex with a fat easy old lay. He's grateful, and so is she. She holds him after.

A aircraft-carrier pilot dislikes some of his colleagues. On shore leave he meets a woman with low self-esteem because of her napalmed back. Back on the ship he sabotages so that a heartless pilot dies on take-off

Bat-girl - 1st person. She's from Lancashire. In a stall of a travelling circus in a body stocking she lets a bat crawl over her. In Oxford, a student's fixated, shyly asking her out. She visits his rooms. Her minder attacks the student.

Weekly a boy temporarily living abroad eats at the house of a family with 3 daughters. He tells a friend he rather likes them. The friend says he's slept with them all. The boy has more luck later.

A minor diplomat, about to leave a hot country is stranded at a hotel because of a coup. He meets a woman, an air hostess. He sees her at the pool with a foreign man. He wants to show off but diving, he bellyflops. Besides (we only now learn) he's fat and balding. She's concerned, checks that she's ok. He boasts about his status. They sleep together. She remarks it's amazing how people from such different layers of society can get on so well. Next day at the airport she acts like they're a couple. He's worried that he'll be found out. He's relieved when he's called away.

Cheryl marries vice-president Lamar. His work suffers. She's flirty with the narrator. She leaves Lamar, taking his car. She's with another man.

The male manager of company dealing in cork resigns because he's falling in love with the female owner. They meet each Xmas for sex. The story is punctuated with documentary paragraphs about cork. At the end she hears that he died of alcoholism, unmarried.

A meta-story, where the author restarts a piece, explaining how/whether the characters match reality. The main character and a woman are together in a house with Frank, his old brother. The main character pretends to go away for a while, but instead spies on Frank and the woman. They're having an affair. He kills Frank. At the end we're told that Frank and the woman are living together somewhere.

"The diary of Natalie X" - An avant-garde French film is remade in LA. Multiple-voices. Goes on far too long.

Wittgenstein is the PoV, suicide the theme. He gives money to a poet who had trained to be a pharmicist only so he can get drugs. He kills himself in the war. Wittgenstein's impressed by his pianist brother's willpower to carry on though losing an arm.

There are first person and third person stories, set in Africa, America, France, England, etc. The voices are convincing (though so far always articulate, and usually judging others by their physical attraction). When faced with a pivotal moment, characters tend to retreat even though it's the opportunity they've been waiting for. Plots sometimes sound like an add-on, trying to turn a monologue into a shaped story. Sometimes it's as if he didn't want to waste some research. I sometimes prefer the research to the story. Cleanliness, attractiveness (even if not pretty/handsome), teeth clashing when kissing, and hairy female armpits recur.

There are sections I liked. In the end I think I preferred the book to any particular story - there was sufficient variety of settings, and the most common scenario (student-age boy, directionless, in a foriegn country, shy with women) is one I easily fall for.

Other reviews

  • Vanessa Thorpe (When you pick up a William Boyd short story, you can be sure of three things. First, that you will hear a narrative voice which is the clear expression of the modern literary mind; second, that this same voice will also be a distillation of the greatest writing in the fairly short history of the short story; third, you can rest assured you are in safe hands. ... Passive or accidental observers, whether the neglected infant in 'Killing Lizards' or the confused youths in 'Hardly Ever' and the title story of the collection, 'Dream Lover', are crucial to what Boyd does.)

Wednesday 13 March 2024

"Sylvia Plath watches us sleep" by Victoria Richards (Fly on the Wall, 2023)

Short stories from London Magazine and various prize longlists.

  • "Never run from wild dogs" - The narrator sees a 14 year-old girl crying in the rain at a bus stop ("There's nothing on the horizon except for the girl"). The girl wants to go to the airport. A 15-ish boy gallantly tries to help. The 30-ish narrator helps. She recalls (but why?) a nature programme that said you shouldn't run away from wild dogs - if you can't stand your ground, curl up. She recalls her alcoholic mother. The girl's bus appears like "a crimson wave breaking over the horizon". The narrator recalls reading out her mother's eulogy, lying about how dependable she was.
  • "Sylvia Plath watches us sleep ... but we don't mind" - It's 11pm. The 30 year old female narrator is in bed. Sylvia Plath (who killed herself at 30) is on a chair. The narrator's husband comes up, is angry that Sylvia's there, punches the wall. But no, the woman realises next morning, that was just a dream. She's pregnant. Her first pregnancy (which her husband hadn't been happy about) ended in a miscarriage. She recalls a video where Sylvia and Ted are interviewed, Sylvia saying that she thought a child would have disturbed their careers but it wasn't a problem after all. When the narrator was 9, her mother died. She tells her husband that she's pregnant, that she'll eat/drink more carefully this time. He goes for a walk. She wouldn't mind Sylvia returning to watch over her.
  • "Drowning doesn't look like drowning" - A couple (the female's first-person PoV) are at an AirBnB in Havana. She's a jogger. During a snorkel trip with a cheap guide, the husband drowns. The story is interrupted by paragraphs about how the drowned react. At the end "Time to reflect, time to tread water ... I still have a scar on my leg from the coral ... You'd have to really know where to look to know it was ever there at all". Doesn't work for me.
  • "The girl in the photograph" - A young widow with a 4 year old daughter, Iris, finds an old camera and gets the film developed. Though some of the photos were taken 30 years before, Iris claims she's in some of them. Her mother agrees. Not much for 15 pages.
  • "And the world was water" - A couple who only met days before are on the roof of London's tallest residential tower - the only people left as far as they know. The water level is a few feet below them and rising. They talk about their favourite food and wonder what to do when the water rises more. When she asks where they'll swim he says "We don't have to know where we're going until we get there. But we will get there." She thinks she "would have loved him even if we hadn't met in this way". No.
  • "Tsuris" - A young Jewish mother living in London, pregnant again, married to trainee Rabbi, goes to a counsellor because she thinks she's a lesbian. She explains that in her strict society (raised in Israel and suddenly flown to London for an arranged marriage), lesbians have to marry - she's seen it happen and has advised other woman so. After, she decides she won't need another session, she feels better, seeing other Jewish mothers - "These were her people. She fitted in perfectly". So the session made her realise that even in permissive London there are many like her?
  • "The boat" - It begins with "I died when I was seven". The narrator tells us how she died in the garden pool, speculating on the event. It ends 4 pages later with what her father thought when she found her - "I wonder if, to him, I was beautiful". No.
  • "Damascus 5*" - Ali left Syria 3 years before. He was a head chef there. His wife and kids died - shot, drowned, bomb. Now he has a makeshift cafe in Birmingham - the Damascus. In the street people call him "Paki" or "refugee scum". He doesn't blame them - he blames the media. The narrator meets him at 8am on Saturday to prepare food with others who have many sad stories to tell. There's detail about the menus, the authentic food. In the final paragraph we learn that Ali's making the food for the homeless, and that his permit will soon run out. What then? No.
  • "Below the line" - the narrator posts a story online, awaits replies. Their "index finger caresses the circular wheel of the mouse like a clit". She arranges to meet up with one of the repliers, saying she's researching into trolls. He turns up, she puts a knife between them on the cafe table and says "I'm writing about castration, I'm so glad you could contribute". 3 pages. I don't get it.
  • "Elephants don't live in the jungle" - the narrator's staying overnight by her daughter (who's 4, a common age in this book) in a hospital. Acute asthma. Should be ok. There's not room for the father. The little boy opposite might have died in the night. She drops in on a music workshop for sick kids. The leader tries to develop a narrative to make the sounds meaningful, but a boy, Malachi points out that elephants don't live in jungles or eat bananas. So they just make noises. Everyone stares at Malachi, waiting for him to clash the cymbals. The best piece so far, though sick children are an easy way to provoke emotion.
  • "Things my mother never told me" - The narrator when she was 5 was given a false leg by her mother, who said she'd marry the person who fit in it. The leg belonged to the unpleasant father. The girl's not interested. She leaves home early, have several lesbian relationships. When her mother dies after a short illness she keeps the leg to remind her of home.
  • "Earnest Magnitude's infinite sadness" - Earnest (female, I think. 49) lives with a boring, undemanding lecturer, Philip. A sexless relationship. She cheers herself up by wearing bright clothes and visiting a nameless lake - "I watch one of the swans take flight - wings like two enormous yachts sailed by billionnaires through the ballpoint blue of the sky". She met a racist old lady. Her mother's strange. At the lake she sees green - "an algae-like green clinging to the bottom of a boat drifting in the shallows of a Cornish fishing village ... a stiff green, tinged with white, because of Sports' Day, and you get called up to leap over hurdles because you're tall ... the green of a bed of soft moss that you could lie down on to make love, to yourself or someone deserving". She falls in love with an oak. Then she's arrested but she doesn't want to give details.

Too many of these pieces have a predictable trajectory, with too little to compensate. The body count is high. I liked "Elephants don't live in the jungle", and "Sylvia Plath watches us sleep ... but we don't mind" is pretty good. "Never run from wild dogs" and "Earnest Magnitude's infinite sadness" are interesting in parts.

Other reviews

Saturday 9 March 2024

"onwards" (Ball bearing press, 2010)

Stories (plus the odd extract from novels and autobiographies) from the Warwick MA in Writing.

Several quirky pieces. In "Fishing" the comparison of angling with looking for love is made explicit - sad, lonely men comparing experiences. In "The Scene of the Crime" the main PoV is from a spider. The woman's enduring complaints about the man's attitude to the spider has to be taken figuratively. At the end the man and the fly are paralleled.

In "Gilly is a victim" a maverick doctor tries to remove a man's mysterious extra gland than has been the cause of his life-long bad luck.

"Smile" is tame. I struggled to finish "The Girl in the Box" - too strange. I skipped over a lot of "Carlton International". I didn't understand why the woman made her decision in "skin". I didn't understand what was meant by "ineffable" in "Divine Feast" - "just as the pictures began to take shape they assumed an ineffable sense of wrongness - the people's limbs were grotesquely long or their faces contorted, the landscapes overstated or hellish." I liked "Tuesdays".

Wednesday 6 March 2024

"Wild life" by James McDermott (Nine Arches Press, 2023)

Poems from Cardiff Review, Poetry Wales, Alchemy Spoon, The North, and many other places.

The first poem, "Closet", uses apostrophes to denote possession, and hyphens. Other punctuation characters are replaced by spaces. I've seen this done in other books. This book uses the same style throughout. Symbols like ".", ";" and ":" which past writers agonised over are here all conflated into " ". People get used to it, one might point out, and after all, when one listens to a poem we deduce the punctuation easily enough. But when listening to a poem we have the advantage of intonation and body language. Why should the reader have to deduce? Besides, if whatever can't be heard is going to be replaced by spaces, what about the line-breaks? Most of the book's poems use line-breaks so that the stanzas all have the same number of lines. Why?

What I'm most puzzled by in "Closet" is the first stanza - "an average person's skin covers two square/ metres  the standard height of a closet". But two square metres isn't the standard height. It's not even a height. And why put the line-break where it is? The next stanza begins with "age six   I open Mum's wardrobe door" - so maybe the gaffe is because it's the child's point-of-view. But the subsequent vocabulary shows it's not. And why does "Mum" begin with an upper case letter? The event recounted is commonly dealt with in literature. Though the subject matter may be an apt introduction to the book's topic, the poem doesn't tempt me to read on.

Just occasionally in the book line-breaks bring out double-meaning: "Section Twenty Eight" has "caress your fibre// optic hand" and "grasp our pix//elated flesh". "Self-Harm" has "eighty per cent of wo/ men desire their men to be clean shaven". "Gaysthetics" has "atmos/phere" and "con/versation

"Steam room" offers the insight that strangers in a steam room will chat in ways that they wouldn't in a train. Doubled spaced it fills a page, which only emphasises its unoriginality. "To camp", "How to care for your pansies", "Stinkhorn", "We're animal", "Shaggy" don't work for me - found poems or list poems which sound too much like exercises. "This Gay Club Is My Church" might work as a performance piece.

I like "School mates", "Protect the beautiful landscape", "Queen", "Spill", "Heart Attack", "Tickled Pink" (a long poem that uses "/" like line-breaks or bulletmarks) and some fragments that are often at the end of poems - e.g. "I can't remember/ who first threw shame's stone in the sea of me/ but I remember each ripple" (p.22); "we stroke our slugs/ awake to eels   electric blood// squeeze our girth like cucumbers/ buff each other up   gold lamps// cocktail shake one another until/ ready to pour" (p.51). "The Weight" ends with "you brand me faggot which// means kindling   I learn to burn  my body disappears when you say poof"

Saturday 2 March 2024

"Best British Short Stories 2023" by Nicholas Royle (ed) (Salt, 2023)

Stories from books and magazines. The magazine list - Tate etc, Extra Teeth (2), Fictive Dream, Personal Beasts Journal, Granta, Lunate, London Magazine, Soanyway - includes a few I've not heard of.

In his wide-ranging introduction, Royle writes that he doesn't like the term Flash Fiction - "it's such an awful term, which has somehow taken hold and spread, like dry rot ... the very nature of the term, with its implications of speed and ephemerality, is, I think, unhelpful ... I do recognise that I have a bee in my bonnet about this". He also quotes from Philip Stevick's "Against Subject: fiction in search of something to be about" - "Is it possible to have a fiction that is coherent on its own terms but so tentative and exploratory that its writer seems never entirely clear what its centre is, not even at its end?"

  • Islands - The life of a woman born on an island of breadfruit and callaloo who moved to the UK to marry and have 3 kids, become a nurse. One grandson was interested in her island. He flew there, found gravestones and a few remaining relatives. So the story must have been selected for the style - there are many short (often one word) paragraphs, with empty lines between paragraphs. No.
  • The Lowing - Only 3 pages. "It was only a short walk from the farmhouse to the barn" appears 6 times, for reasons that become clearer. Yes.
  • The Statistics Revolution - Only 5 pages. A class of med students play a joke on their stats lecturer. No.
  • The Incorruptable - 5 pages about the last days of Robespierre by the women who thought she was his de facto wife. No.
  • Somewhere out there west of Thetford - A man living in a caravan park starts doing little favours for defiant, old Mrs Grote, a neighbour, a loner. Her unfriendly, rarely seen daughter's a barmaid in nearby Brandon. When Mrs Grote dies, he finds £1200 in a bag in her caravan. He throws it away. Atmospheric, with interesting characters but an unsatisfyingly predictable end.
  • The Nights - Jean (lone sheep farmer), Claire (single mother) and Anna (secretly out with boyfriend) take turns at being PoV. Night in a rural setting. Lights, then bangs. At the end the omniscient narrator tells us about the hunter. We presume the corpses are animals.
  • Elephant - 1st-person PoV is Coco, a servant. When Lord Dallows dies he leaves everything to his son, Edward, who's not been seen for years and who is now an elephant. The Lord's daughter Cynthia is a married nymphomaniac. Edward returns, and the house is adapted for him. A herd of elephants roams the grounds. The family make it into a money-earning Safari Park. Coco becomes his companion, rides on him, stays out at night with him. At the end he takes Coco to a ridge where his looks down at a thousand fires - his people. Yes.
  • Chimera - 3 pages. "You" and "She" visit a basement bar. All life is there. Suddenly they return home where "your" parents are soon due back. The 2 characters are aspects of 1?
  • The Clearance - A thoughtful estate agent is selling a house that relatives are emptying. Long, multi-claused sentences. “Some rain falls. The way it so evenly covers the patio is a wonder, a splendour even, he thinks, to an estate agent who has seen so many patios, so many wonders”. I liked it though it took some getting used to.
  • The thinker - About 5 pages. A man takes over upkeep of a caged human when a friend dies. He breaks into the deceased man’s house and things get stranger. Yes.
  • Middle ground - Brighton, 11, is a schoolgirl. She and friends use primroses for devination. Foregrounds are easy. Backgrounds are harder to comprehend. She walks with a boy. She sees what older girls are like. She begins to take chances. She’s not scared because it’s her choice. Feels like an extract.
  • Still life - A man wakes. He’s another thinker. “I try to isolate this moment as a specific event, something with a clear beginning and end so it’s easier to understand, when really everything organised itself so gradually that I’m still only approaching the reality of how things were all these years later”. His partner stops paying the rent, but still uses the place like a girlfriend might, visiting while he's away. He empties the place, dispersing the contents around London.
  • When we went gallivanting - Richie's in a tower block when it starts walking. A committee is set up to manage food and power. Big brash Athena Righteous-Fury continues giving swimming lessons (with benefits) in her bathroom. The tower block reaches the sea. She teaches Richie to swim in 15 mins. Yes.
  • Qx - Less than 4 pages. A book-lover buys another old copy of a novel where chess pieces come alive. In a cafe he sees a woman beating a man at chess. She leads him out. A slip of paper with "Qx [something]" falls from the book. I know "Qx" means "Queen takes" but I don't get the ending, beyond the obvious.
  • The Beard - Leading males in a Muslim state disappear from public view when they turn into women. Their beards drop off and collect in wind, ending up as a bundle in the square. A woman sets the bundle alight. I think more could have been made of the interesting idea/satire.
  • The slime factory - It's the 2030s. London's flooded. Nesterov, a billionnaire thanks to exploiting the computing power of slime mould, disappears from view. The narrator's a journalist. His biotech girlfriend goes to work at Nesterov's secret lab. 7 years later she contacts him saying she's worried that a colleague, Thomas, has disappeared. The narrator finds that the colleague is being disappeared from the WWW. Nesterov suddenly re-appears, fat and bold, inviting people to a launch. The narrator goes. Nesterov's created in Gloucestershire a retro landscape of windmills and Morris dancers. He says that mankind took a wrong turn in the neolithic, turning against nature. He presents his idea of the future - an organic train. It has a face - the face of the lost colleague. A year later there's a new train with his ex-girlfriend's face.
  • Bonsoir (after Ithell Colquhoun) - Less than 5 pages. I don't get it.
  • Common Ground - I think Royle often likes Alison Moore's stories. I don't think this is one of her best.
  • The Bull - Someone leaves a wake and walks where they walked with their father long ago - "How did I become this person and not another?" they ask themselves. They'd found a shed/container which they'd thought empty but when the father lifted the child up to see through the grill, there was a bull. We're dripfed with info. The person is female, Chloe. The father stopped work after a colleague died and left the family when Chloe was 13. He had anger issues. She feels she's always resembled him. She's become a men's barber. The last time she saw him he'd come in and asked for a mohawk. Only now are we told that "In his septum he wore the silver ring that he'd worn ever since I could remember" (ah, like a bull). She has "dark ink and fine white scars" on her arms, piercings in lip and eyebrows. She reaches the ruined shed and the story ends - "Tears pricked my eyes, as the hot stink of a huge animal swelled around me. Then, with the roar of great bellows, the darkness began to breathe"
  • Tinhead - Nearly 30 pages long - easily the longest piece. Anecdotes and reflections. Rafi, recently moved to Manchester, not far from where he grew up, goes to buy boots for a walk when Darren, from his home village of Hayfield, sees him. Darren tells him about the village deaths and criminals. Rick Tinsley - Tinhead - leapt off a bridge and died. Rafi thought him an intellectual - in spirit anyway. He performed that social role at a village level. Thanks to Tinhead, Rafi had escaped the small-minded village. He thinks that what saved him from Tinhead's fate was that he grew up in a home with books. He'd offered Tinhead his "Nausea" novel which he'd refused. Rafi visits the suicide scene then drives on to Hayfield. His parents had moved there from Manchester. He chats to Tinhead's brother in a pub, fearing he might turn violent. We learn that Rafi had been to Oxford Uni to do a Ph.D but had to quit. Mental breakdown. Later, back home, he thinks he was never of the village - he "he had learned to live in a state of alienation from myself and others".

What you rarely get in these Royle anthologies are New Yorker stories (or Alice Munro stories) where people in normal enough situations deal with what life throws at them.

Other reviews

  • Kim Wiltshire (There are clear themes that run through the collection: concerns about the world we live in, and where it is heading, alongside the loneliness of life for so many.)

Wednesday 28 February 2024

"Don Marcelino's Daughter" by Tim Cunningham (Peterloo, 2001)

Poems from Ambit, Poetry Ireland Review, TLS, etc.

I don't feel that they're over my head, but I think I'm missing something because too many of the poems seem so-so - a shame because the book's not lacking in quotable phrases, or original ideas for poems. One problem I have is that pieces like "Mrs Kirby" and "Errata (about days 8 to 13 of creation - a neat idea) are prose in all but format, and fairly ordinary prose at that, compared to Flash nowadays. I liked "Pebbles" and a few of the other shorter pieces. Longer pieces can sag - "The Living Room" shows things reverting to their origins, some more obvious examples (e.g. "Books and bookcases/ Revert to trees/ And the glass that I held/ In the palm of my hand/ Crumbles to grains/ Of timeless sand") filling more space than interesting ones like - "when/ Piano keys release again their music to the world/ I know that I will hear only the trumpeting/ Herds as they charge behind ivory spears". And there are longer poems like "Viking" (24 lines) that don't work at all for me.

Rhyme's used sparingly. "Quartet" has a sextet for each family member, then ends with a rhyming quatrain - "Sometimes the music stops/ But mostly they accept the score/ And play the harmonies/ That exorcise the demons at the door". Each sextet begins with "Sometimes the music stops". The final line of each sextet rhymes with an earlier line: in the first sextet line 4, then line 2, line 3 and line 4.

'Clintona' ends with "a boy/ Watched the magical designs// Of frost crystals on window/ Panes, intent/ As a geneticist detecting// The chromosome/ In cells that spell,/ At best, a life sentence". I'm not convinced that the analogy is apt but in any case the line-breaks are no help to me. The final line is a pun/double-meaning, something he does in several pieces. In "Flashback" children in Hiroshima play Samuria until "Bad light/ Stopped play". In "Piano Tuner" the blind man, a "keyboard Casanova", is finally envied for "The magical vibration of his wand". At the end of 'Corrections', "Magenta pencils lost their point".

Saturday 24 February 2024

"Case Study" by Graeme Macrae Burnet

An audio book

The narrator receives from an anonymous contact some journals which involve Braithwaite, a sixties follower of Laing who the narrator happens to be writing a biography of. The book alternates extracts from the journals with extracts from the biography.

In the biography sections we learn that Braithwaite's mother left when he was 10, and that his engineer father killed himself. He met Colin Wilson. They didn't get on. During a TV debate chaired by Joan Bakewell he stormed off. He saw an actor in a pub and wondered whether his persona in the pub is any more real than his on-stage ones. He read doppelganger novels, especially ones where the protagonist murders "the other". At Oxford he didn't know whether to hide his Northern accent or flaunt it. He was popular with girls. He met Laing. He wrote a book called "kill your self". He met Dirk Bogarde and they talks about authentic selves.

The journal is written by someone who's read Braithewaite's book - a sister of a patient of Braithwaite. In the case history he wrote about the patient, changing some of the details to preserve confidentiality. Other inaccuracies of the journal are of the type that convince the narrator it's not a prank.

The journal writer lives with her father. She had a sister, Veronica, who killed herself 2 years before while doing a maths PhD at Cambridge, when 26, having had some sessions with Braithwaite. She turns up at Braithwaite's as "Rebecca", pretending to be slightly deranged. When he's out of his office she checks his files. He catches her. She meets a man (a photographer) and arranges to meet him later still playing the Rebecca role.

She publishes a short story about an office worker like her having an affair with a married man. It's a one off. She continues having sessions with Braithwaite. He seems to use them as chat-up sessions.

Rebecca begins to acquire more independence, accusing the woman of obstructing her from having sex. The woman falls into depression, giving up her job.

Braithwaite was briefly imprisoned for having drugs and sex with a minor. His reputation never recovered. Eventually he hung himself.

At the end the author is invited to meet the anonymous contact. It's a 70ish woman. Rebecca.

Other reviews

  • Nina Allan
  • Marcie McCauley (In Case Study, Burnet presents two additional authors, whose documents are made available to readers. Most compelling are the private notebooks of a woman who is preoccupied by a young woman’s suicide; she believes that she has recognised the dead woman in a psychotherapist’s published work, despite that author’s having concealed the woman’s true identity. The author of the notebooks presents evidence of the psychotherapist’s misconduct and excerpts his publications; this complex structure allows questions about selfhood and identity, confusion and delusion, to proliferate. He not only presents different iterations of narratives, but different versions of authorship.)