Adam Mars-Jones’s new novella – new to us, that is, as it was first published in Areté magazine in 2017 – is one of those books that proceeds by what it doesn’t tell us. On the one hand, it doesn’t tell us much at all, being fewer than 100 pages long. On the other, narrator Barry Ashton likes to talk a lot, but seems to have trouble getting to the point. Barry is on the surface a new type of narrator for Mars-Jones: bit of a bloke, an engineer with the British army (“attached to a peacekeeping mission in a hellhole”), oh, and he’s heterosexual too. Mars-Jones, it turns out, is an expert engineer himself.

Source: The Guardian June 13, 2021 13:52 UTC