Sunday, 13 September 2015

The Keys of Babylon by Robert Minhinnnick

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This is a skilful collection of stories, about identity and dislocation.

The nature of the dislocation varies from character to character – some it is the result of physical moves of geographic, others it comes in more subtle ways.

These are richly told, as you would expect of a writer of the calibre of Minhinnick, while each people gets just 10 to 20 pages I felt you experienced them as fully rounded – in the way that you sometimes, albeit rarely, meet someone and almost instantly they become an “old friend”.

Maybe there is a particular attraction in this kind of narrative, where we walk with a gathering of people whose common bond is that they are in different ways “misfits”, for those of us who have always been somewhat ill at ease about our place in society.

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