Minhinnick writes
prose with a strong sense of poetry, powerful imagery, but also the
layering on meaning, the hint, the metaphor, the illusion as much as
the allusion. The counterpoints of south Wales and Australia are both
given an air of simultaneous authenticity and unreality.
This is a book
running across multiple chronologies and geographies, and even when
you are in one chronology you are having a flash back to another.
Therefore there is nothing recognisable as a narrative arch – but I
don't think that is the point.
The heart of the
novel seems to be the question “what happened to Lulu?” but it is
a question that is never remotely answered. (One begins to wonder did
Lulu ever exist? Did anyone exist for that matter?)
The central
character Richard muses “ As ever, we wondered whether there was
anyone left who wasn't phoney. Because we were the real thing.
Weren't we? We were the last of the prue. The founders of a new
age.”
And yet you have the
sense that Richard is the biggest phoney of the lot – maybe that is
the only way you can ever actually live by the saying “be the
change you wish to see”, you have to pretend the world is a better
place than it is, pretend that you are a better person than you
really are, and hope somewhere along the line reality catches up?
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