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Showing posts from April, 2020

Harrowing at every moment

"Half way along the road we have to go, I found myself obscured in a great forest, Bewildered, and I knew I had lost the way." So opens Dante's Inferno, the lines echo through the title and the opening pages of Claude Houghton's novel, 'Julian Grant Loses his Way' except in Grant's case the forest is rendered contemporary, we are in the West End of London in the 1930s; and, as we are to discover towards the end of the book, this is not a vision of the afterlife, it is a vision from the afterlife. Grant finds himself adrift, on his way to a destination, yet unsure which. He stops off in the Metropolitan Cafe to drink a cocktail and gather his wits because the world has been behaving unwontedly strange. He has had a crystalline vision of memory - two people stand on a beach in Cornwall, looking out to sea. It is deeply familiar and he finds himself moving towards them to get a better perspective, to aid memory. As he approaches, he realizes t