A Beckett fagend rescued from a bin

Spectator readers of my vintage will remember their first encounter with Beckett as vividly as their first lover’s kiss. For me they happened around the same time, aged 18. The dramatic initiation was a Colchester rep performance of Waiting for Godot, in 1956.

Twenty-five years after his first mature work was written Beckett had hit England with the burst of an unexploded wartime bomb. The general response at the time was one of fascinated bafflement. That has dispersed over the last half century but the fascination — as the headlines accompanying the publication of this Beckettian fragment witness — remains undiminished.

The story, ‘Echo’s Bones’, is an early work but in no sense juvenile. The package Faber offers us has, internally, the dimensions of a transport-caff sandwich: 23 pages of prefatory material, 48 pages of text, 69 pages of end-notes. It would be easy to sneer— all caboose, no engine. But that would be unfair.