Acting strange

Reviewing Lindsay Clarke’s Whitbread-winning The Chymical Wedding a small matter of 20 years ago, and noting its free and easy cast and wistful nods in the direction of the Age of Aquarius, I eventually pronounced that it was a ‘hippy novel’.

Reviewing Lindsay Clarke’s Whitbread-winning The Chymical Wedding a small matter of 20 years ago, and noting its free and easy cast and wistful nods in the direction of the Age of Aquarius, I eventually pronounced that it was a ‘hippy novel’. Slight anxiety when Lindsay Clarke then appeared on the bill at a literary festival I was attending — authors, you may be surprised to learn, don’t always care for these off-the-cuff judgments — was quickly dispelled. No doubt about it, Mr Clarke affably deposed, ‘hippy’ was exactly the right word.

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Sean Thomas

Good riddance to literary fiction

Oh well, I thought to myself, a third of the way into The Water Theatre, an altogether ominous narrative rife with intimations of family fracture and post-colonial trauma, not much sign of the beautiful people here.