This curious and wearisomely long novel, the third of a trilogy, and set in Ashford, Kent, is partly an exercise in the fantastical impregnated by the historically serendipitous, and partly a crudely shaped slab of kitchen-sink realism, complete with passages of high comedy. These two elements strain to come together, to knit into some seamless whole, but, ultimately, they remain yawningly apart from, and on occasions almost entirely invisible to, each other. What is more, these looming elements of the fantastical never become sufficiently realised, or even sufficiently comprehensible, for the reader to be able to weigh — or even properly to register — their emotional impact upon each other.
Here is one of the book’s problems from the reader’s point of view. It features a various cast of characters: Kane, a drug-dealer, with a father, Beede, who manages the laundry at the local hospital; a chiropodist called Elen who is darkly inclined towards the mystical; a rough diamond of a local builder called Harvey.
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