‘What you will’ has a Shakespearean ring to it. It is, after all, the second part of the title of Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night. It suggests romance. And comedy; a little mayhem, girls dressing up as boys, and vice versa. Possibly on an island.
Alas there are no cakes and ale in What You Will, Katherine Bucknell’s third novel, set mainly in Hamersmith, W14. More sackcloth and ashes. Recalling her days at Oxford, American Gwen pictures people fondly, ‘toiling towards some unspecified advancement in their woollen suits, woollen skirts, woollen tights, and over the top their black gowns’. She ‘relished the atmosphere of difficulty, of chill, of foreboding’.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, she married her tutor, Classics Fellow Lawrence Phillips, whose idea of a good time is a period of quiet with Petronius and Victor Hugo, on whom he is writing a comparative study.
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