My Book Reviews

  Review of As If by Blake Morrison   Having recently reviewed Morrison’s And when did you last see your father? and Things my mother never told me, I wished to review As If also.  Finally, I found the book hidden away on a shelf in one of my upstairs bedrooms. I notice that I bought this book way back on 10/6/’99, having been published by Granta Publications the previous year.  Reading the book once again, after a gap of twenty-five years, was a worthwhile exercise as it raises profound and still disturbing questions, questions we all continue to ask about the horrors we humans are capable of unleashing on our fellows. For anyone interested in the mystery of evil in the world, in the psychology of bad behaviour and its apogee in murder, this is a book worth reading.   To further deepen the mystery, it deals with the murder of a little boy of two years old by two older boys of ten years. Again, it is written in masterful prose that becomes lyrical...

Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination .   Robert Macfarlane .  Granta Books , 2004  Extended Review: O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne'er hung there. This quotation is from one of Hopkins’ “Terrible Sonnets,” a sequence of six that overtly plumbed his depression and more covertly his aesthetic and artistic crisis as a poet struggling with his craft.  Furthermore, I used that same stanza for a college project on depression when I was nineteen years old.  However, a discussion of Hopkins’ work is far beyond my intention here as I wish to attempt a review of Robert Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind (Granta Books, 2003).  In fact, it was the title that drew me to purchasing the book, recognising as I did its literary provenance.  Indeed, Macfarlane uses the first six words of the above stanza as a fitting epigraph.  He subtitles his book “A History of a F...