The Brotherhood Of Man Book

Perhaps one reason Shakespeare is so untouchably brilliant is that you have no idea who he is from his work. This is rarely true of novelists. Read a Fitzgerald or Hemmingway novel and there's the author himself on almost every page. No one doubts Dr Zhivago is Pasternak himself. And I could carry on with innumerable other examples. True some novelists are more elusive in their work and demand more detective work, like Henry James or Nabokov or Virginia Woolf. But when you read a number of novels by the same author you begin to recognise the same pivot and cast of characters popping up over and over again. Even Shakespeare's characters reappear in his plays. One of the fascinating things about reading several books by the same author is this growing familiarity with the limited scope of his/her world. Which is why there's often a sense that every author is telling variations on the same story over and over again. The conclusion perhaps is that in life only a handful of individuals have an impact on the formation of character and the way we see the world. Virginia Woolf's point of departure in The Waves. I've now read two Cunningham novels and started a third and have begun to feel that not only do I know what to expect from his created worlds but also that I know a lot about him, the person behind the text. In much the same way we have all built notions about the real life identity of our fellow reviewers on this site. Notions which, of course, might be miles off the mark. It's always a slightly unreal feeling to feel we know someone we've never met.

To the novel itself. I would have edited out the first chapter of The Hours. Here I would have edited out the last chapter. The penultimate chapter is a miles better ending. That said, this novel left me wanting to know what happens to the characters after the curtain comes down. Is that though a good sign? On the one hand it's a testament to how well he had me invested in them. On the other I felt he curtailed the story just as it was becoming even more compelling. As if Ferrante had ended Elena and Lina's story with My Brilliant Friend, a decent novel but hardly a masterpiece without its other three parts.

A Home at the End of the World is about an unconventional living arrangement. Two men, one gay, the other so pliant he'll try anything and an older woman. There are lulls but loads of great stuff about parenting and romantic expectation and social conditioning and on the whole it's beautifully written and thoroughly engaging.