'The principal thing was to get away.' So Conrad wrote in A Personal Memoir, and there is a characteristic division between the sobriety of the utterance, its air of principled and ample reflection, and the wild idea of getting out, of doing a bunk. It is one of the many divisions examined in Doubles, which explores in compelling proliferation the implications of duality in all the forms in which it has touched, inspired and shaped the writer. For imaginative literature not only depends upon but is duality. Novels need doubles to dream them up, and readers to find and recognise their own separate elements in the pages.

LRB 4 July 1985 | PDF Download