Outlandishly theatrical, well-wrought and witty, Middlepost is Anthony Sher's first novel. The jacket illustration - Sher's own work - sets the tone. It presumably depicts some of the novel's characters, misshapen and naked as eels, rising up into the heat and dust. Inside are five suggestive line drawings by the same hand, the most notable of which is the frontispiece, 'The Great Fish Vomiting out Jonah upon the Dry Land', Jonah being one of the names which the central character of Middlepost might easily have contracted, given the number of times he is compared to that desolate hero.

LRB 29 September 1988 | PDF Download