When novelists tell us that the world is made of God's love or the same green cheese as the moon, we expect them to dramatise their perception - to force their philosophy on us as a magician forces a card - so that we can see how it feels to share it, if only for as long as it takes to read the hook. The same expectation holds good when a novelist proposes, as Gordon Burn does in his new novel Fullalove, that not green cheese or God's love but black pus - meaningless suffering, and an appetite for meaningless suffering - is the basic building-block of the universe.

LRB 21 September 1995 | PDF Download