James Wood writes:

Like Welch’s work, Pilcrow gets nowhere very elegantly. Adam Mars-Jones has been celebrated for the slenderness of his work, increasingly for its non-existence, as if his career were an exercise in negative theology. Pilcrow is not only very long; it measures its length in such tiny units that at times you feel that a version of Zeno’s paradox will stop you from ever reaching its end. John Cromer is born in the early 1950s, just outside Bath, to a family studiously aware of its impoverished, upper-middle-class status. John develops normally until he is four, and then succumbs to a mysterious illness which turns out to be Still’s disease, a form of juvenile arthritis.

(LRB 24 April 2008)

Faber | hardback 525 pp. |ISBN: 9780571217038