James Meek's early fiction is alert, acrid and funny, and only slightly too insistent on its own quirkiness - as if it were hoping reviewers would call it surreal (they did) and confident that this would be a good thing. These qualities make for many sudden pleasures of reading, but I could find nothing in the two novels and the two collections of stories - McFarlane Boils the Sea (1989), Drivetime (1995), Last Orders (1992), The Museum of Doubt (2000) - that prepared me for the eloquent sobriety of the new book, The People's Act of Love, and its entirely different sense of what is strange.

LRB 21 July 2005 | PDF Download