Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #225658 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-29
• Binding: Hardcover
• 516 pages

Customer Reviews

Any river, anywhere
This interesting tale of four writers of one kind or another, all middle-class or socially mobile, is set in south-east London. However as a 'local' I found nothing familiar about this area: you need more than a few placenames like "in Woolwich market" or "in Catford" to yield a sense of place. The topical references which are presumably meant to evoke the zeitgeist following the new 1997 Labour government are often shunted into sub-clauses, as the protagonists busy themselves with the shenanigans of too many contemporary novels: adultery, the tedium of university teaching, it's a hard life in advertising etc. It's hard to care about any of these people with the exception of Harry, the black local newspaper hack, nevertheless burdened with some stereotypical baggage. This could be any city in Britain. Coe's 'The Closed Circle' did it better, and with more political bite. If Morrison intended 'south of the Thames' to be symbolic, ie a liminal space just as the characters endure such a position, then it's insulting to residents as well as hackneyed. Shame, I expected better from Morrison, a writer I admire.