One of the pleasures of this week has been to be able to get round to Alan Bilton's new novel, "At Dawn, Two Nightingales", which I've been saving, as he's an author whose worlds I like to become absorbed in, rather than just dipping in in odd moments. And what a world this is, richly described but intangible and unstable, where all is theatrical artifice, and lurking behind each shaky set is something enticingly dark. A picaresque quest for love, and a melancholic celebration of the power of ambiguous texts, it's full of the twisty loops that have characterised his previous novels, with nods, bows, and backhanded to Potocki, Bruno Schulz, Gogol, Nezval, Bulgakov, and, I feel, the Marx Brothers, Jimmy Cagney, and more contemporary references. Literary, playful, and a tiny bit unsettling. Great stuff
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