In fact, Mitchell smartly seems to foretell such a critique and answer it in advance when his writer character, Crispin Hershey, silently borrowing from Ezra Pound and Milan Kundera among others, notes that the modern novel emerges long before the eighteenth century in the sagas of medieval Iceland: I have quarreled with the theoretical presuppositions underlying James Wood's review of The Bone Clocks: as I said, I fundamentally disagree with Wood's philosophical claim that the novel as a literary form must treat the inner life with some version of psychological realism because the novel has absolutely superseded the epic following, in Wood's account, a suspiciously sectarian and nationally specific hand-off from Paradise Lost to modern fiction. The following will be evaluative, and mostly of interest to those who have read the novel. I will not rehearse the novel's plot or structure here, since they are described in many other reviews ( here, for instance). It was about a decade ago that John Banville (rightly) called Ian McEwan's Saturday "a dismayingly bad book," and I am sorry to say that I would make the same judgment about this new novel by another maven of mainstream British fiction.
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