Alison Lee

Alison Lee 's book on AC calls her an intellectual writer, whose novels refer to many literary, critical, and musical works, including the social and anthropological theories of Roland Barthes , Claude Levi-Strauss , and...

Lorna Sage noted that South America is an apt setting for this novel, since the essays and stories of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges show a similar blending of the fantastical and the documentary (...

Anthony Burgess praised AC for doing something in this novel which she did in later ones as well: looking at the mess of contemporary life without flinching.Claire Harman points out surreal characters, the...

Marc O'Day suggests that this second novel of AC 's Bristol trilogy(which won the life-changing Somerset Maugham Award in 1969) explores the countercultural mind and lifestyle of the mid-1960s, but notes that...

At the very end of her life, AC still felt that she was unrecognised, perhaps because of her uncompromisingly left-wing politics. At the same time it made her rather miserable to think that...

This novel was published the same year that AC was diagnosed with cancer. Critic Alison Lee notes the poignancy of one character's statement: Only untimely death is a tragedy.

Alison Lee has commented on the novel's verbal pyrotechnics. Its baroque language seems to create cracks in the structure of the real world, indicating that there are always several perceptions of any situation.

According to Marc O'Day, this novel is the third and last of AC 's Bristol trilogy. Two of the self-absorbed characters forming the lethal love-hate triangle are half-brothers Lee and Buzz (the latter illegitimate)...