Saturday, November 08, 2008

THE FIRE GOSPEL, by Michel Faber, is reviewed by Hephzibah Anderson in The National Newspaper (UAE). Excerpt:
Faber is best known for his novel The Crimson Petal and the White, a hefty slab of candied Victoriana, but his slimmer works are unified by a corrosive misanthropy that runs rampant here. In the farce that ensues, the classical parallels get lost. Ultimately, the novel is a bleak satire on the publishing industry and a world in which the intellectual advancement that Prometheus stood for has been cheapened to who-cares-what, so long as it captures a share of the Da Vinci Code’s market.