ABSTRACT
John Lanchester has shown a disconcerting versatility and an impressionist's ability to bring to life very different narrative voices. There could hardly be two more contrasting works of fiction than his first two novels, The Debt to Pleasure and Mr Phillips. If The Debt to Pleasure is Lanchester's post-modernist fiction, then his second novel is his exercise in modernism, a deliberate attempt to see how much of the flamboyance of his first novel he could get away with leaving out. Very occasionally Lanchester's control slips and the narrative voice hints at the verbal gymnastics on display in The Debt to Pleasure but for most of the novel it remains undemonstrative. Lanchester's challenge is to make the reader interested in his character's very ordinariness and the danger is that his deliberate restraint will backfire. Lanchester studied English at Oxford, working as a graduate on poets of the 1950s, before earning his living in London as a restaurant critic and literary journalist.
