empowermint 's review for:

The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison

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This is an unabashedly difficult and intellectual novel, deeply cruel and often nasty. It does not concern itself much with a plot based on diegetic causality or character development. Instead, it builds in the reader the promise of a secret, first to the plot and later to life itself, only to frustrate it time and time again. It ends with the unnamed narrator experiencing a period of gnostic-like enlightenment, but the epiphany which grants him this is not straightforwardly shared with the reader—but we are given the lucid experience of the answer being inherent, just out of reach.