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Overall I really enjoyed this. It's very much in the style of Gormenghast, HP Lovecraft and Joseph Conrad, not all of whom I've enjoyed to this level, so he has elevated that poetic style somewhat. Still, it suffers from a feeling of detachment that you get with those authors and a sense of characters that are half-formed or who fail to make much impact.
There are also a couple of times where a woman has sex with a man and there is really no reason to imagine she should because that man is clearly unappealing. Dunno how best to put that but it's very much a sort of mid-20th C. male writer 'thing' for me, and it's a bum note in the writing, making me go, "Really? In 2012 you wrote *this*?!" Still it gets the 4 stars because the other stuff, the ideas, were so interesting.
There are also a couple of times where a woman has sex with a man and there is really no reason to imagine she should because that man is clearly unappealing. Dunno how best to put that but it's very much a sort of mid-20th C. male writer 'thing' for me, and it's a bum note in the writing, making me go, "Really? In 2012 you wrote *this*?!" Still it gets the 4 stars because the other stuff, the ideas, were so interesting.