A review by likecymbeline
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns

3.0

What an evocative title. The book itself is brief, started and finished on the first leg of a bus trip home for the Canadian long weekend. It's exemplary in a lot of ways of all I'd want a modernist novel to be. The elements of everyday brutality seemed excessive at first, and yet when I took a step back to think about it that was the point, because this is not a portrait of a pre-war English idyll. The point is that it never existed. This book is haunted by its own grotesque reality. The reality of selfish natures in people we are meant to love, of the madness of a mob, and all the small gruesomeness we witness and perhaps (in my case) try to forget. The world I want to be in isn't the one depicted here, but whether that's still my world regardless is another question.