A review by barrynorton
Afternoon of a Faun by James Lasdun

4.0

Timely (#metoo and Trump) and readable in one sitting, but I'm left uncomfortable with the narrator. In particular that the author, a fellow older white man, has his older white male narrator be an academic so, with the supposed balance of his explicit liberalism - quickly and comfortably switching pronouns for a transitioning character, for example - he can make an unexamined assertion that "campus politics" are going too far. On every other theme the vacillation of the narrator is used to sell the idea of introspection, but not there. There it's simply expected that the reader agrees.