![]() ![]() The spec-fic text arrives from the Stormzy-linked Penguin imprint #Merky Books as a sweeping page-turner of a story that aerates the author’s favoured forms-memory, trauma, the speculative-as part of a boldly inventive construction that runs to 355 richly dramatic pages. Sorrowland, the blazing third novel by Rivers Solomon (who uses fae/faer pronouns), is an interesting example in this regard. If our current climate of anxiety produces much dramatic potential for the novelist, it is also susceptible to producing a kind of novel that often feels too comfortably attuned to the idea of ‘reckoning with the past’ as a cathartic rehearsal of past wrongs, and is thus diminished as a result. Partly, this is because the long-worn sense that writers ought to respond to the world in which they find themselves is the driving impulse of much that is great in contemporary literature. As the beat of cultural life is increasingly filtered through the watch-it-now lens of on-demand television shows, so many new novels have taken on a pacing and rhythm that presages their adaptation for Netflix. The great enemy of the contemporary novel is TV. ![]()
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