The London Times: “Hall really wants to be the new David Mitchell, a writer who can give an unforgettable voice to, say, a floating quantum thought particle, but has neither his searing intelligence nor his ability. We are left with only stratospheric pretentious-ness, where the writer’s barely assimilated reading and capacity to invent empty tricks stalk the pages like ghosts….Nevertheless, this is an important cultural marker – of the triumph of the PR machine over that poor, passé little thing called writing.”
Ouch.
Ouch indeed but the difference from my original complaint on Vollman was that he as a established author knocked a first novel.
Neel Mukherjee is the Times Critic not an author and has a long history of sniping at authors albeit sometimes rightly so.