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Reality isn’t straightforward or a neat little package, and rarely do clever plots neatly play out and resolve themselves in actuality, so I appreciate novels like this. In terms of the writing, at the paragraph level, the style is good, although I ran into a few typos and editing errors, but nothing which detracted from the story. On a slightly larger scale, perhaps taking a step back, the plot is a little rough around the edges. Often the author will set the stage, let events unfold, and then much later on, still in the same setting, describe how a certain character is present and it turns out was present all along and is now doing something, which is odd and takes a little bit of getting used to because that character’s presence should seemingly have been mentioned before. Where this happened, I needed to go back and, in a manner of speaking, edit the memory of my imagination of the current scene, inserting the just-now mentioned character or object or fact. Revising history, at least in short-term memory. But perhaps that’s a feature of the story, given that it’s told as if a memoir by an old man, the architect of the story’s events, and as imperfect a writer as he is a human being. As we would expect.

Not bad for a book I randomly picked up in the library. I’m glad I read this, and look forward to the author’s next work.