Slade House, the latest offering from the Man Booker prizewinner David Mitchell, presented critics with a challenge: was this haunted house story a fantasy fright fest, or real literature? Could it, indeed, be both? “Even critically acclaimed authors such as Stephen King have had trouble convincing the carriers of Daunt’s linen book bags that ghoulies and ghosties can coexist with an intellectual sensibility,” wrote Melissa Katsoulis in the Times. “Obviously David Mitchell’s publisher is hoping he can buck that trend.” Her verdict was that he succeeded: “Mitchell masterfully, humorously, combines the classic components of a scary story … Don’t let any anti-fantasy prejudices keep you from being swept up into his unreal reality.” For Claire Lowdon in the Sunday Times, however, the book didn’t quite transcend its genre. “If you don’t like fantasy, you won’t like Slade House. If you do, you are in for a treat.” In the Independent on Sunday, Amanda Craig was even less convinced. “Mitchell’s gift for inhabiting different characters sharpens our engagement with his entertainment, but whether Slade House is great literature is debatable.”
The publication of Living on Paper: Letters by Iris Murdoch 1934-1995 (edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe) was supposed to help revive the reputation of an author whose reputation has rather diminished in the years since her death. But sadly there was a general consensus among reviewers that Murdoch did not emerge from the project looking very appealing. “Its contents are irredeemably dull and frustrating,” wrote Rachel Cooke in the Observer. “If it does not illuminate her writing, nor does it much expand on her private life, save for to remind us how ruthless she could be in affairs of the heart … What Murdoch does mostly in these letters is emote, loudly and repetitively and self-centredly.” In the Sunday Times, John Carey found that “loyalty seems to have meant little to her, and not only in sexual contexts”. She was promiscuous, careless, masochistic and, worse still, philosophically inconsistent. “Her own philosophical interest is in morals and the search for the good … However, whether the good is compatible with promiscuity is not a question she raises. Perhaps she did not care to confront it.” Only Rivka Isaacson in the Independent on Sunday found a redeeming feature: “If there is an overarching message in this volume it is how far ahead of her time Murdoch was in her ideas about gender fluidity.”
The character flaws of the Brontë sisters were likewise outlined with some relish by the Daily Mail, in a review of Claire Harman’s Charlotte Brontë: A Life: “Emily beat up her pet dog. Charlotte – plain, toothless and dull – was so spiteful children threw stones at her” ran the headline. “As the Brontës spent most of their lives cloistered away in Haworth, Yorkshire, often in poor health, people have tended to assume they were as timid as they were retiring,” wrote John Preston. “Claire Harman’s elegantly written, consistently perceptive new biography lays this theory firmly to rest.” For Daisy Goodwin in the Sunday Times, “Harman’s biography does not add anything new to the body of Brontë scholarship”. In the Independent, Lucasta Miller put a more positive spin on it. “With no particular interpretative or ideological axe to grind, Harman is able to tell the story straight, and to get rid of all argumentation and clutter.”
