On sale for little more than a week, my latest novel Mural is attracting some very flattering reviews.
Four positive critiques are online, and they comprehensively summarise the book and its aims better than I can.
Rod McLary of the Queensland Reviewers Collective calls Mural a ‘tour-de-force of literary fiction’. Its ‘freshness and imaginative flourish [take the novel] into new territory’, he writes. One of Mural‘s ‘strengths’ is that fact and fiction are ‘seamlessly interwoven’. His last three sentences sum up his views. ‘Stephen Downes has crafted a novel which is breath-taking in its wide-ranging and erudite ramble through the mind of a psychopath who is intelligent, widely-read and articulate. But like a dangerous undercurrent in the ocean, [the narrator’s] writings mask madness and a depth of violence which only break the surface as the narrative nears its conclusion. Mural is a powerful and compelling novel which will remain with the reader long after the last page is turned.’
In The Newtown Review of Books, Dr Ann Skea, an eminent Ted Hughes scholar, begins by calling Mural a ‘strange book’. This heartened me enormously. The best novels are always strange or, as the American critic Harold Bloom used to say, they speak to us in a foreign language that somehow or other we understand. Each is unique, each is uncanny.
In her long review, Dr Skea quotes liberally and accurately from Mural, explaining contexts. She sums up by saying that it’s ‘worth reading, if only for the bizarre stories and the historical stories [the narrator] tells and tells well; and for his unusual, often thought-provoking reflections on life and death’. The narrator’s responses to his stories are ‘complex’, she writes.
In ARTS hub, Erich Mayer writes that Mural ‘explores with insight and empathy the mind of an intelligent psychopath’. The book is a ‘delightful smorgasbord of ideas, stories, opinions and anecdotes’. The narrator’s stories are ‘so well-told and so interesting that it is easy to forget how dangerous a psychopath can be’. Mr Mayer gives Mural four stars out of five.
In This Reading Life, blogger Brona says ‘oddities’ in the text kept her ‘fascinated’ with Mural. She found it hard to explain what the novel is about, and not knowing the crimes of the psychopathic narrator created for her a ‘sense of unease’. She concludes by saying: ‘I’m not sure what I can compare Mural to as I have read nothing like it before. All I know is that I read it in a fever-dream of fascination […]’.