Myshkin’s text is littered with chronological anomalies, which Nicolai always picks up on. The conceit also helps Rowlands to develop his ideas about the importance of anachronism in understanding a human life. He often manages to sum up paragraphs with the kind of pithy aphorism that makes you stop and take stock Plus, it allows him to dismiss a concept he doesn’t like as “a crock of shit”. It also gives Rowlands the licence to cut loose from the academic straitjacket, to throw out ideas that may or may not have legs without having to dot every i and cross every t. This is a clever way of reminding readers always to think for themselves, never to take the arguments offered on trust. The son warns us right at the start that in his father’s manuscript, “As far as the philosophy goes, some of it I think is clearly right, some of it is clearly wrong, and some of it could go either way.” Rowlands is a respected academic but his creation, Myshkin, is an amateur, and the expertise of Nicolai is somewhat vague. A Good Life comprises a fictional manuscript written by a man called Myshkin, discovered, annotated and edited by his son Nicolai, with a few interventions written by his mother Olga thrown in for good measure.Īs a device, this has several merits, the greatest of which is how it undercuts the authority of the author. Whether Rowlands ran out of aut obiographical material or just wanted a new challenge, his latest book is an ambitious attempt to try another way of blurring the line between showing and telling.
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