Ah, the perils of the rhetorical device. Three-quarters of the way through Jonathan Coe’s eighth novel, the narrator, Rosamond, breaks off her story. She is talking not to us but to Imogen, the young, blind relative she tried — and failed — to care for many years before. Now Rosamond is 73 and near death, and she decides to speak the tale of that failure into a tape recorder so Imogen can have some knowledge of her own family’s history. She does this by selecting 20 photographs, then describing them and the circumstances in which they were taken. But by the time she reaches No. 16, the strain is beginning to tell: “Five more to go, then. Thank goodness! I am growing tired of this story, and you must be exhausted, listening to me chatter on for hours on end. Can you bear with me for just a little longer, Imogen? It will be over now, all over, very soon. A relief all round, I am sure.”
Would that the reader were not moved to agree; but alas, she is. “The Rain Before It Falls” is a peculiar book, to put it kindly
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