I have always been attracted to Gould’s narrative voice; his selected poems, The Past Completes Me (2005), is the only book of poetry I have ever reviewed: I liked it too. There is a genial insistence on following his own muse (perhaps Clio, as Henry Luck suggests). The narrative pace is leisurely, but there is none of the pretentiousness which so often mars ‘literary fiction’. It is true that concessions are not made to the etymologically naïve. In the first stairwell of the story, their nostrils are assaulted by ‘the fetor of concrete’. But more often a startling and amusing image is hewn from workaday materials. There are many, but it is hard to beat the image of Henry clutching the Yugoslavian Branca ‘as though she were a cupboard he had rescued from a flood’. There are acrobats and tricksters in the poets’ stairwell, but Boon keeps ascending, with Gould, admiring their antics but not ultimately distracted from his own artistic illumination.