Beryl Bainbridge has an extraordinary ear for the speech of drifters, refugees, entrepreneurs of various kinds, Irishwomen; her characters [in Young Adolf] probably exist in the seedier back streets of Liverpool and other ports but then again she may just as well have invented them. She has an uncanny knack for capturing place and time; every detail seems exactly right, from the railway carriage to the Liverpool docks in 1912, to the bedrooms, kitchens and basements in which her oddly-assorted characters live out their dreams, plaster cracking, dry rot eating away.
The novel unfolds effortlessly, inventively; it is the writing of a natural. (p. 142)
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