Critical Essay | Critical Review by Boyd Tonkin

Critical Review by Boyd Tonkin

SOURCE: “Russian Salad,” in New Statesman, June 6, 1986, pp. 26-27.

In the following review, Tonkin offers unfavorable assessment of Sphinx.

A sequel to Ararat and Swallow, the third part of D. M. Thomas's planned quartet of Russian novels begins with an unlikely fantasy. In a Soviet mental hospital a tortured dissident claims to the guard that he works for the New Statesman. The orderly has other ideas and a cosh to support them: ‘You're Kravchenko, a fucking terrorist, and a raving loonie. Learn some fucking respect.’

Ever since The White Hotel, Thomas has given his public Kravchenko's strange delusion in reverse: he thrills a safe Western intelligentsia with visions of persecution and massacre. What Sphinx in a defensive moment of self-description calls ‘The author's lurid style / And themes of holocaust and lust’ seem to cater to the liberal's ‘hunger for absolutes’. To a doubtful culture he spins a...
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