Piers Paul Read's experimental novel [Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx] is an infuriating mixture of the trenchant and the perverse…. The novel spirals backwards—via satirical setpiece, heavenly interludes, jokes, straight fiction—to trace how revolutionary impetus was able to start up in the unpromisingly easy-osy conditions of Western Europe today. The devious irony at times cuts deep…. But pointful passages are out-weighed by ones whose only aim seems to be to annoy the conventional reader. The revolt against exploitation becomes the impulse pour épater le bourgeois…. [All] Read can do is stand the conventional novel on its head. He cannot put his finger on any actual seed or source of revolution—of radical change—in the world he belongs to. For all the 'advanced' cachet sought by the title and the trappings, the book remains the furious shadow-boxing of someone trying to run a r-r-r-revolutionary one-man-band in a situation where the only practicable line for the Left is cooperation and patience.
David Craig, "R-R-Revolutionary," in New Statesman (© 1966 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), Vol. 71, No. 1838, June 3, 1966, p. 817.∗
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