Whatever else may be said of D. M. Thomas, he certainly knows how to stir up the literary shit. My dentist, who is Jewish, nearly rammed the drill through my windpipe when describing his reaction to The White Hotel: its detailed, almost loving account of the massacre at Babi Yar was perceived by him as a pornographic insult to those whom the Nazis butchered there.

Others were more outraged by what they saw as that passage's plagiarism (from the writer Anatoli Kuznetsov), while others, me included, have been generally upset by Thomas's female characters. From his first novel, The Flute-Player, to last year's outpouring, Ararat, their primary function seems to have been as receptacles for brutality.

Swallow is Ararat's sequel: number two in a threatened sequence 'of improvisational novels … [concerning] the mysterious way in which a word, an image, a dream, a story, calls up another, connected...