I can't tell by the review if The Hidden will endure a better fate than works by those establishment writers you refer to in this article, but one can only hope for a better crop of writers than what has been out there lo these many years. Although I think Irving would prefer to be remembered as a wrestler, anyway and Roth as a masturbator,it's too bad cheap melodramatists get such accolades. It does sound like this book may be in that vein. I wonder if the writer was inspired by that mesogynist crap movie Spartans? I think of it as men in diapers. Loved it's take on rape.I was taught in a college course that Spartan women were less oppressed than the Athenians because the men were off doing their war games, leaving the town to be run by women. That's probably not true, as the review points out Spartans didn't speak for themselves. They used to make movies set in the fifities as an excuse to include sexist crap, now they go ransackng history for a similar purpose. Why is there such a die hard commitment to demeaning women?

The book sounds interesting; thanks for the review. The part about "unconverted British spellings" has me flummoxed, though. Why do they have to be converted, exactly? In Canada, we spell many words the same as the British do, and it hasn't killed us yet. Hardly seems worth criticising (yeah, that's right, I said criticiSing...).

Thank you for writing a classic book review. With book reviews gone from newspapers, with online sites either breathlessly looooooving what they review or reviewing solely to disparage, it's nice to see a review of the old form again, and especially on a wide appeal topic. The other online sites that do still have reviews can be a bit obscure, and I occasionally feel that I'm being offered ideological medicine.

The position of editor appears to have been hunted to extinction at publishing houses. The blue/red pencil is no longer available, as it appears that the last known stocks of rare wood necessary for them was logged by a bored plutocrat on a junket in 1990. It does not matter the quality of the author or the publisher -- only the most hideous block errors have a chance of being corrected, I assume, because typographical and typeset and grammatical errors swim through contemporary books aplenty. Jasper Fforde's "Jurisfiction" agents are needed to hunt these grammacites down and exterminate them, because we cannot hope for real world editors anymore: they've been let go in the interests of software grammar checking.

I can't understand what the point of covering him if he's not.

Do monsters await in the bowels of the earth, or in ourselves? Novelists have been attempting this sort of thing since John Fowles' "The Magus"

Just since 1966? Excuse me?

is an excellent British poet and novelist. His novel The Cryptographer is fantastic. See a review by A.S. Byatt:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/jul/26/fiction.asbyatt