David Ellison

And, look, over the duration of the novel, it is rich and finely detailed and, in the end, kind of gratifying.

I get it.

I like it.

Is it the most effective form of historical fiction for me?

No.

And, of course, the risk, the terrible risk in all of this, is that the more trainspottery it gets, the more determined you get to pull the author up.

And, in fact, I've got in my heavily marked-up copy one bit which, rather obnoxiously, I've written, Aha!

which is where I caught him out because he mentioned something about the workshop of filthy creation, which is a line from Frankenstein, which is published in 1818.

So too late.

Yeah, terrible nerd.

Yeah, yeah.

And oftentimes those details arrive in moments of disorientation or stress.

So some of the most vivid writing in the book occurs under the influence of opium, when there's a final kind of unburdening and unleashing of Lacroix's capacity to speak and to see.

And that's quite horrific, but also very detailed, very interesting.

Well, they are the friends.

I should mention also that the novel is haunted by the prospect of it becoming a kind of allegory.

Everybody's name seems freighted with significance.

So the friends, F-R-E-N-D-S, are a family who've signed on, slightly reluctantly in one case, to what we would now call an intentional community, but back then was a kind of free-thinking society, which certainly had more liberal views towards sex and a general kind of scepticism and interest in science.

And they've pitched up on this remote Hebridean island.

Vegetarians.