The Auctioneer

Finn, the Auctioneer, observes: "Hen's yellow hair. My palette has no other name for it than yellow; my inside information says it isn't bleached, or poured out from a bottle marked Butterscotch or Strawberry Blonde. The only artificial treatment is the lemon juice she rubs in at the sink in the morning, when she still looks too young to be a mother".

And when Finn first met her: "I can't say that's what sealed it. But I know that if a certain part of me, something I had always trusted with my most important decisions, had curled up and gone to sleep instead of standing on tiptoe for a better view, our relationship would have ended with her driving me back to my two-roomed flat and wishing me luck in finding a life."

So many threads within the story - is this what travelling in Australia is really like ? what had actually happened to piano playing Margaret? possessions of the dead falling under the auctioneer's hammer, twentysomethings living under the roof of a Victorian mill, plastic brains, drugs, the Green Knight, handcuffs. It was marvellous, when I read it the second time, to discover bits that I hadn't noticed first time round because I had been in such a hurry to know how it was going to work out. Would Finn meet up with Anna ? would it be worth the wait ? were they all going to succumb to "Bliss" ? Surely Hen wasn't going to die ?

It's a very clever book and the writing is sublime - it's definitely up there with "The Beach", "Quarantine" and "The Leopard".

Absolute entelechy - hurry up and write another one, Charles Fernyhough.


Hypnotic tale of love sex memory truth & identity. Buy it !   November 18, 1999
The most rewarding book I've read in 10 years.

Prepare yourself, my review contains extreme purple praise, but this novel has just about everything, and fully deserves the applause it has received from the professional critics.

Fernyhough's rich evocative language is a revelation and takes you on a truly pulse-quickening journey to heaven and hell and back, through the memories of "The Auctioneer" Finn Causley, which keep you reaching for the truth of his past until the very end. (Read the other reviews if you want a fuller idea of the story).

You can almost taste this guy's vivid salty prose. His characters live in a world of heightened senses, and you like them will absorb his almost tangible descriptions of the everyday world like a sponge, to forever look at things in a different way. (I turned over the corner of about 20 pages so I could flick back to re-read some of his real gems!)

You can learn, what it means to hate, to love, to forget, to remember, to cry, to laugh, to die and to be born again. You can become engorged by the erotic power of Finn's forbidden dreams, laugh out loud at the author's often hysterical sense of the absurd, or simply hold your breath as you wait for Finn to deliver Fernyhough's quite breathtaking finale.

With every chapter, every sentence, every word (even punctuation), Fernyhough makes deliberate and individual decisions which make him a joy to read; his words dance like musical poetry off each page.

This is surely the emergence of a rare voice with a bright future who will charm everyone who buys and reads him.

My only problem with Charles Fernyhough's writing is that I believe his next book won't be out till next year. Watch this space however as my spies tell me it's going to be extraordinary !