Benjamin Eastham

William S. Burroughs is, alongside Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the third part of the Beat generation’s holy trinity. Yet while those two were long ago ushered into the canon, Burroughs’ writing has stubbornly resisted a comparable assimilation into the mainstream. A less conventionally romantic figure than the unruly Kerouac or the hippie seer Ginsberg, the gaunt, irredeemably strange Burroughs is perhaps comparatively unappealing to the adolescent male readers who are so notoriously eager to recreate the lives recounted in On The Road and Howl. But a greater impediment to Burroughs’ incorporation into the reading lists of youthful idealists (if there are any left) is the simple fact that he is considerably more difficult to read.

As the publishing industry comes to terms with the latest reports that the book is dead — this time at the hands of a digital revolution — we can count Penguin’s illustrated edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland among the reasons to be optimistic for its future. This latest version of Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece, for which Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama has supplied the artwork, makes full use of every advantage the printed book enjoys over its electronic counterpart and, as such, points the way for publishers fearful of the digital age.

The first thing to tell you about Lars Iyer’s Dogma is that it is very funny. It didn’t make me laugh out loud on the tube, which seems to be the reviewer’s traditional stamp of approval for successfully comic novels, but this is partly because I didn’t read it on the tube. Had I read it on the tube I would have laughed, but silently, because I am British. The other thing to tell you is that Dogma is the second in a trilogy of what might loosely be termed philosophical novels, or more precisely novels about the inadequacies of philosophy. Which second point explains why I was so eager to get the other one in first.

The era immediately preceding the French Revolution presents such rich pickings for the historical novelist that the relative scarcity of English-language fiction set in the period comes as a surprise. We might charitably suggest that our authors are intimidated by the long shadow of A Tale of Two Cities, or less generously remark that they are too busy picking the corpses of the first world war to attend to an earlier conflict with altogether more ambiguous historical overtones. Andrew Miller’s Pure strides with admirable self-assurance into the pyretic atmosphere of Paris in 1785. We meet our hero in the Palace of Versailles, an ambitious young man supplicating himself to the ancien régime.