The Lie of the Land (First Edition)

David Nunnies is a slave to a terrifying secret from his past--an event that cut him adrift from his wife and child and that now threatens to destroy his very life

Middleton is an English writer whose previous novel published here, The People in the Picture , was an intriguing and unsettling study of the impact of a strange man on the life of an unstable young woman. His new book offers another eccentric, David Nennius, to whom people are irresistibly drawn: the enigmatic, faithful Quinn, whom he apparently rescued from vagrancy, and Rachel, the beautiful Samaritan (a group of amateur social workers) who senses in him a man worth saving from what looks like imminent tragedy. Middleton skillfully works up an atmosphere of doom overlying the tiny details of domestic life; but when Quinn and Rachel discover a manuscript in which Nennius describes his life, involving much palaver about a mysterious, all-devouring woman with mythological overtones, the novel begins to fall apart. Lurid melodrama takes over and eventually Nennius, always more fascinating to the other characters than to the reader, becomes tiresome and absurd. Middleton is a gifted writer, fallen here into an unpromising rut.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

David Nennius, a small-time electrical contractor in Oxford, England, is haunted by the past--not only his own past, which conceals a terrible crime and a terrible revenge, but the fabulous past of Britian. For he has, improbably, convinced himself that he is living out a pastiche of Blakean mythopoeia, the legend of Brutus, and British chthonic myths. His housemate Quinn and a volunteer social worker, Rachel, are hindered by their own preoccupations as they try to free their friend from his obsession. To grasp Middleton's larger meaning, which seems to involve the power of myths of rebirth to liberate love, may require more than a passing knowledge of significance in narrative structure and of British mythology, but anyone with a pulse will feel it quicken in response to revelations and in anticipation of a gruesome finale. Middleton knows how to build tension and, perhaps more remarkably, how to relax it.
- Hugh M. Crane, Cambridge P.L., Mass.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.