'The Melody' Will Draw You In, Then Take You Somewhere Unexpected
Jim Crace's superb new novel is a trickster — it seems to be a bittersweet tale of late-life love, but then it becomes a meditation on gentrification and the toll poverty can take on human beings.
On the morning I read Jim Crace's superb new novel The Melody, I was in our living room when I heard them: Bells. Chiming over and over again, from I knew not where. It felt as if the book itself had created an atmosphere around me, as if I'd entered its world involuntarily — and I wasn't surprised.
That's how immersive Crace's latest trickster tale — about an aging (Italian? Maltese? Sardinian?) singer known as "Mister Al"
