Robinson

"…and part memoir of the author Charles Boyle [Jack Robinson is a pseudonym]. He’s also the founder-publisher of CB editions. Quite apart from the rendering of its themes, what makes this book so wonderful for me is its gentle sentence-making. Boyle was (and might still be) poet. I love the way, in about a page and a half, Boyle reduces something essential about Englishness, colonialism, the public school system to the self-sufficiency of Robinson Crusoe, and then just riffs on that, with erudition, wit and warmth. What more do you want from a short fiction than to do all that? I have to say, I probably loved this work of fiction most this year. I think it’s just the warmest, most playful, witty, erudite and unique offering. There is such creative intelligence at play at; it is just so generous. I also love the unclassifiability of it, too. It’s one of those things where you kind of go, ‘Is it fiction?’ ‘Is it about fiction?’ Jack Robinson is ploughing a literary furrow that I think is very narrow, but very deep."