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James Friel, The Posthumous Affair (Tupelo Press, $16.95) James Friels fifth novel begins with a resonant image: in 1880, two children, Daniel Blake, who is beautiful but tiny, and Grace Cooper Glass, who is the size of a large boat, are trailing a red balloon across Washington Square. When he falls against her, she loses her grip and the balloon sails up into the sky. The moment is the beginning of a troubled relationship in which there is never an occasion when both of them want each other simultaneously. The novels title suggests that there might be a bit of a mortality theme going on and its plot does not disappoint. The death count in the first thirty pages is unusually high and characters continue to perish with roughly the frequency of frontline soldiers at the Somme. When they are not dying they are self-harming, and beyond that they have a tendency to sustain injuries or suffer infirmities not unused to the doctors visit, lets say. As adults, both Grace and Daniel become novelists. She moves to Europe and, in the manner of the rich in the 19th century, makes the grand tour. In a parallel to this, The Posthumous Marriage has a strain of literary tourism. References to works of literature abound. The setting, characters and plot hint at Henry James or Edith Wharton, but there are also echoes of Great Expectations and allusions to Shakespeare. As a child, Grace has an unhealthy fascination with Ophelias drowning. Her obsession with this literary suicide (and death in general) might have some similarity to the morbid romanticism of Tales of Mystery and Imagination, and I doubt much fiction as emotionally wrought as Friels novel has been written since the publication of Poes collection. Later in The Posthumous Affair, literary allusions turn to literary cameos: Daniel meets Henry James, who suggests that the younger man does not feel enough. Daniel protests that he feels all the time, and James response is withering: The plain fact is that I only witness these feelings as at some concert, some tiny tinkling chamber concert, and I am sitting a long way back and am waiting

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to be engaged. Its unfair to quote an author against himself, but I had a similar reservation about The Posthumous Affair: the characters, rounded and exotic as they are, didnt always engage my emotions. I suspect sympathetic, compelling characters are not the point, though. Friel has an easy mastery of third person and omniscient narration. Hes equally at home in scene and summary, although sometimes theres an excessive degree of the latter: pages 144-150, for example, are almost entirely summary, which and that felt like a lot. Neither is he opposed to the odd rock-fall of prolepsis or avalanche of exposition and page 29, for instance, is a layer cake of both. However, viral outbreaks of the pluperfect tense are often followed by controlled, brisk action. Within the books grand narrative Friel injects smaller stories that are compressed but fully realized. In just two of its eleven pages, Chapter III reveals all we need to know about Graces grandfather, the sadistic patrician George Edward Cooper. In not many more pages, the same chapter also tells the unhappy story of Graces parents, who join a utopian settlement and come to a grizzly end. Their story has the economy, tone and resonance of a fairy tale. Friels fulsome voice reads at times like the love child of D.H. Lawrence and Edna OBrien. Although its sometimes rather rich, the literary equivalent of a Nigella chocolate cheesecake, this is a consistently striking voice. The rhythmic cadences of his sentences may or may not have something to do with Friels Irish roots, but his descriptive powers are highly developed and repeatedly put to striking use. A spring day has a petal sheen and a sky preparing for dark is plum-coloured. The imagery throughout is poetic and imaginative: rooks are seen scrawling across the sky, while a ballroom flickers and glows as if it were trying to remember itself. The language at times might be a little less rococo than the Palace of Versailles interiors, but it is often a thing of beauty - and if theres any contemporary fiction written in a similar style, I havent noticed it. Friels novel, flagrant in its artifice, is about as

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natural as a Faberg egg but better perhaps to have a Faberg than one you might find on a supermarket shelf.

Robert Graham is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, Cheshire. Salt published his novella, A Man Walks Into A Kitchen in 2011. Like This Press will publish his short story box Everything We Do Is Fun in 2013.