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The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore5/24/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Speaking about those two books in the same sentence is sacrilege because The Greatcoat is a particular kind of British kitsch that a favorite college professor of mine simply called “holly-golly.”īut before I get into the specifics of Dunmore’s latest novel, I think it worth talking about the notion of the unreliable narrator, which has had some real purchase lately with the publication of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending and whose best examples in the past were Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and James’s masterpiece, The Turn of the Screw. But I can say, without equivocation, that Dunmore’s novel The Greatcoat is no The Turn of the Screw. ![]() Although I remember that a fuss was made over the Black book, I didn’t read it. She has won the prestigious Orange Prize and been short and long listed for other prizes her work has been compared to that of Tolstoy, Emily Bronte, and Virginia Woolf, and this newest short novel has been called by English critics “a perfect ghost story,” reminiscent of both Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. Helen Dunmore is well known in her native England for her novels, short stories, and children’s books. I can say, without equivocation, that Helen Dunmore’s novel The Greatcoat is no The Turn of the Screw. ![]()
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