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What they're saying about The works of Melmont
 THE WORKS OF MELMONT is in the greatest
traditions of picaresque writing,
from Smollett through to John Barth, Mervyn Peake and J K Toole. But Snoo
Wilson's novel, with its epic embrace of an entire political and criminal
world and its evocation of the many layers of a particular society in a
particular time, provokes comparison more than anything else with Balzac.
Melmont himself (who may suggest a variety of recently deceased or indeed
still living real-life monsters) stands squarely beside Vautrin as one of
literature's great criminal rogues. The book would make wonderful, encompassing
television, but in its irrepressible verbal exuberance is as raucous and
riotous a novel as has appeared for many a year.
-Simon Callow An audacious and baroque satirical novel about the corpulence,
cunning and corruption of a certain deceased business and media mogul
whose name began with M… Outrageous, wicked and ratherwonderful.
-Sarah Dunant Tirelessly inventive, encyclopaedic
and monumental – a labour of love.
-David Storey Sometimes,
questions about a novel's function in the crucial
Ballardian sense, or that of its role in the development of a moral
aesthetic have to fight it out for second place behind an awe-struck
"What the hell was that?" Perhaps the most accurate description is of a
Trollope-inspired science-fantasy satire, with liberal po-mo splashings
of mythology, info-history and gleeful anachronism....The Works of
Melmont is exhilarating. It is a blast, a genre-defying tale told with
gusto and panache and a refreshing lack of the street-smarts. It is
very funny and not a little bonkers.
-Charlie Hill, Independent on Sunday |