Steven Hall’s first novel, The Raw Shark Texts, became a cult hit when it was published in 2007. It has certainly matured with age: if its postmodernism looked a bit effortful fourteen years ago, in today’s climate of endlessly auto-fictive selves, it now seems rather charming.
Hall’s new novel, Maxwell’s Demon, is another unabashed piece of metafiction, which both draws attention to itself and to the act of reading it. “The writer divides and sorts, the reader divides and sorts”, we are told – a task that can feel onerous, given that among the novel’s subjects are the true form of angels and the origins of the alphabet; there are pages of text arranged in the shape of leaves. But Hall takes great pleasure in his half of the job and leads us playfully through the book’s various twists and turns, which makes our task feel less daunting.
His protagonist Thomas Quinn is an unsuccessful novelist and also the son of a great writer, now dead. Shortly before he died, Quinn’s father endorsed a novel by his protégé Andrew Black called Cupid’s Dream.
