Giles Gordon's fiction has been neither widely read nor much discussed critically outside of newspaper reviews; yet, he occupies a significant position among recent British writers as one of those most determined, as he puts it, “to kick fresh life into the novel” in the 1970s. He has been called “the only true inheritor of the late B. S. Johnson's mantle,” and in the 1970s he did extend through the 1970s some of the self-conscious, innovative techniques Johnson favored, at the same time showing himself unusually alert to the potential established abroad by the French nouveau roman. Such interests contributed to a fiction characterized by its sustained self-reflexivity: his interrogation of the conventions of the novel played a part in consolidating the experimental, postmodern idiom that was being established in British writing at the time.

Giles Alexander Esmé Gordon was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 23 May 1940, the...