SOURCE: Coe, Jonathan. “Palimpsest History.” London Review of Books 14, no. 11 (11 June 1992): 30-1.

In the following excerpt, Coe commends Thorpe's narrative skill and characterizations in Ulverton, but finds fault in the novel's overriding authorial presence.

In her recent collection Stories, Theories and Things, Christine Brooke-Rose was casting around for a generic term under which to classify such diverse novels as Midnight's Children, Terra Nostra and Dictionary of the Khazars, and came up with ‘palimpsest history’. What all of these books have in common is their interest in the recreation of a national history: a history which, in each case, has been erased or fragmented, subsumed beneath layers of interpretation, forgetting, writing and rewriting. If the genre has up until now seemed somehow alien to our own traditions, very much the product of something called ‘World Literature’, a kind of superleague of writers whose work is, above all, thoroughly (and...