SOURCE: Page, Ra. “Much Ado about Nothing.” New Statesman 127, no. 4405 (2 October 1998): 49-50.

In the following review, Page offers a negative assessment of Pieces of Light, asserting that Thorpe's “gift of garrulousness” ultimately hurts the focus of the novel.

How easy should modern literature be to read? Speeding through Adam Thorpe's leaden tome—[Pieces of Light,] a 500-page novel purporting to cover issues of war, colonialism, anthropology and self-administered pagan psychology—one can't help feeling it should be more difficult than this, more arresting and upsetting, with sweat to prove the toil worthy. Has every art become so public in its consumption, one wonders, that it must also be public, immediate and indiscriminate in its conception? Perhaps a law should be passed to make reading more taxing, a protectionist policy to cotton-wool the economy of the language, to inflate the currency of words and make them expensive for anyone...