SOURCE: Quinn, Paul. “A Tale of the Tribe.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5036 (8 October 1999): 24.

In the following review, Quinn describes Brooke-Rose's Subscript as “her strangest and … most strangely human work so far.”

Christine Brooke-Rose's career has been much concerned with codes. As her memoir Remake (1996) reveals, she was a trilingual child negotiating languages and their translation, a state she acknowledged in the title of her early novel, Between (1968), which concerns a translator. Brooke-Rose was a wartime code-breaker at Bletchley Park; she spent twenty years as a professor at the University of Paris, immersed in structuralist poetics, producing unflinchingly rigorous critical works which codified texts from Ezra Pound to Kurt Vonnegut. Most visibly (if that is the right word for a writer who remains a cherished secret among British writers), she has striven in her fictions painstakingly and wittily to analyse and unpick some of the dominant discourses of our...