SOURCE: Reading, Peter. “Ethical Feats.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4510 (8 September 1989): 968.

In the following negative review, Reading criticizes Falling, calling the novel “not particularly original.”

Colin Thubron's very short new novel, Falling, is concise rather than concentrated. It tells the story of Mark Swabey (No. 63176), formerly a journalist on the Hampshire Times, who recalls his history from inside prison, where he is serving a sentence for manslaughter. The events leading to Swabey's incarceration are these: he jettisons his steady girlfriend Katherine, an artist and maker of stained-glass windows, so that he may devote his attention to Clara, a trapeze artiste, star of a run-down circus about which he has written a feature; journalist and aerialist become lovers; Clara, predictably, has an accident during a performance and plummets to the sawdust; her resulting paralysis (from the neck down) is heart-rendingly described; Mark, humanely and at her request, procures and administers...