SOURCE: Wall, Stephen. “Going to Bed with an Author on Your Reading List.” London Review of Books 11, no. 18 (28 September 1989): 18.

In the following excerpt, Wall offers a mixed assessment of Falling, but asserts that the novel consistently maintains its momentum.

Colin Thubron's hero [in Falling] has to do with falling in a physical and, more vaguely, metaphysical sense. Mark Swabey is in prison for a crime whose actual nature isn't revealed until near the end of this terse tale, but which is connected with his passion for Clara, a trapeze artist of unusual grace and daring.

As a journalist, he is fascinated by the extent to which the circus world is outside normal society and enclosed on itself; he is astonished when Clara says she's never been in a church. It's like living in an alien culture, and Clara represents it at its purest, just as the troupe she's...