SOURCE: “Fossils and Fundamentalists,” in Times Literary Supplement, March 25, 1994, p. 19.

In the following review, Kemp applauds the insight and wit of A Change of Climate.

A Change of Climate is a novel studded with fossils and relics. From a Norfolk landscape dotted with ruins and tumuli, Roman skeletons and terracotta shards are unearthed. Flint arrowheads poke out of the ground. On a beach at Cromer, prehistoric bison bones turn up. Elsewhere, a stroller across the sands finds a weird primeval object: the hundred-and-fifty-million-year-old shell of a bivalve, scientifically termed Gryphaea, but more commonly known as a “devil's toenail.”

This sinister-looking fossil—“thick, ridged, ogreish”—lurks in the recesses of Hilary Mantel's dark new novel as a symbol of the evil that has clawed hideously at the lives of two good people and remained petrifyingly lodged in their past. Scooped up from the seaside by a young man alive...