SOURCE: Wall, Stephen. “Word-Processing.” London Review of Books 13, no. 17 (12 September 1991): 15-16.

In the following review, Wall comments that A Landing on the Sun treats themes similar to those in The Trick of It, but less successfully, contending that the narrative voice of the former is dull and that the storyline tends to be diffuse.

There have always been novels with a highly developed sense of their own means of production. When, at the end of Mansfield Park, Jane Austen said she'd let other pens dwell on guilt and misery, she was being literal as well as figurative. A pen was what she wrote with. Dan Jacobson's and Michael Frayn's reliance on, respectively, a word processor and a tape recorder needn't be put down to Post-Modern self-consciousness. Novels naturally like to keep up with the technology on which they rely, but an appeal—however disingenuous—to external machinery and...