SOURCE: Moore, Charlotte. “Back to the Womb with a View.” Spectator 273, no. 8670 (10 September 1994): 34.

In the following review, Moore observes that the unusual narrative structure of Flesh and Blood works to blur the boundaries between memory and desire, imagination and reality, conscious and unconscious.

‘My mother was my first great love, she was my paradise garden.’ So says Frederica, one of the several narrators of Flesh and Blood. Or are they really several? Frederica, the pregnant artist, has evolved from Fred the androgynous matricide, has merged into Federigo, adolescent observer of female transgression. Time runs backward, and is then dispensed with; male slips into female and back again. Michèle Roberts constructs her book—one hesitates to use the term ‘novel’—like a set of Chinese boxes, or Russian dolls. Each episode links to the next, each narrator takes on aspects of his/her predecessor. Roberts mixes memory and...