SOURCE: Linklater, Andro. “Landscape with Peasants.” Spectator 267, no. 8513 (7 September 1991): 34.

In the following review, Linklater applauds Carey's descriptive abilities in The Tax Inspector, though notes that the title character is the novel's weakest.

In the old days, when kindly scientists were still trying to develop ‘smart’ weapons as the humane way to deal out death and destruction, television news once showed a subversive clip of a submarine missile being tested. It was crammed with about ＄10 millions worth of computers and enough information to navigate itself from the ocean bed through the earth's atmosphere and down the throat of a passing cod in the South Atlantic, but through some flaw in its make-up, it chose instead to describe two and a half circles of fluffy smoke and explode in a shower of orange sparks just above the surface of the North Atlantic. If they ever recovered the tail-fin, it probably...