Melbourne 2015. I am mid-way through this year’s Man Booker Prize winner The Narrow Road to the Deep North. After getting off to a rocky start – I mean what the fuck are editors doing these days? In the first chapters of the book there are at least five examples of really irritating grammatical stuff interrupting the flow of the text. These should have been picked up by any half-way decent editor. Having said that however, I don’t know if I just got so involved in the story that I stopped noticing the errors, not sure, but now I am totally immersed in the whole thing. He really is a VERY smart writer. Structurally the novel is perfect, its emotional timing is impeccable. One is sucked, in punched in the guts and spat out, all the while experiencing a state of “Aha!” in which the possibility of judgement, the very categories good and evil become meaningless.