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-ups 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.