Well, I finally finished it – sometimes devouring it, sometimes picking at it. It’s a brilliant and repellent novel: the world seen through the eyes and thoughts of Gulley Jimson, a lying, thieving artist not averse to a bit of GBH. (I’m tempted to re-read “Herself Surprised” just to hear Sara’s voice.) He sees the world as a vast canvas for his brush: the opening scene where he paints with words the sun “like an orange in a fried fish shop” is just the start. Something exotic and startling in a mundane world. Nothing is unnoticed in Jimson’s world, just like Blake’s – whose long quotations I skimmed over unapologetically. Jimson + Blake = indigestion for this reader.

But the mass pile-up of words and images and thoughts and emotions (many of them fairly basic) grip and repulse you. There’s something about Jimson’s zest for life – and for re-creating that life on canvas (or on a soon-to-be-demolished wall) – that captures you and makes you feel like a purse-lipped killjoy for recollecting that the “tap” that broke Sara’s nose is actually called domestic violence these days, or that handing over pawn tickets to someone for the items of his that you’ve hocked is actually theft.