Time after time, the reader is brought to a point of soul horror – the horror of doubleness, nothingness, meaninglessness. But the novel goes deeper than flesh wounds. The cumulative effect is exhilarating: Riviere has turned paranoid pub talk and midnight doubts into a prose poem of laceration. After the recital, the words of praise were guaranteed to come thick and fast from every direction at once, turning every poet into a virtual pincushion of words of praise, riddling every poet with words of praise – and eventually every poet at the poetry recital fell under this unending hail of words of praise, when they realised at last the monstrous insincerity that powered these words of praise, targeted as they were at every poet regardless of their so-called talent, whereupon the words of praise detonated, destroying the poet instantly. No one escaped the deadly words of praise that everyone arrived at the poetry recital armed to the teeth with, and in a certain sense all perished at the hands of those who wielded deadly words of praise. Over the course of a single very long evening and night, the unnamed narrator is informed of Wiese’s latest disgrace, gives a poetry reading, attends a festival after-party in the Travelodge near Waterloo Bridge, meets Wiese and then spends the next seven or so hours listening to his hilarious raging monologue about the destiny of the poet. In a slightly futuristic version of the UK, where drones dot the sky and thumbprints have replaced credit cards but not much else has changed, a poet called Solomon Wiese is found guilty of plagiarism, disappears for a bit, then is found guilty of plagiarism a second time.

(Riviere is an established poet who has published full-length poetry collections with Faber.) I’d say it was satire, and it is that, but it’s also a meticulous analysis coming from a place of despairing intimacy.

The writing is merciless the rage is genuine. Within a couple of pages this subject matter became clear and I thought, “Oh God, why bother?” But a hundred pages later, I was thinking, “Why bother with anything else? Why bother with lunch?” This is a brilliant and brilliantly entertaining novel. It is a single-paragraph novel, written in raging, recursive prose, about the small world of English poetry. Dead Souls is Sam Riviere’s Thomas Bernhard phase. First, no paragraphs (or very long paragraphs). A Thomas Bernhard phase is not hard to spot. But almost immediately after the train journey, to make up for my ignorance, I read Thomas Bernhard (one of the shorter ones), and then – just as Pope Dyer had predicted – I went through my own Thomas Bernhard phase.

Dead Souls by Sam Riviere