It is a difficult book to review, since everything one could bring up against it, and, more alarmingly, almost everything one can say in praise of it, have already been said in the book itself. ‘Tried to rewrite the Shad- ows as less self-important; gave up, realising that was their only virtue.’ Admiring the book for its absolute and recognisable truthfulness turns out to be no great achievement on the part of the critic: ‘Anything that elicits an immediate nod of recognition has only reconfirmed a prejudice.’

All the same, even if this is true, and even if Paterson means it (something not to be taken for granted — ‘I no longer mean all of these. I meant them once. Some of them only once’) then to state, once, perfectly, unforgettably, a prejudice one didn’t even know one held is something of an achievement. It may be true that some of the most haunting of the aphorisms are the ones where the reader doesn’t actually know what he means — ‘All that moves is ghost’ — but the energy of the book comes from the way it seems to present observations for the reader’s passive assent, then to place that passive, unachieving assent under an unwavering analytical gaze. The only thing for a reviewer to do with this brilliant, honourable and savage book is, as you see, to quote substantially from it, silently accepting that he is not going to be able to express Paterson’s thoughts any better than Paterson already has; the only thing for any thinking reader to do is to buy and read it. The Book of Shadows has, self- evidently, been produced after long years of gestation and addition, and has an unmistakable authority. Paterson is a remarkable writer; this is a book unlikely to be competed with in its peculiar field any time soon.

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