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Afternoon of a Faun: James Lasdun writes MeToo as a Thriller

Spurred on by a review by Katy Waldman, I read James Lasdun’s slender but riveting novel Afternoon of a Faun. It was probably the frisson of the title drawing me in at first (Jerome Robbins ballet drawn from the same source is a particular favorite) but Lasdun has managed the hat trick of both taking a story ripped from the headlines and crafting a thriller around it. An unreliable protagonist, an unreliable narrator and an unreliable subject and #MeToo combine for some page-turning narrative delights and I could not put this down. It felt so good to be engaged in a novel, I am finding it a challenge to lose myself in fiction these days as it cuts so close to the bone. Highly recommended.