A plotless performance

HEARTBREAK is a tiresome, frustrating book. Though marketed as a novel it fails to provide anything in the way of sustained narrative and is instead little more than an exasperating miscellany of thinly-sketched characters and random, disconnected vignettes.

The publishers claim “the central character is not a person but an invisible metaphor”, but this does not disguise the fact that Heartbreak is a scattershot, plotless performance.

Raine is an Oxford academic best known for his poetry, something that shows through in his prose.