As Fiction Uncovered announces its 2012 best of British fiction selection, I review one of the picks, This is Life by Dan Rhodes, alongside another Paris-set novel, You Deserve Nothing by Alexander Maksik. I loved them both, although the latter’s controversial provenance makes for a complicated reading experience.

Hart believed in three major destructive powers: erotic obsession, grief and envy. In her six novels, she anatomized each with an unflinching boldness that was, and remains, unparalleled. Certainly, she had literary influences, particularly Irish writers like her friend Iris Murdoch, Beckett, Joyce, and her beloved Yeats. But as a contemporary novelist, Josephine Hart was peerless.

Dora’s own doctorly ambitions were thwarted by her father, who was of the firm opinion that studying medicine ‘would ruin her eyes, her looks, her reproductive health and any prospect of a settled future’, so she’s only too pleased that her duties for Dr Kemble extend well beyond typing and filing. In her first week she’s posing as the ‘alley murder’ victim while the doctor tears at her blouse to see ‘whether the assailant was left- or right-handed’, attending a ‘morbid anatomy demonstration’ on a man hideously ravaged by tertiary syphilis, and sitting in the public gallery of the ‘charm bracelet murder’ trial, where Dr Kemble is giving evidence in the case of another dead blonde, this one older and, as the defence counsel damningly establishes, ‘fond of society’.

From my Fiction Uncovered review of Louise Levene’s Ghastly Business, a hilarious and wildly original novel set in London between the wars.

Emma Garman

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