Fourth Estate

Peter Singer occupies a distinguished position at the Centre for Human Values at Princeton University and is frequently described as the most influential of living philosophers. The front cover of this new selection of his writings couples him with Bertrand Russell and, in some respects, the comparison is sensible. Both philosophers have written clearly and simply on issues that are of interest not only to specialists. They have attracted a wide reading public and achieved the kind of celebrity and notoriety rarely associated with philosophers. Both have been activists – Russell mainly in the cause of pacifism and nuclear disarmament, Singer in the cause of animal liberation and the preservation of the environment – and both have stood for parliament.

At the end of The Glade Within the Grove, D’Arcy D’Oliveres coughs his way towards death from lung cancer. With him dies David Foster’s benign alter ego, the narrator of his comic Dog Rock novels. Of course, the ‘Arcy who narrated The Glade had become less sociable and considerably more learned than the postman of Dog Rock, but it seemed reasonable to assume that his demise marked the end of Foster’s fictions in the comic mode. Not so. In his latest novel he mixes a good-humoured third person narration with the kind of colloquial dialogues which dominated the MacAnaspie sections of The Glade. In the New Country gives us a funny, more accessible, and more conventional Foster.