Michael Fitzgerald’s new novel, Late, opens with a camera obscura, a direct reference to Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939). The image is a nifty one – a portrait projected across the Pacific Ocean, as well as across time itself – and it goes some way to signalling the author’s intentions: he wants to create a novel deliberately weighted by the creative works (films, books, art, and sculpture) that have come before and, for his protagonist – who in real life died on 4 August 1962 – those that have come since.
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