Golden Hill by Francis Spufford

 

Well, this was at least vaguely disappointing. The prose was (I presume intentionally) very much in the style and voice of mid-eighteenth-century writing, which I avoid more or less whenever possible, and while I think I at least got most of the incident, I didn't really see much point to it all. I guess the strong whiff of picaresque here explains some of the difficulty in discerning any point, though that's not strictly speaking inherent in picaresque. Whatever distinctions there might be among the characters is to my eye and ear buried under the willfully antiquated authorial voice. I'm sure Spufford more or less hit the target he was aiming for, but the target wasn't one I turned out to be all that interested in.