The Empty Chair - Roger Keen
As he demonstrated in his previous novel Literary Stalker , Roger Keen is a master of the metafiction, using a complex narrative structure to delve more deeply into underlying and often troubling mental processes that can be otherwise difficult to unravel. He employs that device again to remarkable effect in The Empty Chair , blurring the lines between autobiography and fiction in a similar way to his first novel The Mad Artist , exploring individual hopes and aspirations running up against social conventions, artistic conservatism and impossible family expectations. Keen takes that one or two steps further here, merging reality with fantasy in an ambitious unconventional approach to narrative that is the only way of encompassing the range and depth of a subject that has very real and meaningful human concerns. It's certainly a clever idea to filter the majority of those concerns though the semi-fictional/semi-autobiographical character of Steve Penhaligon, working in the 1980s fo...