REVIEWS
The minutiae of motherhood, as compelling as any thriller
Kate Briggs’s debut novel The Long Form is certainly one of the most perplexing books that you could read this year, but also one of the best. This is a profoundly ambiguous, wonderfully unstructured read, yet one that is deeply engrossing all the same.
Helen and her baby daughter Rose wake up one morning: it is fair to say that not too much happens over the next few hours in the physical surroundings of their small flat. Instead, we are treated to a feast of literary imagination, of ruminations on the history of the novel and the cares of motherhood, reflections on the difficulties of describing real life in words and the true purpose of fiction. Henry Fielding stalks the novel as Helen gets her way through; Briggs’s greatest quality in this novel is the ability to weave passages of high-flown literary criticism with snippets of daily difficulties: at the same time as the character Helen discusses what makes
