Female novelists seem to be getting a bit of a bashing these days. Some literature courses offer trigger warnings for anyone frightened by the “toxicity” of Jane Eyre or Northanger Abbey. Tom Rachman’s The Imposters doesn’t let them off too lightly either. His first novel, The Imperfectionists, focused on journalists. Here he offers a convoluted study of a different sort of writer, the ageing novelist Dora, in a treatment that is not unfeeling, though needlessly contorted.
The book, one gradually realises, is supposed to have been written by Dora – Rachman is playing the ventriloquist here, with Dora his dummy. What we get are disparate pieces of fiction that Dora is presumably working on (mostly in the present tense, alas – almost always a mistake). These stories within stories, combined with scored-out sentences, snatches of her diary and Dora’s own cameo appearances, coalesce into a “punishing self-portrait”.
