OUR LIFE IN THE FOREST

It gives us no pleasure to be the small boy pointing and laughing at the naked emperor’s winkie, but it’s occasionally necessary when it comes to literary fiction.

This slim volume by French author Marie Darrieussecq is a case in point. It’s been showered with critical bouquets in the author’s homeland, described as “a brilliantly executed dystopia”; “ingenious and brilliant”; “spellbinding”. Quite why is hard to fathom.

Told as one long first-person monologue, Our Life In The Forest recounts the protagonist’s escape from a world where some of the population have “halves”: blank, insensate clones used for harvesting replacement organs. Bafflingly, “Rest Centres” exist where people can visit their halves and sit holding their hand, a waste of resources that is about as plausible as the main twist.

The fact that Darrieussecq struggles to build a believable world wouldn’t matter so much if the book had resonant metaphoric depths, but it doesn’t. And while her spare style is appealingly idiosyncratic, two of the narrator’s ticks – repeated use of the Jim Royle-esque ejaculation “My arse!”, and explanations of every cultural reference (“The Mona Lisa is a famous painting from the 16th century”) – are downright annoying. Spellbinding? My arse. Ian Berriman