Julie Davidson

This is a hard book to read and a harder book to be hard about. It has been received uneasily, mainly by women columnists and women’s page writers who have found it difficult to reconcile its tabloid appeal (the Mail snapped up the serial rights) with its solemn purpose. Most of these reviewers, while hinting at misgivings, have dutifully taken the therapeutic line: ‘If this book helps women who have been raped to come to terms with the trauma then its publication is justified … if it changes attitudes … provides valuable insights into the long-term effects … indicts the press, the law, the public perception of rape …’ And so on.

Before I got to the fourth and latest book in the exhausted but inexhaustible Henry Root corpus, I allowed myself some shallow research on his previous works. The first was memorable enough, even without the help of a library. The Henry Root Letters was not so much a work of tenacious parody or stomping satire as a pretty good leg-pull: which may be why the London Review of Books, when the letters were published in 1979, called them ‘a disgrace to publishing’.