A Novel without a Hero
Christopher Ricks, 6 December 1979
“... An earlier novel of Mr Moore’s, The Emperor of Ice-Cream, had made serious play with the Wallace Stevens poem, gravitating from the delicious chill to the coldness of death. But it is inheritance which makes allusion central and indispensable, since literary allusion is itself an act of inheritance. To use the wording of previous writers is to ... ”