What I understood from her responses to the lengthy questions about all three novels in the Outline trilogy is that she is attempting to challenge or even to violate the traditional novel and those assumptions that have been handed down from our Victorian forebears. The assertion is reported in the transcript of a conversation that appears in the New Yorker: “ I don’t think character exists anymore.” A Conversation with Rachel Cusk by Alexander Schwartz (18 thNovember 2018). This was more than intriguing, challenging even, as my major work on my own novel at the moment is in the development of the character of one of the protagonists. I was intrigued by the novelist’s suggestion that ‘character does not exist anymore’.

This is consciously and carefully wrought writing. But although the fiction is that the original narrators of the stories are people Faye has met more or less randomly, this is a conceit. She offers them as if to challenge the reader to find the themes, the communalities, the differences, their own meanings. The stories she is told provide illustration of transition, movement, passage of all kinds: stages in life, from one country to another, the process of writing, relationships between people over time, from one marriage to the next and so on.įaye is to a great extent the passive filter of these stories. The narrator herself is moving from the end of her marriage to establishing a home with her sons in London. The title suggests the passage of people from one situation to another.

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