So much has been written about this novel, from the huge advance its author received before it was written, to the Irish Times literary award she received afterwards, and yet the book itself remains an enigma. An extraordinarily ambitious combination of the most unlikely elements (boxing, poetry, politics), added to a dizzying melange of times and places, would spell disaster for most first-time novelists, but Logue juggles it all with defiant skill.
It's an easy novel to read and an even easier one to admire: to love it, however, is a little more difficult, perhaps because what seems, on the face of it, like a tale of blood-and-guts passion, turns out to have an almost completely bloodless heart. It would take a miracle for a book about boxing to capture my heart: this time out, that miracle just didn't happen.
