If you thought you were reasonably well-read, Textermination will soon convince you of the contrary, as you're bombarded with characters and lines from great works of literature only about 80% of which you will recognise without resorting to Google. You're slewed around without any warning from nineteenth-century classics to Carlos Fuentes and Ivo Andric, then just when you think you know where you are someone pops up from medieval Japanese or Persian literature.

Chapter One is already a rocky ride, as Emma (Woodhouse? Bovary?) gets into Mr Knightley's carriage, only to discover that it is actually a Landauer she's sharing in Weimar with Goethe, which soon becomes a fiacre in the streets of Paris and then a calèche belonging to an honorary canon of the cathedral at Toledo ... and after a little diversion to Spain and the Balkans somehow becomes a flight to San Francisco with a change of planes within sight of the burning city of Atlanta. Or possibly Troy. Or Moscow.

Things become a little clearer in Chapter Two, when we start to work out that these heterogeneous fictional characters from all over the world and every period of history are assembling for an MLA-style literary conference. They are there to do the things that people normally do at conferences (drink, fornicate, argue, etc.) as well as to perform their religious duty towards the Reader, in whom they live and move and have their being. And to worry about what happens when readers start to forget about them and give up on the books they appear in.

Needless to say, it doesn't all go smoothly - there seems to be a terrorist plot linked to the presence at the conference of Gibreel Farishta (from The Satanic Verses), the conference is invaded by uninvited TV and film characters protesting against their exclusion, there's a stray Chinese emperor who insists on going around in the nude, and something has gone wrong with the invitations so that both Thomas Mann's Lotte and Goethe's are there, as are the older and younger David Copperfield, as well as both Broch's and Dante's Vergil, neither of whom is quite sure where Christa Wolf's Kassandra fits into things. And there's a Viennese sinologist with a set of library steps who seems on the point of causing chaos...

If this all sounds a little bit like a Jasper fforde novel - yes, it is rather, but the references are several notches more recondite, and the logic is built to challenge your ideas about literature and how it works rather than to create a consistent fantasy-world (so in fact it doesn't need to be all that logical, and isn't). A closer parallel is probably David Lodge's conference-circuit novel, Small world, but Brooke-Rose has her fun by putting the professional literary critics ("interpreters" here) in a situation where they are no longer in charge of things.

Probably too clever for its own good, but great fun. ( )

Well, that was fun! ( )

Dette er den ultimative roman, der skal genlæses mindst en gang hvert årti. ( )