Justin Cartwright

Consciousness - that, to me, is the theme of the modern novel.

When Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature at the age of 88, she was the oldest person ever to receive the prize and one of only 11 female winners in its history. Her award was the end of a very long journey from a remote farm in Rhodesia to a banquet at Stockholm's Stadshus, the grand city hall in Stockholm.

It is a commonplace to say that novelists should be judged by their work rather than their private lives or their publicly expressed views. And writers, of course, subscribe enthusiastically to this idea.

Homer and Langley' is the work of E. L. Doctorow's old age. There are fewer Homeric references than you might have expected, given that the narrator is called Homer Collyer and is blind, although, like the classical Homer, not born blind.

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