‘Literally fabulous’

Big-name fiction tends to get reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement fairly promptly, but everyone else usually has to wait. Is this a deliberate policy – not to treat books as ‘news’? I can see that if it’s your book you want attention for, this could get irritating, but for most readers I think it’s fine; this is a coach-and-horses, surface-mail journal, not an e-zine. A year and a month after the publication of J. O. Morgan’s Natural Mechanical, the book is reviewed in this week’s issue of the TLS. Wordsworth drops by, as he has done before, but also, for the first time, the Beano: ‘. . . And it is precisely this ability to occupy the overlap between Thomson comics and The Prelude that makes the poem such a literally fabulous achievement, shaking off labels as skilfully as Rocky ducks out of school: “down the empty corridor/ then out/ then off”.’