Humanity, Léon Bloy, wrote can be divided into two categories, those who fight the beast, and those who nourish it. In literature, the former is presently in the ascendance. This is why I like so much Stephen Mitchelmore’s remark that the right reader will find “blessed relief in Jen Craig’s fiction”. For such blessed relief is precisely what I found on my three passes through Panthers & the Museum of Fire.

There is little character development, only passing narrative impetus and no plot, yet relief is to be found in the novel’s reticence. Unavoidably, it has a situation: a writer called Jen Craig is given a manuscript written by a friend who has died. She is asked by the dead friend’s sister to return it unread; unable to resist temptation she reads the manuscript and achieves a breakthrough in her own writing, possible the book the reader is now reading. There is suspense in wondering why, after urging the narrator to read the manuscript because of her supposed literary flair, the sister now asks for its return, unread, but this question is unresolved. Mr. Godot never arrives.

Novels like Panthers & the Museum of Fire jettison everything recognisable as a novel, lacking much that Aristotle deemed essential to drama, yet this extraordinary little novel has at its heart a tragic fatality and a concentration of mature and tender feeling.