The Fox in the Attic, like its no less remarkable sequel The Wooden Shepherdess, offers a richly detailed, Tolstoyan overview of the modern world in upheaval. At once a novel of ideas and an exploration of the dark spaces of the heart, it is a book in which the past returns in all its original uncertainty and strangeness.
Hilary Mantel is the author of many novels, including Beyond Black and Wolf Hall.
John Self is a book critic.
The Fox in the Attic (“one of the very great novels of its time”—John Sutherland) and The Wooden Shepherdess, the first two parts of Richard Hughes’s The Human Predicament trilogy. Harvill Press, 1994/95. Vol 3 not shown on the grounds that he didn’t write it. https://t.co/avVk5RzhuM
Hughes does not write with a researcher's smug wisdom-after-the-event but with an artist's power of recording the past as if it were the living present...The long passages on the Munich beer-hall putsch of 1923, Hitler's escape, hiding and capture are a tour de force of dreamlike action.
-- Time
[The Fox in the Attic] has many virtues, many strong and compelling moments; it continues Hughes's particular method of tracing the misapprehensions, confusions, and wrong-headedness of people who are either not able to grasp the complex currents of the world they live in, or are blinded by the obsessions of child mentality or political fanaticism or religion.
-- John Crowley, The Boston Review