"All over again": form, subjectivity and desire in Neil Bartlett's "Mr Clive and Mr Page"

Sears, John (2002) "All over again": form, subjectivity and desire in Neil Bartlett's "Mr Clive and Mr Page". Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 44 (1). pp. 49-59. ISSN 0011-1619

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Abstract

Rock Hudson never starred in a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock; but if he had, Neil Bartlett's Mr Clive and Mr Page (1996) would almost certainly have made some use of the historical coincidence. Bartlett's novel uses the case of Rock Hudson to frame a narrative that is, among many other things, a fairy tale of the unsanitized, pre-nineteenth-century kind, laden with Hitchcockian significance, not least in the novel's overt reference to Rebecca. Bartlett spins the reader a yarn that embraces, challenges, and finally disorients conventional positionality, forcing a reconsideration of the import of the narrative that extends beyond its immediate frames into an intertextuality that adumbrates the novel's political interventions.