The Second Person from Porlock

A really interesting premise and a really interesting story that I loved every minute of reading. The cover just adds to how interesting this book is

A transporting novel described by the author as “a riff” around the life of Coleridge and centering around his poetic fragment Kubla Kahn and the mysterious person from Porlock, the person whose sudden arrival allegedly caused the poet's loss of inspiration. It’s 1824 and Coleridge, a recluse estranged by friends and family, is often lost in opium-induced visions. His story intersects with the lives of two young men fatally obsessed with finding him, who meet as they embark on their quest through England: George Scrivener, a poor Cambridge undergraduate student and mediocre aspiring poet who, after finding a cryptic scribble in Coleridge’s book library copy, would do anything to grasp the secret of the poet’s visionary writing but is targeted by his more fortunate peers in a dark academia twist; and Samuele Gambino from Sicily, who finds out he may be Coleridge’s illegitimate son (based on rumours regarding Coleridge’s relation with opera singer Cecilia Bertozzi in Siracusa) and sets out to find his father, pushed by the affection his mother still nurtures.

A taut and engaging story, adventurous and suspenseful, brilliantly paced and deftly constructed in a game of correspondences. It makes excellent use of elements from Coleridge’s most imaginative poems (Kubla Kahn, Ancient Mariner and Christabel) which are scrutinised and used as fragments of a detective story aimed at reconstructing Coleridge’s elusive persona. I loved the vivid reconstruction of the various settings, period details and the reality of Sicily. Characters in Coleridge’s literary entourage come alive, too: Coleridge’s wife and daughter, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, the iconoclastic Byron, haughty Robert Southey and amicable Charles Lamb.

It is also a coming of age novel, with the protagonists confronted with failures and choices: Scrivener, for example, is torn between popular fiction and fiction of a higher order, more attention-demanding but deeply affecting. In this respect, behind the veil of Romanticism lurks a very contemporary concern, i.e. the vision of the reader as a consumer and a narrowing down of spaces for literary fiction that challenges boundaries, beliefs and assumptions (a problem recently illustrated by Frank McGurl’s excellent essay The Novel in the Age of Amazon). A true joy to read, and if you are not familiar with Coleridge and the works cited, you will fall in love it.
4.5

Thanks to Netgalley and Fairlight Books for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.