All that Follows

Picador UOpp £16.99
The Week bookshop £15.29 Qnd p&p)
"One of Jim Grace's many attractions as a
novelist is his unpredictability," said Mark
Sanderson in The Sunday Telegraph. He has
written books about the Stone Age, about Jesus
Ghrist, and about a pair of dead bodies on a
beach. All that Folloivs is, however, a
surprisingly conventional book: it is a thriller -
albeit one set in 2024. Lennie Lessing is a retired
jazz musician who is jolted out of his passive,
TV-watching state when he learns that an old
comrade from his activist past has taken a family
hostage in a nearby suburb.
This is a thriller in which very little happens,
said Adam Mars-Jones in The Observer: there is
little violence or action. There are a few good
lines along the way, but "the penalty for
anticlimax is quite high". All that Follows is a
"failed experiment", said Simon Baker in The
Spectator. It is awkwardly woven together and
slow-moving, punctuated by recollections of
Lennic's gigs that "maunder on for pages and
pages", weighed down by "jazz jargon". The
result is "utter flatness, which is something Crace
previously seemed incapable of".