If some of the plot developments occasionally feel contrived to fit in with his grand scheme – this is very much a book in which villains are both omniscient and forever present – then it barely matters, such is the visionary glee with which Theroux creates a world in which man's identity is no longer restricted to physical form, but instead is as mutable as shifting a song between music devices.
The Argentine writer Eduardo Berti's first novel, in this lovely translation by Alexander Cameron and Paul Buck, is as mutable as its title suggests, possessing both an old-fashioned formality and a brisk tautness authentic to the changeable era it depicts.
The excellent title poem, a deceptively casual sonnet, acts as something of a tissue sample for most of the book's concerns, from the mutations of cells to the disruption of the seasons, in a voice as mutable as the phenomena it describes, speaking sympathetically in the year 2004 to those who "feel small among the numbers.
For actors as mutable as Chimo, celebrity is almost beside the point, but a larger profile seems inevitable.
But these figures are as mutable as the mists around them, morphing into friends joshing in a nightclub or indifferent passers-by.
So why shouldn't the car itself be just as mutable as all these other features?
What if the ceiling were as mutable as the sky overhead?
And her key to rethinking the women is the words, which are as hard and precise as cut diamonds and as mutable as dreams.
One of the services of Carol Groneman's new book is to remind us that a woman's subjective expectations of what her sex life should be are as mutable as the culture in which she lives.
The fact that the genes encoding these female reproductive proteins are as mutable as genes designed to keep parasites at bay demonstrates that the relationship between sperm and egg, while essential to the persistence of all sexually reproducing creatures, is nevertheless a fractious one, Mars versus Venus stripped to its molecular skivvies.
All non-CpG sites were considered equally mutable, as were all CpG sites, although at a higher rate than non-CpG positions.
