It's a great passage, when you think about it.
That's a great passage, an essay in urban typology worthy of Balzac at his keenest (and least windy).
But, even if this is bearable, the accompaniment of the great passage beginning "All the dead voices" by the noise of rushing wind is not.
There's this great passage in the book of Jeremiah, where he says, "Oh, earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord".
Likewise, Japan chose the ungarlanded The Great Passage instead of Hirokazu Kore-eda's Cannes prize-winner Like Father, Like Son.
It's a great passage but the librarian puts the emphases on all the wrong words, which is ironic for a book by a rapper.
You'll remember--we've all read our Proust--that there's this great passage in which the aroma of madeleines, these little rich cakes that they love in France, evokes this torrent of memory in Proust.
I have only one thing to think about that, a great passage of Scripture that talks about forgetting those things that are behind and reaching forth unto those things that are before.
There is a passage in "Song of Myself" (the greatest passage of all, as it happens) that we sex-addled moderns can barely read today because our own humbug theories require us to obsess about who is sleeping with whom and what kind of sex they are having.
It is one of the great creations of terrain as a character in English fiction, yet it would not be too far-fetched to say that the opening of Henry Shukman's new novel not only reminds us of this great passage, but also comes close to emulating it.
