The narrative blends past, present and future, and the stories of all four characters are anchored by Howard's precise prose.
Cruelty, pain and the inescapability of our past are recurring themes; in "The Use of Poetry," a free-verse narrative blends the tragic (a child's disappearance) with the trivial (Christmas party chitchat).
The golden art-I-fact of the Bonaparte transformation through the years of Berlin experiments, the self-contained narratives blending hard and soft to "Into the Wild" and "Riot in my Head" hit just the right notes, on every level, for a collective conversion as pathway out of the binary (the after-postmodern) and into the tertiary.
Mixing abstraction, appropriated cartoons, and illustrations and images of homey, old-time interiors, the paintings create a haunting narrative blend of the domestic and the hallucinatory (Johnson).
Meanwhile the comic impulse, ousted from its early role in shaping the structure of the stories, becomes reabsorbed into the grain of the narrative itself, blending in with the other principal tonalities to form the characteristic hybrid Chekhovian note, where the tragic and the farcical, the lyrical and the prosaic, the tender and the grotesque are inextricable from each other.
Seventy-five years later, in ACT Three, storytelling has become a polished theatrical art, displayed here by familiar characters in a narrative that blends whimsy with homicidal melodrama.
The chairman of the five-person pan-Commonwealth judging panel, poet and literary critic Professor Daniel Massa, said: "The excellence of Small Island lies not only with its thematic issues that are represented with insight and sensitivity, but also in Andrea Levy's consummate narrative skills in blending multiple voices in a framework resonant with humour, irony, understanding and a lot of fun".
At a comparable volume level to the soldiers' chatter and jokes is an added layer of audio: a monologue blending autobiographical narrative with philosophical consideration.
It was the talk of 2004 and won him a lot of recognition for blending documentary, narrative, and experimental elements, and both Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell came on as producers.
"McElheny brings historical narratives into his work, blending those in an incredibly rich and challenging way," said Edward Saywell, chairman of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which made "Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernism" a centerpiece of the new contemporary art wing it opened last year.
