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Quilt is an intriguing and sometimes perplexing story of loss, loneliness and coping. A man loses his father and begins the doleful process of funeral-organisation and house-clearance - the cumbersome outward manifestations of the grieving and coming-to-terms which occupy him within. On the face of it a dreary enough subject for a novel in all conscience, although a very human one to which many of us will all-too-poignantly relate, and yet the fizzing, darting, tangential lexicon of Nicholas Royle's prose illuminates it into a bright and effervescing thing. At times I felt like a pin-ball in one of those old-fashioned amusement machines, ricocheting from one image to another, spun off mid-sentence into new trajectories by rhymes and associations of ideas. Then again I was on a bob-sleigh, hurtling down a linguistic crevasse with my stomach in my mouth wondering what on earth was going to come at me round the corner of the next page.How refreshing it was to have something required of me in the reading process! To be obliged to grapple with the allusions and to think about the philosophy, natural history, psychology and literary references which make up this novel, in order to make sense of it. This novel has more than a little of the savour of the novels of Henry James, Conrad and Poe, which require the same kind of `active reading'. Certainly, Nicholas Royle has much of interest to say in his Afterword about the nature of fiction and the role of the novel itself which is well worth reading. Perhaps what we have here is a neo modernist novel. How splendid!The journey on which the author takes his character (and his readers) is unexpected to the point of being bizarre, but peel away the word-play and what remains is a heart-felt homily which speaks in words a mile high of the abject emptiness of grief and the frantic, eccentric efforts we make to fill up the void.