This is the kind of novel from which one must quote repeatedly and at length. In its very first pages there is a passage of such surpassing loveliness that I knew at once I was reading a work of literature and not of fiction: "These shadows were for a long time so insubstantial that I suspected they were the work of my mind, like the shapes on the backs of your eyelids or the blurred scotomas that herald a migraine. And then, startlingly, the bough of a tree above me shimmered out of the black and I slipped into a perfectly realized, silverish realm of pattern and form. Features of the landscape around me appeared as pentimenti in an X-ray: a wavering bush like a phantom limb, a bend in the river scrubbed out to serve the compositional harmony. This shift from one way of seeing to the other I experienced as something like grace."

My pet theory is that intelligence (in an author) and precision (in their prose) will necessarily generate humor on the level of the line, and I am grateful to this novel for bearing it out. "If you find the tinkle of empty nitrous oxide canisters when they are punted down the pavement beautiful, as I do, then London was very beautiful that morning." "I was looking out over the town like some self-consciously melancholy Rückenfigur..." "I talked to the painter about whether our attendance at this event would be held against us in the final judgment. He believed that our presence here was likely terminal to our chances of salvation, but that there was nothing to be gained now from complaining about the fact, and he rose even further in my estimation."

The novel is constituted of such observations and also has, though to me this is entirely superfluous, a high-concept plot (art world maniac employs narrator for frivolous little project in billionaires' island haven). Fortunately the latter does not ruin the former and is even meaningfully integrated within them. A feat!