Passing Time

"Frenchman Jacques Revel arrives in Bleston, an industrial city in the north of England—also a thinly disguised, reimagined Manchester—to begin employment as a shipping clerk. Lost under the spell of a dark, dank, labyrinthine metropolis, he endeavours to solve the puzzle of an attempted murder. We follow his erratic odyssey in diary form as a growing sense of unease envelops him and mysterious fires erupt throughout the city.Passing Time, originally published in France as L'Emploi du temps (1956), is the great, forgotten Manchester novel, a book of enormous imagination and vitality. Melding Greek myth with Proustian method to formulate a brilliant study of alienation and the nebulousness of memory. A work that attempts to excavate Britain's proto-capitalist past and industrial forebears—interrogating their affect on modernity and the human soul.""Mr. Butor writes well, and with so thorough an awareness of what he wants to achieve that criticism is pre-empted... He is so disinclined to dramatize that I would suspect his principal gifts are those of a lyrical philosophical poet rather than a novelist—a sort of urban Wordsworth who has lost faith in tranquil recollection.""New York Times""Butor's most accessible work in English. Sentences last whole paragraphs, with their Claude Simon-like sub-clauses and meanderings—personally I rather like that kind of writing.""Adrian Tahourdin, TLS""Judging by this novel the experience [of working in Manchester] has marked him for life, for Passing Time is not so much a hymn, as a whole oratorio of hate. The mood suggests Kafka at his most paranoid; the method harks back to Virginia Woolf but here the stream-of-consciousness has become a turbid flood, the dark Irwell, mazy as the Ganges delta.""The Guardian""Passing Time is as revelatory as Butor's critical writing on time and space: here is a model for the metaphysical noir tradition that has borne such rich fruit in the quest narratives of tortured detectives seeking to escape labyrinths of their own making. It's about time this Manchester root of the nouveau roman was given fresh attention. Respect to Pariah for breathing new life into this almost forgotten classic.""Mark Blacklock, author of Hinton and I'm Jack"