The Biographer's Tale

The Lying Tongue

by Andrew Wilson

"Wherever I went I saw a question mark at the heart of the city."This evocative opening line, which begins Andrew Wilson's TheLying Tongue, provides a telling metaphor for an extraordinarywork of imaginative genius, meshing Dickens's gothic atmospherewith Hitchcock's suspenseful creepiness.The novel opens in Venice with a travelogue of shimmering historicaldescription dappled with poetic detail. The narrator, Adam Woods,a recently graduated and troubled student, tells us he has takenleave of England to start anew after an unseemly end to a relationshipwith his girlfriend. He has a job offer to tutor a 16-year-oldboy and aspirations to write a novel.