The Lyre of Orpheus, Davies. Yes. Davies is extremely good, and I suspect it’s mostly because of the large amount of attention I have to pay that I haven’t read much more. I read the Deptford Trilogy some time ago (before I started reviewing everything I read), and also enjoyed it despite Davies’s habit of including extensive background information (Jungian psychology in Deptford, opera in Orpheus—KCLS refers to the former work as “didactic fiction”). I was surprised to see in the KCLS listing that Orpheus was a sequel. I’ll likely have to get to What’s Bred in the Bone one of these days.
Davies correctly uses “whoever”, bless him, which is only to be expected from Canada’s prose laureate. He does not, however, seem to have an ear for American speech: “That’ll do to be going on with” is not something I would expect to hear from a Californian grad student.