Tales from the Bitface (version 4.2)

I’m reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando at the moment, and enjoying it very much. There’s a bit right at the beginning, gruesomely involving a severed head, that I think Iain Banks might have been echoing in The Algebraist – considerably more gruesomely.

My bike ride this morning took me to Bloomsbury, Woolf’s old area. On my way back, going through Islington, I thought of Walking on Glass, and I suddenly realised that we have multiple characters walking around there with a lot going on in their heads, which is very similar to what happens in Mrs Dalloway – though in Central London

If you follow that link you’ll see that I noted the stylistic connection between the two back in 2018, which I had forgotten today.

There have probably been theses written on such parallels.¹ And Banks was an English graduate, after all, so he’d surely have studied Woolf. I have no great insight here, just a morning’s literary musings.