The Night Alphabet by Joelle Taylor review – relentlessly inventive | Fiction
A man walks into a bar. Well, no. At the beginning of poet Joelle Taylor’s first novel, a woman called Jones walks into a tattoo parlour. It’s 2233 and weather programmers have calibrated this part of London to “endless spring”. The already heavily tattooed Jones asks the two artists, Small and Cass, to connect all the images on her body by a thin line, using ink mixed with a vial of her mother’s blood. This will be an act of unification and completion.The 23rd-century tattoo parlour is a retro one. The tattooists may use…