I read an article about To the Lighthouse by Margaret Atwood, in which she referred to the ‘elusiveness’ of ‘Woolfland’. The events of the book are far from surreal, but something about its characters is distinctly heightened. They are all a little too in tune with each other, and with some higher plane. 'Is it the mystically paired river forks? The bio-magnetic influence of our bison? The powerful Northern Lights?' That was, of course, from My Winnipeg. Exact words are repeated in different characters’ thoughts. As Atwood pointed out to me, Mr Ramsay’s reciting of Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade serves no purpose other than to prophesise the First World War. Everything is too perfectly constructed. Nothing is quite real enough to hold on to – like each story in My Winnipeg it all threatens to give way.