The Wardrobe Mistress

The Wardrobe Mistress isn't just an entertaining ghost story, assembled by a master-manipulator to be full of narrative trapdoors, tantalising at one moment and agreeably grotesque the next: it's also an exploration of the deep mythology of theatre . . . McGrath himself seems ambivalent about the sentimentality he depicts. But there's no political ambivalence here: by the end of the novel, the icy postwar alleys, the shattered theatres and public houses are under the malign enchantment of a quietly resurgent politics. The plentiful mirrorings, the doppelgangers and dybbuks both real and false, make that plain, and make plain that fascism is also a kind of theatre - always already a re-enactment of itself. Guardian