The latest addition to my website is Rupert Thomson‘s Dartmouth Park. Our narrator is Philip Notman, a fifty-something historian. At the beginning of the book he is attending a conference in Bergen, where he meets a fellow and younger academic, Inés. There is a spark but nothing happens. However on the way home he has a nausea attack triggered by something minor. It is clear that he appears to be having some sort of his crisis, which his wife notices. When he jets off to Cadiz, where Inés lives, we think midlife crisis and so does his wife. However, Inés is left behind as he flees to a remote cottage in Crete. Gradually, he expresses his contempt for the modern world and even writes a fairly obvious manifesto about the ills of the consumer society. It is an interesting book about a man struggling with the modern world but sadly has a weak ending.