The Last Weekend, By Blake Morrison

Reader beware: Unreliable narrator ahead

Blake Morrison uses a quote from Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier as the epigraph to his new novel, which should alert us to the unreliable quality of its narrator.

But even without that nod, it's pretty easy to catch on. In fact, great big signposts shouting, "don't trust a word he says" appear very early in this tale.

The Last Weekend is about Ian, a teacher who is spending a weekend in the countryside with his wife Em and two friends whom he has not seen for a long time: Ian and Ollie were once great rivals as well as friends; Ian and Daisy were lovers, before Ollie appeared. Unfortunately, Ford's subtlety and complex psychology is missing from this far shallower, albeit pacier, update.