This is a book about the night and what it brings. He looks at it from a bunch of different angles. The book takes on - dreams and nightmares, the fear of the dark, night shift work, the history of lighting, night motif's in painting and literature, and soon.

As a critic he analyses and reflects on what artists have had to say on the subject. The book starts with the poem, Acquainted with the Night, by Robert Frost and ends with a quote from Krapp's Last Tape, by Samuel Beckett. Many pages have passages from writers such as Stevenson, Freud and Coleridge, with Alvarez using them to examine a subject like the connection between dreams and surrealism.

The photographs and paintings that Alvarez chose to accompany his text are particularly haunting. One in particular: an untitled photograph by Roger Parry shows a dark room with a dull beam of light streaming in through a half-opened door. The photograph was taken from inside the room and a few objects can be dimly seen: a daguerrotype propped upside-down against the dark wainscoting; a length of rope that might be fastened into a noose. Alvarez has this to say about the photograph: "I no longer remember how I populated the darkness, but I remember the fear itself, particularly of the darkness that shrouded the upper floor, where I slept."

I found this a fascinating book.He's serious but playful, has a casual sophistication, a curious and sceptical mind, and a direct writing style.

Well worth seeking out. ( )

Alvarez brings a kind of journalistic quality to a subject that he apparently devoted four years to bring to fruition in this book. So it's easy reading, in fact easy put down, pick up reading. But I can't avoid the observation that if you had put it down, and never picked it up again, there'd be no sense of 'how did it end', no sense of missing anything at all. It talks about night, and gathers some stories and facts in, but there's very little emotional engagement (if that's what he was aiming for) or synthesis of ideas and theories (if that's what he was aiming for), or comprehensive survey of random facts - if that's what he was aiming for.

To take one example - the impact of crime at night, all he has to say is a narrative of a fairly uneventful night cruising with police in the US and the UK. An interview with a burglar or a mugger about working at night would have lifted his story out of the humdrum, but it remains relentlessly shallow. I am looking for stories of miners trapped underground, of the effect of moonlight and fog, of the noises and wildlife that populate the night, of shift-workers and their upside down world and fatigue, of what it is like to be on the dark side of the moon. But I walk away without any of that.

Effectively Alvarez has left the night-light on. You get the sense of someone telling you about how exciting and interesting night can be, but you never get to experience it - not through this book in any case. ( )