Cirrus@Austlit

'This is a rather extraordinary first novel. It is written in a style that ravishes the reader because it is constantly inventive and nervily inflected with a maximum suggestiveness. Ronnie Scott is superb at capturing the intimations and innuendos that any human heart – perhaps especially a not fully formed, post-adolescent one – is capable of. He is as good at evoking a world of young men who are a bit in love with, certainly not uninterested in, each other. But The Adversary is too talented a piece of debut fiction to be received with hands-off courtesy. The besetting problem of this putative novel that everyone should have a look at – to cotton on to a writer who has a wizardly quicksilver command of language – is that not enough happens in the book, and the author’s apparent belief that it does comes to seem like naivety.' (Introduction)