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Title: Glittering images....?
Review: How can any respectable writer use an image like "glittering images" possibly as many as 500 times in one book? It's a hokey, overstated image to begin with--who is it that is actually so "glittering" in the book in the first place?--and it destroys the meaningfulness of the split personality, or the outer and inner character, the holy and the profane, that is really the subject of the book. It seems to me that Howatch herself is divided--between a writer of somewhat serious intentions and a pulp romanticist. I finished the book because it has its own kind of compulsive readability, but I'll never read another one.
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