There are roomier luxury estates but anything that can compete as a cargo carrier

There are roomier luxury estates, but anything that can compete as a cargo carrier with Volvo's V70, even a C-class Merc, is not going to frustrate the heavy packer.The Avant has a simple seat-fold arrangement that doesn't tax your strength or dexterity, and there's plenty of thoughtful detailing, including a ski hatch, tie-down eyes, an under-floor recess, a roll-up dog guard, even optional rear-facing seats. A diluted melange of the petrolhead's dream team is not so far-fetched. If you seek a car that's all things to all (well-heeled) people - a car more than passably endowed with comfort, refinement, exclusivity, fun, space, practicality, agility and freedom - look no further than Audi's mid-sized, V6-powered, four- wheel drive A6 estate, officially known as the 2.8 Avant quattro. Subtle changes in form and line have turned the latest A6 estate from a good-looking car into a stunning one Few coupes are more glamorous. "My story is my only remaining possibility for an ongoing life, which is how it must be for everyone, living or dead.".

The perfect car? There's no such thing. One set of wheels cannot embrace all the incompatible attributes of, say, a classic Ferrari, a Transit van, a Rolls-Royce Seraph, a Caterham Seven, a Mini Cooper and a Land Rover - a fleet to satisfy most whims The perfect compromise, then? Now that's easier. Behind Owen, the shack is shored up with timbers as the life was with fictions. It is set up on stilts, presumably to avoid flash-floods but symbolic of the shaky foundations of memory. The mountain behind is as indomitable as the memory of his father must have been, but Owen looks away into the distance, stiff and guarded.Long after his death, in Banks's garrulous narrative, he has finally achieved "the silence of the truth-be-told".

The book is a witness to those who died with John Brown: two more Browns, sons-in-law, a Hazlett, a Kagi, a Leary, a Leeman, a Newby, a Stevens and a Taylor, and finally Dauphin and William Thompson, all in separate shrouds but buried together And yet the story is the survivor's alone. ." Only by making a fiction out of father's story; only by giving it that "shapely" dynamic, is Owen going to be free of it.The book's cover catches him in 1888 at his cabin in the hills above Pasadena: a horse, goats, a calf, the withered arm hidden in shadow. It is closer than ever to the treacherous certainties of Twain. What seems at first glance like a grand historical fiction, with the sweep of a still-young continent as its canvas, is actually the claustrophobic recollection and imagining of a sick old man.That is what makes the book wonderful, not what it reveals about Brown or America or abolitionism. "These words are my thoughts given shapely proportions and relations to one another.

Banks doesn't quite manage to do that, largely because the teller is complicit and compromised. Would he really have talked about being "empowered", of his father's "conflicted"personality? Would the Old Man have spoken of "racist Yankees"? The nightmare of Harpers Ferry is hard for any American to separate from its mythological afterlife. The language of the book is more inconsistent than Owen's rationalisations strictly require. Never before, though, has he made such use of historical record, and never before has he made the process of storytelling the subject of his tale.Owen is writing to a young historian, and implicitly to her professor He wants to beguile her He wants her sympathy for his withered arm and wasted life. And he wantsher for a listening Sheherazade, who will not tire of his stories. Only in the telling and the manner of the telling is there truth.Some aspects of the telling are problematic The physical setting isnever convincingly realised. Cloudsplitter is a great mountain, and it is one of the characters' and the book's difficulties that all landscapes are required to have a symbolic function: fertile, hostile, frozen, stony, mighty, God-bothering.

In Continental Drift and The Sweet Hereafter he again delved into the American obsession with innocence and evil and their interpenetration. We are never sure of Owen and we need to be surer of him.Banks has explored this territory before, though never quite as encyclopaedically. In Rule Of The Bone, he created a modern Huck, an untrustworthy storyteller we can trust because he lies cheerfully and sees more because of it. The guiding principle of his life is opposition to slavery, but in the end he throws away his life, and that of his sons and kinsman, in a meaningless act of violence.The events that lead to that moment, the famous raid at Harpers Ferry, make up the bulk of the book. At times, Owen seems the older and wiser, but for the most part he is too self-conscious and self-serving in his enumeration of key moments: the injury to his arm that sets him apart from certain labour and from certain risk; the loss of virginity to a teenage prostitute, whosucks him and then shows tiny undeveloped breasts (an ironic reprise of his lost mother); the unconvincingly acquired wisdom that nominates him for the sore task of writing to his father that yet another beloved sibling has died.