“I like to imagine that Adam’s tongue, his palate and his lips were always on fire, that the air he breathed was kindled to incandescence each time he cried out in sorrow or delight. If fiction can be said to have a function, it is to release that primary fury of which language, even now, is miraculously capable – from the dry mud of daily use. So that furred, spotted and striped, it may – as it did in Eden – scrawl under every tree as revelation.”
