On the Horn

At first, a savvy reader might place Michael Redhill’s The Trial of Katterfelto as a postmodernist work of historiographic metafiction, a term coined by the Canadian critic Linda Hutcheon. It is, after all, an epistolary novel set in the eighteenth century, consisting of letters penned by Roger Gossage, an alcoholic who repeatedly insists that his story is “entirely true.”

Surprisingly, much of his story is indeed historically accurate. Roger’s travelling companion, Prussian-born Gustavus Katterfelto, was a roadside magician who is sometimes credited with inventing germ theory. Other notable figures are present, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge (to whom Roger is writing), William Hazlitt, Erasmus Darwin, John Cartwright, and a stand‑in for Caroline Herschel. Characters authentically date themselves, as when Roger recalls, “I arrived the day that Joshua Reynolds died, and left just after Britain took Martinique.” And such details suggest Redhill might be...