In analytic philosophy, aesthetics and narratology do not occupy the central place they hold in the continental tradition. This is largely because many analytic philosophers still feel that aesthetics lacks important problems which are amenable to analytic methods; and narratology is still viewed as necessarily wordy, imprecise and pretentious. Greg Currie's new book should do a good deal to break down both prejudices. It shows that there are plenty of important aesthetic problems which can only be solved by drawing up careful classifications and noting fine distinctions; and it is conspicuously sober, clearly laid-out, crisp and intelligent.

Currie begins by distinguishing between a story and a narrative: a story is the thing told (the characters and events) while a narrative is the way the story is told (the mode of telling) (vi). In the first chapter, he then argues that narratives are intentional-communicative artefacts which manifest the communicative intentions of speakers, and urges that no coherent case can be made for treating dreams, lives, and objects which magically rearrange themselves, as narratives.

‘Intentional-communicative artefacts’ include many entities which are not narratives – theories and lists, for example – and in the second chapter he attempts to distinguish such entities from narratives proper. Instead of defining ‘narrative’, as one might expect, he introduces the graded concept of ‘narrativity’: things which are high in narrativity, he argues, typically involve detailed representations of particulars, especially agents in their causal and temporal relations; things which are low in narrativity employ them less.

In the next two chapters he turns to authors and narrators, and goes against the grain of recent trends by emphasizing the importance of the former. He argues that, on the one hand, we often need to know a good deal about a work's author before we are in a position to make well-grounded judgements about it; on the other, we do not always need to assume or postulate an internal narrator for every narrative.

In the next two chapters he explores the nature of response-guiding frameworks for stories: chapter five argues that authors often help create these by directing the reader's attention; chapter six explores why readers may be inclined to resist certain frameworks.

In chapter seven, Currie examines the way an author can modulate his style of narration to take account of a character's point of view, and gives compelling arguments for thinking his own notion of ‘character-focused narration’ is superior to Genette's concept of ‘focalization’. This chapter's discussion of free indirect discourse leads naturally into chapter eight's discussion of irony, and chapter nine's exploration of how irony can be employed in film.

To round off, chapter ten defends the notion of a fictional character against its literary detractors, while chapter eleven defends the notion of character tout court against sceptics from social psychology.

I found chapters five (on emotional framing) and eight (on irony) the most memorable and helpful. This is largely because the first tackles a little-discussed subject which, in other hands, could seem trivial and nebulous; Currie, however, by focusing on a nutritious example from Sperber and Wilson, shows how analytic methods can reveal the subject's importance. The chapter on irony is significant because it offers a clever and spirited defence of the pretence theory, and puts paid once and for all to the venerable theory that the ironist says one thing and means another. But the book's virtues are by no means confined to these sections. Every chapter advances current debates, and there are thought-provoking insights and aperçus scattered throughout. The following, for example, is well worth prolonged reflection:

The book is written in an engagingly modest and accessible style (the last sentence of the preface runs: ‘[general] readers willing to give it a go are very welcome’(ix)), and although he earlier tells us ‘[it] was never likely that I would produce an excess of literary or historical scholarship’ (vii) the text is well furnished with apt and enlightening examples. Some of these are canonical in this kind of context (Conan Doyle, Austen etc) but Currie also shows a pleasing enthusiasm for the ghost stories of M.R. James.

However, it must be said that Currie, who is scrupulous in his philosophical and scientific references, is not always so careful when it comes to fiction. The authorship of Mr Beluncle, a novel examined on pages 109–15, is ascribed to ‘V.S. Prichard’ (109) rather than V.S. Pritchett (neither name appears in the index or bibliography); and Currie mistakenly calls the protagonist of Mann's Death in Venice ‘Aschenbrenner’ (71) rather than Aschenbach, which is surprising given the importance and prominence of the character's name in the narrative (‘Gustave Aschenbach,’ runs the first sentence of Lowe-Porter's translation, ‘ – or von Aschenbach, as he had been known officially since his fiftieth birthday …’).

His accounts of fictional events are not infallible either. On page 183, for example, he writes: ‘Often … spectral beings … show little rationality beyond a low malevolence, as with the creature whose blind pursuit of Professor Parkin up and down the coastal groins in [M.R. James'] ‘Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad’ is so disturbing …'. There's a cluster of problems here. To begin with, the Professor's name is Parkins not ‘Parkin’, and ‘coastal groins’ should clearly be ‘groynes’ (English spelling is used elsewhere throughout).

More significantly, there is no incident in the story which could be described as the creature's ‘blind pursuit of Professor [Parkins] up and down the [groynes]’. Having found the whistle, Parkins walks home along the beach, climbing over groynes as he goes, and becomes aware of an ‘indistinct personage, who seemed to be making great efforts to catch up with him, but made little, if any, progress. I mean that there was an appearance of running about his movements, but that the distance between him and Parkins did not seem materially to lessen.’ (Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005), 87). While reflecting on disconcerting meetings in deserted places, Parkins pays the distant personage little further attention, and simply continues on his way. Later that evening, after he has tried the whistle in his room, Parkins has a vision of ‘a wide, dark expanse at night’ in the midst of which is ‘a lonely figure’ (89), and this is followed by a sequence where, every time he closes his eyes, he experiences film-like images of a man pursued up a beach – clambering over groynes as he runs – by a creature in fluttering draperies. (90–1) Finally, the creature makes frantic efforts to find Parkins in his own hotel room. [98–100] Now, it seems to be part of James's intention that the reader should run these incidents together, and perhaps the reader is also invited to think that the pursued man in Parkins' film-like vision is Parkins himself (the events depicted are clearly based on the Professor's earlier experience). But when Currie reports that the Professor is blindly pursued up a beach, he is reporting his own creative reinvention of the story rather than what actually happens.

Finally, the description, ‘up and down the [groynes]’ is less than felicitous. This may just mean ‘having to climb over groynes’ or ‘being forced to clamber over groynes’ but it seems most likely to mean that the pursuit in the film-like vision follows a zigzag pattern with both pursuer and pursued running from one end to the other of a series of groynes. If this is what Currie's description implies, then this too involves an element of his own reinvention. In the story, the man runs down the beach in as straight a line as he can manage; it is the creature alone who moves very rapidly up and down the groynes, and when we later learn the creature is blind, we surmise that this is because it needs to feel for its intended prey.

These faults, however, can easily be corrected in a paperback edition. I hope there is such an edition because the book deserves to sell well and be widely read. It is a distinguished addition to the analytic philosophy of literature, and will not only expand the range of quite a few philosophers, but introduce a number of literary theorists to the pleasures of argument, reason, evidence and clarity.