I As If, by Blake Morrison (Granta, £7.99 in UK)

It must have seemed like a good idea to somebody some-where to ask the poet Blake Morrison to write a prolonged meditation on the murder of the Liverpool toddler James Bulger and the subsequent trial of the two ten-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. Morrison obviously means well, and he certainly writes vividly, with a poet's eye for the oddball detail - but a thousand oddball details don't add up to an explanation, and his meandering, stream-of-consciousness approach to his subject ultimately comes across as self-centered and self-indulgent.