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Reviewing it, Tobias Grey calls the book a “force of nature” with a narrative as “slippery as an eel and tangled like the murky, wreckage-strewn waterways of its Oxfordshire setting.”

Its narrative is slippery as an eel and tangled like the murky, wreckage-strewn waterways of its Oxfordshire setting.

As I walked uphill, repeating Ashbery’s lines to myself, I found them as slippery as an eel, almost Heraclitean because it’s so hard to say the same line of Ashbery exactly the same way twice.

Tommy was as quick—and as slippery—as an eel.

In Hudson’s words, Messi has “chameleon eyes” and is as “slippery as an eel covered in Vaseline” and plays with the predatory appetite of a “zombie hunter looking for a Twinkie.”