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Image of a Drawn Sword

Jocelyn Brooke
€18.50
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1950s
20th century
A01=Jocelyn Brooke
Author_Jocelyn Brooke
British fiction
Category=FB
Category=FBC
Category=FJM
classic
eq_bestseller
eq_classics
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
fantasy
forgotten
gay
ghost story
haunting
horror
Kafkaesque
Kent
LGBT
literary
menace
military
naturalism
nature
neglected
nightmare
occult
post-war
Reynard the Fox
sad
soldier
south of England
suspense
tattoo
unsettling
veteran

Product details

  • ISBN 9781509855858
  • Weight: 186g
  • Dimensions: 133 x 203mm
  • Publication Date: 05 Oct 2017
  • Publisher: Pan Macmillan
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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Description

The calm of Reynard Langrish’s quietly predictable life is shattered when, on a night of rain-swept storm, a stranger – a young soldier called Captain Archer - appears at his remote Kentish cottage. He takes Langrish to an ancient hill fort and introduces him to the men under his command, all of whom share a mysterious tattoo – two snakes entwined around a drawn sword – and are engaged in preparations to defend against a nameless menace, referred to only as ‘the Emergency’.

As the dreamlike narrative rapidly accelerates into Kafkaesque nightmare, Langrish is drawn into a world where illusion, paranoia, and reality unite with lethal consequences, and disorienting shifts of time and perception culminate in a terrifying moment of pure horror.

Originally published in 1950, The Image of a Drawn Sword is steeped in the themes and images that occupy much of Brooke’s writing – the relentlessness of time, suppressed homosexuality, condemned love, self-hatred, and futility; and, above all, an England that was both real and uniquely his own, a mystical, half-known natural world.

‘In its way not inferior to Kafka . . . [it has] a haunting, sinister quality’ – Anthony Powell

‘Seldom have naturalism and fantasy been more strangely merged’ – Elizabeth Bowen

‘He is subtle as the devil’ – John Betjeman

‘The skill and intensity of the writing made peculiarly haunting this cry of complaint on behalf of a bewildered Man’ – Pamela Hansford Johnson, Daily Telegraph
About Jocelyn Brooke
Jocelyn Brooke was born in 1908 on the south coast and educated at Bedales and Worcester College, Oxford. He worked in London for a while, then in the family wine-merchants in Folkestone, Kent. In 1939, Brooke enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and reenlisted after the war as a Regular. The critical success of The Military Orchid (1948), the first volume of his autobiographical Orchid trilogy, provided the opportunity to buy himself out, and he immediately settled down to write, publishing some fifteen titles between 1948 and 1955, including the successive volumes of the trilogy, A Mine of Serpents (1949) and The Goose Cathedral (1950). His other published work includes two volumes of poetry, the novels The Image of a Drawn Sword (1950) and The Dog at Clambercrown (1955), as well as some technical works on botany. A perceptive reviewer, Brooke wrote critiques of Aldous Huxley, Elizabeth Bowen, Ronald Firbank, and John Betjeman. He also introduced and edited the journals and published works of Denton Welch. Jocelyn Brooke died in 1966.

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