I discovered this mysterious novel by Jocelyn Brooke via a review in Time Out. My Penguin copy is dated 1983, and was the first re-issue since its publication in 1950.
I had never heard of Brooke, and Penguin must have thought that nobody else had, as the words “with an introduction by Anthony Powell” are quite prominent on the cover.
The narrative in brief, concerns a lonely ex-soldier, now working as a bank clerk and living with his mother in a cottage in a tranquil corner of rural Kent. He is frustrated with life and worried about his health. He meets a young army officer and agrees to start military training with him, in a sort of shadowy territorial unit.
The cover illustration by Tony McSweeney is fascinating in itself. A sad-eyed man in military uniform looks out at us. It is winter and he is wearing greatcoat, scarf, and balaclava under his steel helmet. Behind him is a hedge with a strand of barbed wire above it, and in the distance is a mysterious earthwork and to the left, an oast house. The cloudy sky is a threatening reddish colour, and the dented steel helmet seems to merge into it. Yes, I know, you can’t judge a book by its cover and all that, but I have described this in some detail, because it captures something about the book that Powell’s introduction doesn’t, quite.
Powell is quite keen to compare the novel to Kafka, and this is fair enough, since it undeniably has some Kafkaesque elements, particularly in the later part, where Reynard finds that he has rejoined the army against his will. But the picture on the cover is closer to my feeling that the English landscape, specifically the landscape of Kent, is a major element in this book. Perhaps childhood holidays in the Hythe and Folkestone area had made me aware of the way the countryside here is haunted by a military presence. After all, this is the area of Shorncliffe barracks, the Royal Military Canal, and Martello towers along the coast, relics of the Napoleonic war and two world wars.
It actually goes back further than that, as Brooke reminds us. The “Roman camp” where Reynard begins his military training regime is thought to actually be an ancient British construction.
The strange shifts of time and place, the mysterious bugle calls in the distance, coming from a location that Reynard can’t quite pin down – it is never clear what is “real” and what is taking place in Reynard’s mind. The landscape itself seems to play a role in all this. For example: “Leaning now, against the gate into the fields, it seemed to him that the very countryside itself was exerting upon him an invisible, indefinable pressure, producing in his fatigued brain an intolerable sense of confinement”. I think the novel is the literary equivalent of the work of some of the painters of the era, such as Paul Nash and Keith Vaughan, where a recognisably English landscape is given a surreal twist.
What is the mysterious “emergency” that is constantly referred to? The Cold War? The Labour Government? A projection of Reynard’s troubled sexuality? Or all of these?
I can imagine a film of this book. It might have something of the atmosphere of David Rudkin’s TV play Penda’s Fen. Indeed, I wonder if Brooke’s novel was an influence on Rudkin’s play, where a young man, troubled by his sexuality, finds a mystery in the landscape. What I can’t imagine is the BBC of today going anywhere near such a project. Perhaps if Mark Gatiss could be persuaded to get involved?
And yet, although it is rooted in the immediate post-second world war period, Brooke’s novel is curiously ahead of its time in some ways. If the term “psychogeography” comes to mind, The Image of a Drawn Sword also has something of the more recent concept “folk horror” about it.
The Good Reader 