Alex first came to my attention via an Instagram post by David Tibet enthusing about his novel 'The Animals Praise the Antichrist', which proved to be a fabulously strange love story revolving around two music obsessed teen outsiders.
Since that first book Alex has produced short stories for the publishers Zagava Books, Nightjar Press & Nepenthe Press and poetry for Aswirl Zine. He is currently working on his second novel.
You can find updates on Alex and his writing via his Instagram feed @alex.older
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Jocelyn Brooke - The Image of a Drawn Sword
Where to start with this neglected jewel of a novel? If you like Kafka, Arthur Machen, surrealism, mid-century gay writing, books with atmospheres both weird and eerie, time slips, paranoia, descriptions of the English countryside that are by turns lyrical and nightmarish, then this may be a novel for you.
It’s a great shame that The Image of a Drawn Sword isn’t a Penguin Classic, that it’s only available second-hand or via print-on-demand. It ought to be better known. In rural Kent, not long after the end of the Second World War, a solitary bank clerk named Reynard Langrish is drawn into an opaque world of mysterious army operations which are taking place in the countryside around his home. He’s recruited, ambiguously, by an elusive man, Captain Roy Archer, who remains vague about what his unit is up to. Is another war imminent? Is Britain already secretly at war again? Or is a civil conflict brewing? Langrish isn’t sure. Moreover, he’s preoccupied with his own inner struggles – a burdensome ennui, a growing sense of unreality, a teetering on the verge of personal dissolution. His perceptions and his memory seem unreliable, his understanding of his own situation somewhat limited. As the novel unfolds, it becomes apparent that time is not behaving normally and that identities are uncertain and unstable. Characters age at different rates, facial features alter and become indecipherable. Langrish may be attracted to Archer’s world in part because he finds soldiering – training, gymnastics, boxing – erotic, but it is never stated to what extent he realises this about himself. In a Machenesque touch, a Roman earthworks, perhaps of dubious authenticity, is a crucial site in the novel. Brooke had certainly read and admired Machen. A skilled botanist, he is capable of writing about the English countryside with an evocative skill reminiscent of Machen’s descriptions of Wales. But menace and fear and sexual anxiety hang over everything; there is little respite from the condition of existential dread, not even in rural Kent. This is also true in another of Brooke’s novels, The Scapegoat, a short work of fiction that is never explicitly supernatural, but that has an oppressive atmosphere and a theme of ritual sacrifice fans of folk horror might enjoy.
I’ve been thinking about The Image of a Drawn Sword a great deal recently. Aspects of the novel are very much of its time, but it remains contemporary as well. This is true most especially in relation to the unspecified “Emergency” that forms the novel’s backdrop. The origins and the nature of this Emergency are hard to fathom and never spelled out, which seems, sadly, all too familiar. Then, too, the disoriented protagonist of Image repeatedly searches for an answer to a troubling question: Are we at war? As I write this, it is an unfortunate fact that I know exactly how he feels.
The Cure - Charlotte Sometimes
War, time slips, and splintered personalities haunt my music choice as well.
I’ve loved this song ever since I was a teen: it’s four minutes of gothic perfection. I like the way it was never an album track, it only enhances the sense I have of “Charlotte Sometimes” being a hermetic sound world with its own special atmosphere. It’s like a sunless aural space I can walk into at any time. And I do walk into it quite often. In fact, I often feel I have been living inside this song – living within its gloomy precincts – for most of my life.
So, for me the song is a kind of portal, a portal into a particular grey and doleful place. But the song is itself about portals. Robert Smith’s inspiration for “Charlotte Sometimes” is the 1969 children’s novel of the same name by Penelope Farmer. It’s a book about a girl at a English boarding school named Charlotte who finds that her dormitory bed acts as a portal into the past. While she sleeps she exchanges places with a girl named Clare who slept in the same bed decades ago. Clare was at the school during the First World War, and she and Charlotte keep swapping places between the war years and the 1950s.
If this sounds like an opportunity for exciting adventures, then it really doesn’t turn out that way. Charlotte Sometimes is nothing like a children’s book of today. There are no heroics, and identities are not affirmed – on the contrary, they are always under threat of disintegration (the b-side to “Charlotte Sometimes”, also inspired by the novel, is called “Splintered In Her Head”). It’s such a monochrome, mournful book, shaped by war, disease, death, and grief. The Cure captured its muted melancholy very well. Indeed, some of the song’s lyrics are lifted more or less directly from the novel. Grief and loss are subjects that have reoccured in my writing frequently: there is often an absent other shaping my stories. I’ve been preoccupied with these themes since childhood. Robert Smith has touched upon them repeatedly too: the most recent album by The Cure, Songs of a Lost World, is manifestly a work about grief.
After all that grey, we need some bold colours. My film choice is also about a girl who, whilst in bed, passes through a portal of sorts: the portal of her dreams.
Again, this work is a lifelong love of mine. The earliest dream I can recollect, from when I was very small, is an Alice-style nightmare of tumbling down a hole in the earth into a strange, flickering black-and-white room. For that reason, and perhaps for reasons to do with childhood loss, I’ve always been obsessed with the notion of children passing from one world into another. These stories often focus on young girls, and The Company of Wolves, adapted from Angela Carter’s stories in The Bloody Chamber, is one such film.
In the film, a young girl, Rosaleen, is sleeping in her artfully cluttered room in an English country house (if you look closely you can see a picture of The Cure on her wall). The objects in her room, and her sister and parents, are all woven into her fantastical dreams of a fairytale-like world of forests and wolves, folklore, and a wise old grandmother, played brilliantly by Angela Lansbury. Essentially, the film is a gothic retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood”, but with a number of embedded stories along the way, stories of wronged women, wolves, and even the Devil driving in the forest in his white Rolls-Royce.
Director Neil Jordan is Irish, but The Company of Wolves is a certainly a British film, made here, and very much shaped by the magnificent imagination of Angela Carter, who co-wrote the script. That said, one of the things I adore about it is how un-British it is. British films are rarely allowed to be this sumptuously symbolic – especially when the symbolism is mostly about sex and desire and reproduction. It’s all dark pathways, werewolves, hair, blood, flowers, eggs, mirrors: a veritable forest of Freudianism. It was made on a tight budget, which shows sometimes, but nonetheless it manages to be wonderfully overripe and extravagant. There isn’t enough of that in Britain, I sometimes feel. We could do with more artistic opulence and profusion. I first saw The Company of Wolves when I was very young, and I think I learned from it that sometimes you just have to set your imagination running free.
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