Go Back at Once
Format:Paperback
Publisher:And Other Stories
Published:11th Jan '22
Should be back in stock very soon
Completed by Robert Aickman in 1975, but never before widely available, Go Back at Once is a delicious, delirious comic fantasia about the joys and terrors of a life devoted to resisting the degradations of conformism. It tells the story of Cressida Hazeborough and her friend Vivien, two mordantly intelligent young women trying to find their ways in a misty, pre-Depression Britain. The pair have little patience for the company of the marriageable men they are meant to endure, yet neither do they possess the means to live as they might wish: together, and apart from the demands of modern society. What’s a girl to do?
Having left school and taken the sorts of London job available to women of their age and station, remarkable news arrives: a great foreign poet, playwright, athlete, and soldier named Virgilio Vittore has successfully conquered the tiny country of Trino, on the Adriatic Sea, and is now governing it ‘according to the laws of music’. Could this new utopia be a refuge for Cressida and Vivien, and indeed all who seek a life less ordinary? Or should the women, having arrived in this chaotic land, where love, life, and politics must submit to the rules of the beautiful, take to heart the advice of the novel’s title?
Snobbish yet humane, reactionary yet camp, strait-laced yet queer, old-fashioned yet radical, Go Back at Once reveals Robert Aickman as a master not only of the ‘strange story’, but a satirist deserving of a place alongside the mischievous and venomous greats of the inter-war canon: Firbank, Compton-Burnett, Waugh, Powell.
‘In Aickman’s fiction, peculiarity is intertwined with a drab twentieth-century realism that is very English and sometimes dryly funny. Think Philip Larkin, or Barbara Pym, gone eldritch.’ Anwen Crawford, The New Yorker
‘His name should be placed among the greats—Flannery O’Connor, Irwin Shaw, Raymond Carver . . . You will never forget the first Aickman story you read, nor be satisfied when you’ve read them all.’ John Darnielle, author of Wolf in White Van
‘Unsettling is a key description for Aickman’s writing, not merely in the sense of creating anxiety, but in the sense of undoing what has been settled: his stories unsettle the ideas you bring to them about how fictional reality and consensus reality should fit together . . . He was drawn to ghost stories because they provided him with conventions for unmaking the conventional world, but he was about as much of a traditional ghost story writer as Salvador Dalí was a typical designer of pocket watches.’ Matthew Cheney, Electric Literature
‘For fans of cutting remarks, philosophy, and scandalous divorcées.’ Booklist
‘[T]his novel offers readers…a witty, sophisticated work of 20th-century British fiction.’ Kirkus Reviews
‘Mesmerizing. This unconventional story gets by on the author’s sly wit.’ Publishers Weekly
‘There's a nice light touch to the writing...it all skips along nicely and if it all isn't quite clear, the sheer oddity of the place and events is just as baffling to its two protagonists...It makes for a quite charming novel of two young innocents learning about life.’ The Complete Review
‘To try and make sense of [Go Back at Once’s] assortment of images and metaphors is like trying to interpret a feverish dream . . . the pleasure comes not from retaining a firm grasp on meaning, but in yielding to “the greater power of imagination than reality”, something Cressida comes to appreciate herself.’
-- Andrew Michael Hurley * The Telegraph *‘Aickman's hitherto unpublished second novel . . . is an oddity, a puzzlebox of queerness and a utopian fantasia . . . The prose vibrates with energy.’
-- Catriona Ward * The TimISBN: 9781913505202
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 450g
400 pages