Aickman,
Robert. Go
Back at Once
(unpublished novel, 257 pp.)
According
to a cataloguing entry of the Robert Aickman Archive at the British
Library, this novel was written in 1975. Aickman's first novel, The
Late Breakfasters,
was written some years before it was published in 1964. Aickman wrote
one other lengthy story near the end of his life (he died in 1981).
The
Model was
published posthumously and is often erroneously called a novel, when
more accurately it would be called a novella, due to its short
length. Thus Go
Back at Once
occupies a middle place in Aickman's three pieces of extended prose
fiction. All three are odd, but in different ways; yet Go
Back at Once
is perhaps the oddest work of Aickman's entire oeuvre.
It
attempts to work as narrative on more than one level, yet any
meaning, as well as the details of its time and setting, are rather
murkily presented. Taking place some years after the war, it doesn't
specify which war. Yet the accumulation of a number of minor details
point decisively to about the year 1924. The setting begins in
England, but moves on to a kind of autonomous Italian state called
Trino. Yet it is not the known Trino that is in northwestern Italy,
for this Trino is on the Adriatic Sea, and is reached via Trieste. In
fact the fictional Trino is on the eastern side of the Adriatic,
somewhere in one of the Balkan countries.
On
the surface level, the novel centers on two young girls, Cressida
Hazeborough and Vivien Poins. They are inseparable friends, and
having just completed schooling at Riverdale House, they go to London
to live with Vivien's aunt Agnes (Lady Luce). Cressida begins to work
at a flower shop, while Vivien starts as a receptionist for a
psychoanalyst. Their life is interrupted when Aunt Agnes receives a
summons from an old acquaintance. And here the novel's oddness
begins.
The
acquaintance is known as Virgilio Vittore, a great poet, playwright,
athlete, soldier, etc., who captured Trino and now governs it
according to the laws of music (whatever that means). The two girls
travel with Aunt Agnes to Trino, where they find a curious populace
and an even stranger society, where everything is free for the taking
(the government is funded by a wealthy newspaper magnate, along the
lines of a patron of the arts). The second half of the novel takes
place over a period of only three days, as the girls explore this new
society and become increasingly disillusioned about it. The
theatricality of everything is paramount, and the girls are often
muttering to themselves quotations from Shakespeare's plays, or those
of John Webster, or even Gilbert and Sullivan. Cressida is to work
with the theatre, where all the plays performed are by Vittore. At a
strange banquet the meal starts with a dish made up of lark's
tongues, though the meal is interrupted by a huge number of birds in
flight, which are quickly fired upon by the male diners with their
small silver pistols, leaving the tables covered with feathers and
dead birds. The girls meet a number of unusual people, and aspects of
sexuality simmer in the narrative. What the point of all this is is
anyone's guess. It doesn't seem to be satire, nor allegory, in any
sense. Where it leads, over the three day span, is that Aunt Agnes
and the girls are rescued in Adriatic, having left Trino as it
collapsed, and they go back to England, and pretty much to the lives
they had before their adventure. This is foreshadowed half-way
through the book by the woman Cressida works for in Trino who
suggests to her that perhaps she might prefer to go back at once,
meaning only in that scene to retreat from her prospective
employment. Yet in the end this is what the two girls and Aunt Agnes
do.
We
do not know if Aickman ever offered this novel for publication, but
it would have been a hard sell to a publisher. Go
Back at Once
lacks the cohesiveness of Aickman's first novel, and seems an advance
upon it only in terms of conceptual oddness. It also compares
unfavorably with Aickman's well known “strange stories,” for the
development of the novel is labored to the point of becoming, at
times, rather boring.
