The Image of a Drawn Sword

Synopsis

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

Copyright:

1908

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9781509855865

Related ISBNs:

9781509855858

Publisher:

Pan Macmillan

Date of Addition:

03/28/19

Copyrighted By:

Jocelyn Brooke

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Military, Literature and Fiction, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender

Reading Age:

18 and up

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.