The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Explanations are for the timid’
Two Kensington socialites fall for a decadent Balkan dictator, in this mysterious fever-dream of a novel
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One of the difficulties in reviewing a novel by Robert Aickman is that it’s almost impossible to describe his work to anyone who hasn’t read it before. Comparisons with other authors who plough a similar furrow of the uncanny – Shirley Jackson, say, or Arthur Machen – are only useful to an extent. Aickman really is his own writer. The disquieting power of his “strange stories”, as he preferred to describe them, relies on a carefully crafted enigma. As he put it: “foolish explanations render down truth for the timid”.
That said, the general thread of the story in Go Back at Once – written in 1975, six years before his death, but unpublished until now – is reasonably straightforward. Set some time in the 1920s, it concerns the first forays into adulthood of Cressida Hazeborough and her friend Vivien Poins. On leaving the prestigious Riverside House school, they go to live with Vivien’s wellconnected Aunt Agnes, a vivacious Kensington divorcee. They each find jobs – Cressida in a flower shop and Vivien as a receptionist for a psychoanalyst – and socialise with the cream of upper middle-class society. But it’s a world that becomes quickly stale. The men they meet are vain and tedious, other women haughty or unadventurous, all of them trapped in a banality of their own making.
However, it is at one of the many dinner parties the two young women attend that they first hear the name of the warrior-poet Virgilio Vittore – who, following the wartime upheaval in the Balkans, has annexed the town of Trino on the Adriatic, and made himself defacto ruler of his own city-state. Enthralled by tales of this charismatic Übermensch, Cressida and Vivien are exhilarated when Vittore invites them and Aunt Agnes to visit him.
But he proves a complicated, elusive figure, rumoured to appear only occasionally at the balcony of a tall tower to acknowledge his devotees, who live in reverence to him and his ideals of artistic beauty. Cressida hopes to serve him too, and in immersing herself in Vittore’s fiefdom, she is alternately beguiled, bewildered and terrified.
And so from a gentle lampoon of English manners, the novel passes through the looking glass and becomes increasingly “Aickmanesque” – something which can perhaps only be demonstrated through examples. Cressida is given work in a theatre where an act of torture may or may not be part of the
play being rehearsed. In another scene, Trifoglio – a sort of shapeshifting court jester – tries to assault her, “sallow all over and sticky… with many sharp teeth in his mouth”. At a banquet, little songbirds are set free, only for the men to shoot at them with pistols until “the table was covered with blue, yellow, green and red bundles, heaving and cheeping and defecating whitely in death”.
With its halls and tapestries, excesses and festivities, Trino is reminiscent of Prince Prospero’s castellated abbey in Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”. And just as the prince and his guests are unable to hold back the terrors of the outside world, so conflict comes to Trino in the form of a revolution which ousts Vittore from power.
But Aickman finds beauty in that volatility. In his introduction to The Third Fontana Book of Ghost Stories (1967), he praises the power of the supernatural tale to address “the need to escape – at least occasionally – from a mechanistic world, ever more definable, ever more predictable and therefore evermore unsatisfying and frustrating”.
Read this way (and as the name might suggest) Go Back at Once perhaps fulfils Aickman’s personal romantic fantasy of rediscovering a lost utopia – one which is part dictatorship, part bohemia. Always decadent, spectacular and violent yet never dull.
But this is to consider only one possible reflection in a prism of a novel. To try and make complete sense of its assortment of images and metaphors would be like trying to interpret a feverish dream. It’s not always clear when Aickman is being serious and when he isn’t. The pleasure, then, comes not from retaining a firm grasp on meaning but in yielding to “the greater power of imagination than reality”, something which Cressida comes to appreciate herself. Like her, all we can do is allow ourselves to freefall through the absurdity and nightmares, and revel in the fact that Aickman’s worlds do not give up the answers to their mysteries lightly.