books, page 1 of 136

Olaf Stapledon’s second novel, published in 1932, is not so much a sequel to Last and First Men (1930) as a sort of pendant to it (as his next novel, Odd John, started out as an appendix to this one). Like that first book, it’s dictated by a Neptunian from the far-future final race of humankind, who have developed the ability to project their consciousnesses into minds of the distant past, and not just witness events, but influence them to a certain extent, too. (Stapledon gets over the difficulty of the future being able to influence the past with a little handwaving: “Thus when I am observing your mental processes, my activity of observing is, in one sense, located in the past.” Or, for a little more detail: “though future events have indeed no temporal being until their predecessors have ceased to exist with temporal being, all events have also eternal being. This does not mean that time is unreal, but that evanescence is not the whole truth about the passing of events.”)

Instead of the vast, thousands-of-millions-of-years sweep of Last and First Men, Last Men in London concentrates on one comparatively tiny sliver of time, but one that is nevertheless “a crucial incident in the long-drawn-out spiritual drama of your species”: the First World War and its immediate aftermath. And the Neptunian chooses to approach this period through the consciousness of one individual, a relatively ordinary man called Paul. His intent is to present a deeper understanding of the causes of what was then known as the Great War, but also, by introducing Paul to glimpses of the more cosmic worldview of the Eighteenth Race of humankind, to see how this affects a man of our age. “It is my task,” he says, “to tell you of your own race as it appears through the eyes of the far future…”

After the immensely compressed tale of multiple human species in his first novel, focusing on a single individual might make it sound as though Last Men in London would read like a more straightforward narrative. In fact, it’s even less of a traditional novel (in terms of character, plot, and so on) than Last and First Men. After an initial chapter which details life on far future Neptune, we get a brief glimpse of Paul as he hesitates before an army recruitment centre in London, wavering between social pressure to join up and his more deeply held belief in pacifism. But this is one of the few conventional scenes in a book that has only about three or four named characters, and almost no scenes with dialogue, action, and so on. Following the introduction of Paul, the narrator digresses for two long chapters on the causes of the Great War (whose roots are not in the messiness of Imperial European politics as you might think, but in the very nature of our simian ancestry), before returning to Paul and his personal experiences in the war, and then onto his life in the years that followed.

This is only partly a criticism—you come to Stapledon for ideas, not realism—but I have to say I still find Stapledon at his most readable when he’s following a narrative, whether it be of the human race as a whole as in Last and First Men, or the life of an intelligent dog in Sirius. (To be fair, Stapledon declares early on: “Though this is a work of fiction, it does not pretend to be a novel. It has no hero but Man.”) Here, he has his exposition dials turned up to eleven—which isn’t a criticism as such, but I have to say I did find these sections, though interesting, a bit of a slog.

But Last Men in London could also be a kind of autobiographical novel. Like Paul, Stapledon refused the call-up into the army, but elected to serve in the Friends Ambulance Unit as an expression of his pacifism—and, like Paul, he won the Croix de Guerre, and was intensely aware of the irony of a pacifist winning a war medal. Also like Paul he spent time as a teacher. All this leads me to suspect you can probably read Paul’s education in a wider worldview as Stapledon’s own philosophical awakening, with the Neptunian narrator/educator a sort of fictional stand-in for Stapledon’s inner, guiding, slightly alienated deepest self. (It might even be better to read this novel as Stapledon’s attempt to write about the causes of the First World War being derailed by an inner need to tell the story of his own philosophical development.)

As to the causes of the Great War, from the Neptunian perspective it comes down to humankind’s “practical intelligence” getting ahead of its deeper self-understanding, plus a tendency in the First Men (as the Neptunians call us) towards “the importance of personal triumph over others in the great game of life”—the tendency to value heroic individuals over humankind itself, with a corresponding belief in nations as a sort of communal hero-self, with one nation necessarily triumphing over others being the accepted state of things. From the Neptunian point of view, the Great War was on the cards from the moment we came down from the trees (we have “a will that is still in essence simian, though equipped with dangerous powers”), but awaited the technological breakthroughs of the nineteenth century for its fruition:

“…your ‘modern’ world came too soon. In the century before the war it developed with increasing acceleration. You had neither the intelligence nor the moral integrity to cope with your brave new world.”

More interesting from a present day perspective, perhaps, is Stapledon’s insight into the mood during and after the Great War. There was, he says, a “suspicion in all the combatants that human nature had failed”, its ultimate effect being to “undermine man’s confidence in his own nature”. He goes on, in perhaps his most passionate and forthrightly critical section of the book, to detail how various sectors of society—politicians, religious leaders, teachers, artists and writers, common people—contributed to the war by turning a blind eye or justifying it to themselves. Perhaps the most useful passage to read today, as it still has such relevance, is this:

“Many people seemed to Paul to unearth a new self to cope with [the war], a simpler, less doubting, more emotional self, a self that concealed under righteous indignation a terrible glee in the breakdown of old taboos.”

Post-war, Stapledon describes the mood as one of:

“…a deep and deadly self-disgust, a numbing and unacknowledged shame, a sense of huge opportunities missed, of a unique trust betrayed, and therewith a vast resentment against earlier generations, against human nature, against fate, against the universe.”

Though Paul, in moments of particularly Stapledonian insight, still finds himself thinking:

“How can things be so wrong, so meaningless, so filthy; and yet also so right, so overwhelmingly significant, so exquisite?”

Which is perhaps one of the things that led John Kinniard to write, in Starmont Reader’s Guide 21: Olaf Stapledon, that “Stapledon’s philosophy is best approached as a challenge and a corrective to the disillusionment that became the dominant attitude of the Nineteen-twenties.”

So, what is Stapledon’s answer to all of this? It can be summed up in ideas that were already present in Last and First Men: “loyalty to man and worship of fate”. Or, as the Neptunian narrator puts it in a way that perfectly sums up Stapledon’s mix of the acceptance of cosmic doom with a defiantly joyous optimism:

“The story of your species is indeed a tragic story, for it closes with desolation. Your part in that story is both to strive and to fail in a unique opportunity, and so to set the current of history toward disaster. But think not therefore that your species has occurred in vain, or that your own individual lives are futile. Whatever any of you has achieved of good is an excellence in itself and a bright thread woven into the texture of the cosmos. In spite of your failure it shall be said of you, had they not striven as they did, the Whole would have been less fair.”

Does this help us at all, though, in the prevention of future wars? Stapledon’s notion of “loyalty to man and worship of fate” is a little too vague to be practically useful (unless one were to be faced with a catastrophe that really did threaten the species as a whole like, say, an increasingly unstable climate). Who is to say what best serves “man” or what should be regarded as “fate”? Elsewhere, Stapledon criticises the pursuit of happiness for this very reason:

“For if happiness alone is the goal, one man’s happiness is as good as another’s, and no one will feel obligation to make the supreme sacrifice. But if the true goal is of another order, those who recognise it may gladly die for it.”

Reviews at the time, though fewer than for Stapledon’s first novel, were mostly positive: “one of the most impressive things I have read” (The Birmingham Weekly Mercury), “engrossing and equally stimulating to the imagination and the reflective capacity” (The Aberdeen Press and Journal), “approached seriously, it will be found a rich, stimulating book” (The Daily News). Hugh I’Anson Fausset, in the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, though, offered up a criticism of the Neptunian narrator:

“He may personify ‘the mature individual who has wholly escaped the snares of private egoism,’ and whose will is for the racial good, but only by ceasing to be a person with a real unity of being and a spiritual centre.”

Around the same time, Fausset reviewed (positively) David Lindsay’s Devil’s Tor, a novel which has a few similarities with Last Men in London: both are books in which events and characters are manipulated by science-fictional beings (one from the future, one from space); both touch on the early evolution of humanity and talk of a coming, better race; both make use of sometimes quite intense examination of characters’ inner motives; and both ultimately move towards the metaphor of music made up of many individual instruments as a way of apprehending the cosmic story (and Stapledon’s declaration that “There is no music without the torture of the strings” might have interested Lindsay).

John Wyndham’s Chocky (1963) is a much more readable take on the theme of the alien/futuristic visitor inside one’s own head. I’m sure Wyndham must have read at least some of Stapledon’s works, and wouldn’t be surprised if he’d read them all. Whether he remembered it while writing Chocky is debatable, but there’s a hint of Stapledon’s cosmic vision in Chocky’s parting statement about intelligent life being “the rarest thing in creation, but the most precious. It is the only thing that gives meaning to the universe. Without it, nothing begins, nothing ends…”

Last Men in London is not one of Stapledon’s essential works, but it does make interesting reading as a historical document (its insights into the postwar mood), and as a transition point in Stapledon’s own creative direction: here, he’s working out how to take the themes of Last and First Men and apply them to his evident interest in the philosophical development of an individual. His treatment of Paul’s life is rather distant and unengaging, but he ends the novel with a short episode in which Paul, as a teacher, encounters a weird-looking child prodigy who proves to be, like the next novel’s “Odd John”, a throw-forward to the next step in human evolution. Writing Last Men in London, then, perhaps showed Stapledon the way he should be going, and which he’d do more successfully in both Odd John and Sirius.

In 1934, the Australian writer Vera Dwyer visited England after her latest novel, In Pursuit of Patrick (1933), had been republished here by John Lane. She wrote a series of articles detailing her literary encounters during the trip (mostly with long-forgotten names such as Hamilton Fyfe and Rose Fyleman, but also JB Priestley and Richmal Crompton), the third of which included a visit to EH Visiak. Not really an interview so much as a brief sketch, it nevertheless gives a little glimpse into the sort of person Visiak was.

Dwyer was the daughter of journalist George Lovell Dwyer, and had been born in Hobart, Tasmania in 1889. She’d married in 1915 a bare few weeks before her husband was sent to fight in the First World War, but the couple divorced in 1925. Her writing career began with a story published at the age of 9, and continued with a children’s book, With Beating Wings (1913), written in her teens. Her adult novel In Pursuit of Patrick is described in a review by The Australian Worker as “a brightly-written book about a Bright Young Thing who chases a Bright Young Man through 200 pages, and over thousands of miles of land and sea”. She died in 1967.

Visiak would have been 55 or 56 at the time, and, from my attempts to work out where he lived throughout his life, seems to have moved this year, some time between March and June, from 30 Cavendish Road in Brondesbury (where he’d lived since at least 1911, and where he’d run his Ascham House preparatory school for boys) to 38 Rutland Park Mansions in Willesden (which suits the description of “a tall, narrow house” in the article, and is close to a railway line). The other writer mentioned as attending this soirée, whom Dwyer calls Visello, must be Arthur Vesselo (1911–2000), who collaborated with Visiak on the story “I Am a Murderer”, which appeared in Thrills, Crimes and Mysteries in 1935, and whose output, according to the FictionMags Index, seems to have been confined to a year either side of this article. He later became a film critic, writing for Sight and Sound, before becoming head of the Central Film Library in London (now absorbed into the BFI).

Dwyer’s article was titled “Meeting the Authors”, and appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald Women’s Supplement, on 20 November 1934:

While I was journeying from Australia to England, a girl who had joined the ship at Port Said, and at whose parents’ home in London I was later to enjoy much pleasant hospitality, gave me an autographed copy of a book entitled “Milton Agonistes—A Metaphysical Criticism,” by E. H. Visiak. It was not very hopefully that I set out to read this highly analytical work, for I am not a Milton scholar, and I feared that many of its allusions would be lost upon me, but I soon discovered that there was so much beauty of thought and phrasing, such a luminous quality in Visiak’s prose, that I was able to enjoy it deeply for its own sake.

In the days that followed I read some of his verses, of which John Masefield himself has expressed admiration. Indeed, although this writer’s work is not much known in Australia, and has no wide popular appeal in his own country, it is held in high esteem by many of his fellow-authors, and when, shortly before I left England, Mr. Visiak gave an afternoon’s reading of his poems at a public hall in London, it was attended by some of the most famous literary men in the land, including Walter de la Mare.

He has written some fine sea chanties and poems about ships. He is not a traveller, but the romance of the sea is in his Cornish blood, and has inspired him to write several novels, too, among them “The Haunted Island” and “Medusa,” a piratical tale, with elements of mysticism and horror, published by Gollancz.

All I heard of his unusual personality interested me, and I was pleased, some weeks after my arrival in London, to receive an invitation to Sunday evening supper at Mr. Visiak’s home, in company with my ship-board friend.

Our host proved to be a tall, thin, worn-looking man, who lived with his mother in a tall, narrow house which, though not handsomely furnished, was stored with unusual treasures, like the mind of its occupant. He showed me his collection of Milton portraits, his books, his models of ships, a pewter jug which Charles Dickens had given to his grandfather, and many curious old prints and engravings.

After supper we sat in the unlighted study, while the summer dust gathered slowly, until the room was filled with gloom, illuminated at intervals by lights flashing through the windows from trains passing along an overheard bridge in the near distance, while a stimulating discussion took place on the problem of good and evil, in which another of the guests, a short-story writer named Visello, took an active part. There were some fine threads of argument to follow, spun from Mr. Visiak’s deep delving among ancient and forgotten books.

I have seldom felt farther away from the modern world, with its often cheap and crude sophistication, its artificiality and blatant commercialism, than in that dim London sitting-room, with the busy traffic flashing and rumbling by outside.

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For a second, more amusing, glimpse of Visiak the literary man, there’s this from The Biggleswade Chronicle, 9th April 1937:

Sir Arnold Wilson, MP for Hitchin, and Mr E H Visiak, the novelist, were involved in a misunderstanding at the centenary celebrations of Swinburne’s birth, on Monday night. Mr Visiak was proposing a vote of thanks to earlier speakers, and was speaking on the merits of Swinburne, when Sir Arnold, who was chairman, interjected: “You are here to move a vote of thanks, not to go on eulogising Swinburne.” Sir Arnold said afterwards, “I was chairman of the meeting, when he had spoken for some time on Swinburne, which was not the purpose of his speech. I used my authority as chairman and told him that he was moving a vote of thanks. Mr Visiak misunderstood my motive, and I think he must have forgotten that I was chairman. I meant no discourtesy to the speaker.”

A sequel of sorts is to be found (oddly, three days earlier) in the Manchester Evening News:

Having slept on the matter, Mr E H Visiak the writer whose speech at the Poetry Society’s Swinburne centenary celebrations was interrupted by Sir Arnold Wilson, MP, feels that no apology from Sir Arnold is called for.

“It is true that Sir Arnold used the words, ‘You’re here to move a vote of thanks to me, not to go on eulogising Swinburne,’” Mr. Visiak told me to-day. “I am content to treat that as a jocular but justified reminder that I had gone on talking a bit too long.

“Sir Arnold is a great personal friend of mine, and I am sure that he did not mean to be offensive.”

Four years have passed since the events of the previous two books in Jenny Nimmo’s Snow Spider trilogy, and The Chestnut Soldier (first published in 1989) feels a bit more grown-up, with boy magician Gwyn nearly thirteen and starting to notice girls in a different way (he thinks Nia Lloyd’s sixteen-year-old sister Catrin the most beautiful girl in Wales, but “Lately he had found it difficult to talk to her”). The narrative is divided between Gwyn and the now eleven-year-old Nia (the main character in Emlyn’s Moon), with Gwyn no longer feeling like the distant and wise boy-magician from the second book: he’s trying not to use his “power” (as he’s come to call it, thinking the word “magic” childish), partly because he keeps getting it wrong and making mistakes, but also because he feels he should be taller by now and is worried magic is stunting his growth.

One day, the Lloyds learn that their mother’s cousin, Evan Llŷr, is coming to stay. It has been ten years since they last saw him, and he’s now a major in the British Army. He has, though, been wounded somehow, and is seeking a place to convalesce. In his thirties, handsome and mysterious, he comes across instantly as something of a romantic figure. Nia thinks him “the prince from every fairy tale; he was fierce and kind—and immensely troubled”, and every woman in the narrative from Nia to Gwyn’s grandmother Nain are under his spell. Particularly so is Catrin, who neglects her boyfriend, an Irish lad called Patrick McGoohan, who likes to ride by on his horse to be admired, but now finds himself ignored.

The mystery of Evan’s “wound” takes a while to come out. It’s not physical. He went into a burning building while posted in Belfast, to rescue some of his men who were trapped inside, but he was the only one to escape alive. These elements—his being a soldier, an association with fire, and a potential friction with the Irish—act as a sort of mythic-magnetic pull between him and a story that has already appeared in the first volume of the series, the legend of Efnisien, who maimed the King of Ireland’s horses when the King came over to marry Efnisien’s sister, and whose angry spirit became trapped in the broken wooden horse that was among Nain’s gifts to the young Gwyn. Now, this wooden horse uses Nia’s younger brother Iolo to get itself free of Gwyn’s control, and the spirit of Efnisien enters, or blends with, Evan.

After this, Evan becomes increasingly dark and cruel. Poltergeist activity begins to surround him, breaking young Iolo’s toy horses and Idris Llewelyn’s carved unicorn, and driving Patrick McGoohan’s horse, Glory, to madness. Books fall off shelves, plates break, storms descend on the town, and the Lloyd home looks like it’s been hit by an earthquake. Catrin is hopelessly drawn to Evan, even when his kiss is rough and not at all to her liking. He becomes a sort of Heathcliff figure, romantic and dangerous in a way that skews into the supernatural.

Gwyn realises he has to do something, and after another few failed attempts which increasingly convince him he was never meant to be a magician at all, travels back in time to speak with his ancestor, Gwydion Gwyn, to work out how to deal with this demonic force. (Gwydion, who anachronistically asks “You’re not blaming your genes, are you?”, assures him that he, too, made plenty of mistakes.)

Like the preceding book in the trilogy, the supernatural element in The Chestnut Soldier enters gradually, at first being indistinguishable from the story of a troubled but handsome man suddenly entering the lives of the Lloyds. But unlike with Emlyn’s Moon, there’s not so much of an alternative story to be going on with while the supernatural builds. (In addition, although there’s just as much light comedy as in the previous book, it doesn’t feel as light, couched as it is amongst much more serious-seeming darkness.) In both books, everything is resolved in a brief but confusing showdown involving magic and mythical figures, but whereas in Emlyn’s Moon this released all the tension in the mundane narrative in a way that made sense, here it’s unclear how—or if—Evan’s real-life troubledness is fixed along with his supernatural possession. Things are resolved, but they don’t really feel resolved—though this could be taken as part of the series’ growing up along with its characters, having them face messier situations and messier resolutions.

I was disappointed to find no return of the faerie-like “White People” from the first two books, particularly as they were the most intriguing element, for me. Here, Gwyn only thinks of them briefly, to note that his sister is surely happy with them, so he feels no need to try and bring her back, and besides, he’s grown up and she is now a perpetual child, so what would the two have to talk about? It seems rather dismissive and cold, particularly as I can’t help thinking that Bethan’s supposed happiness with the fairy folk is the sort of happiness a cult member has with their cult—it may require deprogramming to reveal it’s not happiness at all. (I think The Snow Spider could do with a Boneland-style sequel, where an adult Gwyn has to either rescue his sister properly, or at least face up to the reality of what happened to her.)

Like Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (which Nimmo hadn’t read, at least before writing the first book in the series), myth, here, is a thing that threatens to take over modern generations, replaying its tragedies and re-inflicting its suffering. But unlike in The Owl Service, Gwyn’s approach is to fight myth with myth: just as Evan becomes infected with the mythic presence of Efnisian, Gwyn allows himself to become, in part, his ancestor Gwydion Gwyn. (Which leads to some comic moments, as this Welsh ancient’s presence in Gwyn leads to him suddenly finding all sorts of aspects of modern life hard to deal with. Only, as this happens in the final chapters, with the darkness around Evan building, it’s hard to really feel the comedy.)

The series ends with Gwyn saying “I’m grateful for the adventure but I don’t believe I’ll need magic for a while.” Which leaves things somewhat unresolved—he’s still evidently living in a world where myth leaks through into reality, so how does he know he’s not going to need it?

For me, this may be the least successful of three books. The Snow Spider worked as an introduction to the difficulties and wonders of this world of myth and magic; Emlyn’s Moon was the most satisfying as a novel, with its nicely-balanced magical and mundane storylines; The Chestnut Soldier seems almost consciously messier, reflecting the main characters’ entry into adolescence and an awareness of greater moral ambiguity, but ultimately ending in a mood where the characters just felt they’d outgrown magic, as though it were their choice to make, in a world that seems dangerously fraught with myths and faerie.

Like its predecessors, The Chestnut Soldier was adapted for television, being broadcast in four parts in 1991 (produced by HTV Cymru/Wales), running from Wednesday 20th November to 11th December, and retaining all the same actors for the main roles. Interestingly, in McGown and Docherty’s encyclopaedic look at children’s TV drama, The Hill and Beyond, they say: “The Chestnut Soldier loses the subtlety of its predecessors, opting instead for a more teen angst approach”—but as I’ve said, this feels true of the book, too. I can’t help wondering how this third instalment would have been dealt with had the 2020 BBC adaptation got this far. On the one hand, that series clearly implied that there was going to be more of a showdown with the faerie-like people who’d taken Gwyn’s sister, and their by no means friendly intentions; on the other, how would a 2020s adaptation have dealt with the romantic relationship between sixteen-year-old Catrin and thirty-something Evan? It’s accepted without comment in the book (even from Catrin’s mother), but I can’t imagine how it would have been treated in the style of the more careful 2020 version of The Snow Spider.