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 and her friend Vivien, two intelligent young women trying to find their way in pre-Depression Britain. The pair have little patience for the company of the marriageable men they are meant to endure, yet neither possesses the means to live as they wish. Then Virgilio Vittore arrives: a foreign poet, playwright, athlete and soldier, who has 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? Or should the women, having arrived in this chaotic land, where love, life and politics must submit to the rules of the beautiful, go back at once?
Curiouser and Curiouser
All of Aickman’s tales (he wrote 48 in all) include some kind of supernatural element. ‘Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal’ is a vampire story, ‘Ringing the Changes’ is a zombie story,...
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