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Chaos is Come Again

Claude Houghton

3.80 · Rating details · 5 ratings · 1 review

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Paperback, 311 pages

Published 1938 by Penguin Books (first published 1932)

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Sep 12, 2014 Stevedutch rated it really liked it

Having been astonished by his earlier book, ‘I am Jonathan Scrivener’, published two years previously, I hunted round for any others from the same period and this fitted the bill perfectly. Unsurprisingly, there are several similarities: the earlier novel featured the ‘absent’ and enigmatic Jonathon Scrivener who, consequently, became the book’s focus around whom all the events of the novel were woven. ‘Chaos’ also features someone; Sir Keith Petersley, who becomes one of its leading figures but Having been astonished by his earlier book, ‘I am Jonathan Scrivener’, published two years previously, I hunted round for any others from the same period and this fitted the bill perfectly. Unsurprisingly, there are several similarities: the earlier novel featured the ‘absent’ and enigmatic Jonathon Scrivener who, consequently, became the book’s focus around whom all the events of the novel were woven. ‘Chaos’ also features someone; Sir Keith Petersley, who becomes one of its leading figures but who is absent for most of the time. Both of these lead characters employ a ‘third person’ to fulfil similar roles, and who acts as a lens through which the narrative unfolds. In the earlier book, James Wrexham is taken on by Scrivener, ostensibly, to catalogue the books in his London apartment’s library. In ‘Chaos’, Vernon Dexter is employed to be the tutor of Petersley’s seven year old son, Eric, who remains immobile after being dropped as a two year old.

The Petersley’s are an odd bunch and, minus the errant patriarch, either inhabit a decaying stately pile called Greystones, situated somewhere deep in the English countryside, or live close by. There is no money and Dexter never gets paid and barely fed but luckily he has an independent income, which allows him to pursue a career he enjoys knowing that as soon as he stops doing so he can simply give it up. Aside, from Eric there are four adult children; Adrian, from Petersley’s first marriage, who is a brilliant award winning architect, Clive, a self-pitying milksop who ‘works’ in a job through his social ‘connections’, Myrtle, a late twenty-something spinster obsessed with the local self-obsessed curate who is clearly off his trolley, and Anna, the youngest at twenty, who is beautiful, feisty and kind. Petersley’s second wife, Lady Isabel, is desperately in love with her absent husband, who makes no secret of his affair with a leading actress. She, therefore, invents for herself a dream world which she inhabits in self-inflicted seclusion barely leaving a private apartment within the crumbling great house itself.

Having sought out an ‘interesting position with interesting people’ Dexter immerses himself in their motley and often absurd lives just as, in ‘Scrivener’, Wrexham becomes immersed in the lives of the friends of Scrivener who call at the flat in his absence and through whom he begins to piece together a mosaic of the man himself.

There is much to admire in this later book: the writing, as in the earlier, is exquisite and Houghton uses his characters to give voice to his own opinions on the ‘state of the Empire’ – this was published in 1932 - and the descent of man into the chaos alluded to in the title. However, regrettably, instead of coming to a satisfying conclusion, it rather peters out and, as such, is worth only 4 stars. Nevertheless, this is still very much worth a read.
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Valancourt Books: Chaos is Come Again (1932) by Claude Houghton	3	14	Dec 20, 2015 04:48AM

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About Claude Houghton

Claude Houghton

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Claude Houghton Oldfield was born in 1889 in Sevenoaks, Kent and was educated at Dulwich College. He trained as an accountant and worked in the Admiralty in the First World War, rejected for active service by poor eyesight. In 1920 he married a West End actress, Dulcie Benson, and they lived in a cottage in the Chiltern Hills. To a writers’ directory, Houghton gave his hobbies as reading in bed, r ...more