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The Inner Wheel
Collection of three novellas by British science fiction writer Keith Roberts (1935-2000). The Inner Wheel (1965); The Death of Libby Maynard (1970); The Everything Man (1970).
203 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1970
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 6, 2017
[In the unlikely event anyone else reads this book]. It is reminiscent of classic era Doctor Who or The Avengers in tapping into the sense of strange forces that may lie hidden in English villages, along the water meadows or by the church. A group with paranormal insight have gathered in a little town in the West Country, to which they lure the unsuspecting Jimmy Stringer. Through his eyes we see the force of the Gestalt Mind. The second part shows the super mind from the inside, the temptations and manipulations of Elizabeth Maynard to acquire power. Finally it turns Rogue Male, as the psychic bands come into conflict with the military. The writing is crisp and evocative, and worth £2 second hand. Incidentally, only a year later David Bowie was singing about making way for the Homo Superior; something in the cultural air in early 70s England.
February 3, 2026
Perhaps a bit unconventionally, this is my first reading of Keith Roberts, whereas most tend to start with his apparent masterpiece, Pavanne. Like that book, The Inner Wheel reads as a novel assembled from discrete episodes - three sequences that try to braid an overarching thread about people with psionic powers living in 20th-century England. Across the three pieces, Roberts gradually builds toward an eventual gestalt mind meant to confront the world on a grand scale.
Roberts writes at a higher caliber than most of his genre contemporaries. Even on the evidence of one novel, I’d feel comfortable arguing he’s a better wordsmith than many writers working in the same period. He was also an illustrator, and approaches detail with a painterly eye - sometimes with excess. For some readers, his elaborations will feel exhaustive. Personally, it mostly felt apt: flavorful, observant language that can be so dense you don’t exactly “retain” it so much as absorb it in the moment, briefly, like falling raindrops. Emotion comes first, and landscape arrives already filtered through character rather than through a neutral, authorial camera-eye that inventories a place before letting anyone live inside it. This later quality I’ve found to be almost entirely unsuccessful across literature.
The three episodes of this novel can be evaluated on their own accord. Although there is both praise and critique to cast across all three. As critique: the novel suffers from some disjointed logic on what it refuses to show and is unbalanced in convincing us to care about each character equally. As praise: this man could write. It’s hard to be ruthless about technique when the baseline talent is this high. Even the missteps feel like just risks of someone writing at full reach, not a systemic failure to control the form.
It seems fair to call this Roberts’s first true novel. Although, the title story first surfaced in anthologies before later publication.
The title story introduces Jimmy Stringer, who receives a large inheritance from his estranged, recently deceased father and decides to leave his life behind in favor of a “nice little town” on the English coast. Almost immediately he begins to sense an ominous atmosphere - something not quite stated, but insistently present and spectral - and that pressure intensifies when he meets a girl named Anne, who introduces him (and us) to a psionic underground. The plot here adheres to a standard science fiction theme - but the sentences are doing the real seduction. Robert’s has a serious precision of observation - his emotionally laden descriptions successfully build a pressure system acting inside of his characters.
The second story isolates the telepath Elizabeth Maynard and follows her coming-of-age as she learns to live inside her psionic power. Roberts is in full command here. I was deeply impressed by how quickly he brings the reader into a state of knowability with Elizabeth - how he doesn’t just show us what she does, but makes her feel like a living consciousness with ordinary human sensibilities. In most novels we see a character, watch them, and modulate through varying degrees of care. Elizabeth, though, becomes a concern because Roberts gives her a density of feeling that never flattens or over-sentimentalizes. Her interiority is textured and rich: words you can live in. Science fiction aside, there’s a level of craft here that would be intimidating in any literary neighborhood. This section is a masterpiece.
The final story is a more complicated experience. It’s quite ambitious from a writerly perspective but conceptually ineffective. After the beautiful whirlwind of Elizabeth Maynard’s life - love destroyed, hearts recycled, identity rebuilt - Roberts pivots to a new focal figure without fully persuading us that the shift is necessary to the novel’s pulse. Jimmy Stringer now stands as a kind of patriarch to an underground gestalt group (Anne, adopted children, Elizabeth folded into its orbit), and he summons his old friend Roley, who becomes a conduit: a lens through which the collective sends him into a chaotic nation to gather and relay information.
The gestalt executes a coordinated psychic strike that cripples communications and military systems and triggers panic, clampdowns, and interrogation. This conceptual shift happens in about a paragraph, with no prior premonition for it’s appearance and demands assent to a moral and geopolitical framework the novel hasn’t earned. This idealistic gestalt unilaterally dismantles British defense without demonstrating either coordination with similar minds elsewhere or any credible substitute for the protection they strip away. Roberts wants us to accept this event as a moral intervention but did not lay the groundwork for our beliefs to form an opinion. The ethics arrive as an all-of-the-sudden fact rather than as something interrogated. Roley is blasted along a disorienting trajectory back toward Elizabeth (who he falls in love with over the course of a few sentences). Roberts applies a technique of fleeting fractals of language that leave the reader to assemble this rushed plot and ethics from fragments. Again, it’s all incredibly well written but the story is outrunning the persuasion.
And yet - even the book’s flaws are cast on a serious talent. The shortcomings feel like an early attempt to force a large idea through an un-calculated form. But the novel is by no means a failure and I heartily recommend it to all readers. Roberts seems like the kind of writer who just needed to be allowed to go his own way. If The Inner Wheel is a first go at the novel form, it’s ambitious, often beautiful - and even when it stumbles - still unmistakably the work of someone who can write.
Roberts writes at a higher caliber than most of his genre contemporaries. Even on the evidence of one novel, I’d feel comfortable arguing he’s a better wordsmith than many writers working in the same period. He was also an illustrator, and approaches detail with a painterly eye - sometimes with excess. For some readers, his elaborations will feel exhaustive. Personally, it mostly felt apt: flavorful, observant language that can be so dense you don’t exactly “retain” it so much as absorb it in the moment, briefly, like falling raindrops. Emotion comes first, and landscape arrives already filtered through character rather than through a neutral, authorial camera-eye that inventories a place before letting anyone live inside it. This later quality I’ve found to be almost entirely unsuccessful across literature.
The three episodes of this novel can be evaluated on their own accord. Although there is both praise and critique to cast across all three. As critique: the novel suffers from some disjointed logic on what it refuses to show and is unbalanced in convincing us to care about each character equally. As praise: this man could write. It’s hard to be ruthless about technique when the baseline talent is this high. Even the missteps feel like just risks of someone writing at full reach, not a systemic failure to control the form.
It seems fair to call this Roberts’s first true novel. Although, the title story first surfaced in anthologies before later publication.
The title story introduces Jimmy Stringer, who receives a large inheritance from his estranged, recently deceased father and decides to leave his life behind in favor of a “nice little town” on the English coast. Almost immediately he begins to sense an ominous atmosphere - something not quite stated, but insistently present and spectral - and that pressure intensifies when he meets a girl named Anne, who introduces him (and us) to a psionic underground. The plot here adheres to a standard science fiction theme - but the sentences are doing the real seduction. Robert’s has a serious precision of observation - his emotionally laden descriptions successfully build a pressure system acting inside of his characters.
The second story isolates the telepath Elizabeth Maynard and follows her coming-of-age as she learns to live inside her psionic power. Roberts is in full command here. I was deeply impressed by how quickly he brings the reader into a state of knowability with Elizabeth - how he doesn’t just show us what she does, but makes her feel like a living consciousness with ordinary human sensibilities. In most novels we see a character, watch them, and modulate through varying degrees of care. Elizabeth, though, becomes a concern because Roberts gives her a density of feeling that never flattens or over-sentimentalizes. Her interiority is textured and rich: words you can live in. Science fiction aside, there’s a level of craft here that would be intimidating in any literary neighborhood. This section is a masterpiece.
The final story is a more complicated experience. It’s quite ambitious from a writerly perspective but conceptually ineffective. After the beautiful whirlwind of Elizabeth Maynard’s life - love destroyed, hearts recycled, identity rebuilt - Roberts pivots to a new focal figure without fully persuading us that the shift is necessary to the novel’s pulse. Jimmy Stringer now stands as a kind of patriarch to an underground gestalt group (Anne, adopted children, Elizabeth folded into its orbit), and he summons his old friend Roley, who becomes a conduit: a lens through which the collective sends him into a chaotic nation to gather and relay information.
The gestalt executes a coordinated psychic strike that cripples communications and military systems and triggers panic, clampdowns, and interrogation. This conceptual shift happens in about a paragraph, with no prior premonition for it’s appearance and demands assent to a moral and geopolitical framework the novel hasn’t earned. This idealistic gestalt unilaterally dismantles British defense without demonstrating either coordination with similar minds elsewhere or any credible substitute for the protection they strip away. Roberts wants us to accept this event as a moral intervention but did not lay the groundwork for our beliefs to form an opinion. The ethics arrive as an all-of-the-sudden fact rather than as something interrogated. Roley is blasted along a disorienting trajectory back toward Elizabeth (who he falls in love with over the course of a few sentences). Roberts applies a technique of fleeting fractals of language that leave the reader to assemble this rushed plot and ethics from fragments. Again, it’s all incredibly well written but the story is outrunning the persuasion.
And yet - even the book’s flaws are cast on a serious talent. The shortcomings feel like an early attempt to force a large idea through an un-calculated form. But the novel is by no means a failure and I heartily recommend it to all readers. Roberts seems like the kind of writer who just needed to be allowed to go his own way. If The Inner Wheel is a first go at the novel form, it’s ambitious, often beautiful - and even when it stumbles - still unmistakably the work of someone who can write.
March 22, 2021
Not quite as good as his very best, which is Pavane, but it still well worth rereading especially if you enjoy well written fantasy. Some might cal it SciFi , but it fits better into the fantasy/horror genre.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews