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Windmill Hill Sequence #1
Centres of ritual
352 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1978
10 people want to read
About the author
Stuart Evans
14 books1 followeraka Hugh Tracy.
Stuart Evans was born in Swansea in 1934 and brought up at Ystalyfera in Glamorgan. It was as a novelist that he established his reputation, with eight long, technically complex novels which are more inclined to the philosophical than is usual in English fiction. They include Meritocrats (1974), The Gardens of the Casino (1976), The Caves of Alienation (1977), and a quintet known as The Windmill Hill Sequence. He also published two volumes of verse, Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads (1972) and The Function of the Fool (1997). He died in 1994.
Stuart Evans was born in Swansea in 1934 and brought up at Ystalyfera in Glamorgan. It was as a novelist that he established his reputation, with eight long, technically complex novels which are more inclined to the philosophical than is usual in English fiction. They include Meritocrats (1974), The Gardens of the Casino (1976), The Caves of Alienation (1977), and a quintet known as The Windmill Hill Sequence. He also published two volumes of verse, Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads (1972) and The Function of the Fool (1997). He died in 1994.
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August 28, 2018
“Reviewing a novel by Stuart Evans is rather like being a nervous guest at a gathering of talking heads. Greatly as I admire his Windmill Hill sequence...I have never been entirely sure what was going on...” Anita Brookner
A company of dons, politicians, journalists, students, and social scientists talk and – more frequently – meditate on political events, social mores, and the way we live now in the long hot summer of 1976. At their core is the “Highgate Group” – an attempt to create a new, liberal-minded, pro-European party of the middle-ground from disaffected Labour MPs, post-Thorpe-affair Liberals, and Heathite Conservatives. Sounds like a novel about the Social Democrats? Yes, in a way, but presciently so – since the SDP was formed in 1981 and Centres of Ritual was published in 1978.
A lot of contemporary British politics washes through the book, but it is essentially a background against which the protagonists think and talk, and examine themselves and each other – often scathingly. It is effortlessly witty, erudite, and well-informed. Stuart Evans gives no quarter to the reader, who is plunged into a series of unidentified first and third-person accounts – including letters – which took me about 50 pages to untangle. A sharper reader would, I daresay, do better. Amongst these accounts are extracts from a satirical roman a clef written by one of the journalists which added wonderfully to my initial confusion.
The latter piece of metafiction allows Stuart Evans to go well over the top. I like an author who can throw out an introductory sentence like: “The rubicund, haginicholine face of Barnaby Freeth registered all the sense of revelatory alarm that must have been Ebenezer Scrooge’s on Christmas morning.” Haginicholine? Smashing.
The whole book is engaging and a pleasure to read, although very little happens. The tone is somewhat downbeat – the slow death of liberal democracy – but it is not clear (at least to me) whether this is the author’s viewpoint or that of the Highgate Group, all of whom are wittingly or unwittingly patrician and elitist. As some of them realize, they don’t actually like “the people” all that much. A disenchanted (and promiscuous) Labour MP despises them and their left-wing anti-European sentiments: “I look up from my premature Transylvanian grave at the bovine peasantry watching in sullen triumph above my elegant catafalque as the possessed puritan plunges the left-handed stake into my liberal rib-cage. And they line up their mallets.” All of which remains pertinent today.
The titles of all the books in this sequence come from a text on the archaeology of Windmill Hill above Avebury and a further theme concerns the fragments that make up past histories and our own; what records or artefacts survive by chance and how they may be interpreted in the future. Perhaps this is why Stuart Evans captures the year 1976 so painstakingly in this first novel of the sequence. All the more sad, therefore, that these books are now almost wholly forgotten and unread.
A company of dons, politicians, journalists, students, and social scientists talk and – more frequently – meditate on political events, social mores, and the way we live now in the long hot summer of 1976. At their core is the “Highgate Group” – an attempt to create a new, liberal-minded, pro-European party of the middle-ground from disaffected Labour MPs, post-Thorpe-affair Liberals, and Heathite Conservatives. Sounds like a novel about the Social Democrats? Yes, in a way, but presciently so – since the SDP was formed in 1981 and Centres of Ritual was published in 1978.
A lot of contemporary British politics washes through the book, but it is essentially a background against which the protagonists think and talk, and examine themselves and each other – often scathingly. It is effortlessly witty, erudite, and well-informed. Stuart Evans gives no quarter to the reader, who is plunged into a series of unidentified first and third-person accounts – including letters – which took me about 50 pages to untangle. A sharper reader would, I daresay, do better. Amongst these accounts are extracts from a satirical roman a clef written by one of the journalists which added wonderfully to my initial confusion.
The latter piece of metafiction allows Stuart Evans to go well over the top. I like an author who can throw out an introductory sentence like: “The rubicund, haginicholine face of Barnaby Freeth registered all the sense of revelatory alarm that must have been Ebenezer Scrooge’s on Christmas morning.” Haginicholine? Smashing.
The whole book is engaging and a pleasure to read, although very little happens. The tone is somewhat downbeat – the slow death of liberal democracy – but it is not clear (at least to me) whether this is the author’s viewpoint or that of the Highgate Group, all of whom are wittingly or unwittingly patrician and elitist. As some of them realize, they don’t actually like “the people” all that much. A disenchanted (and promiscuous) Labour MP despises them and their left-wing anti-European sentiments: “I look up from my premature Transylvanian grave at the bovine peasantry watching in sullen triumph above my elegant catafalque as the possessed puritan plunges the left-handed stake into my liberal rib-cage. And they line up their mallets.” All of which remains pertinent today.
The titles of all the books in this sequence come from a text on the archaeology of Windmill Hill above Avebury and a further theme concerns the fragments that make up past histories and our own; what records or artefacts survive by chance and how they may be interpreted in the future. Perhaps this is why Stuart Evans captures the year 1976 so painstakingly in this first novel of the sequence. All the more sad, therefore, that these books are now almost wholly forgotten and unread.
Displaying 1 of 1 review