Come Back Sweet Time

To lace a man up in the armour of youth. The fleshy body held taut, is forced upright, is pulled thin by a corset tight and hard; hardly any breath to breathe.

We watch as the corset is removed, the flesh tumbling down the man’s sickly frame; his body falling, collapsing, melting…

We are looking at Reynard through metaphors - that stained glass prose of literature - and we see not skin, not fat, nor muscle, but the inside of a man’s mind as it falls to pieces. We are in the company of a civilian who habituated to the luxurious austerity of an army at war can no longer cope with the laxities of peace; he is breaking down; his mind blown to bits by comfort and quietude.

Leaning, now, against the gate into the fields, it seemed to him that the very countryside itself was exerting upon him an invisible, indefinable pressure, producing, in his fatigued brain, an intolerable sense of confinement. At the same time, the features of the landscape took on a peculiar appearance of unreality, as though seen through a distorting lens, or reproduced by some inferior photographic process.

The sensation, unpleasant as it was, caused him no surprise; for some weeks past he had suffered from this disquieting sense of ‘unreality’, and he had already, to some extent, come to terms with it. It was though he were living under a glass bell, through which he was able to perceive the normal features of the world, but which prohibited him from any direct contact with it. The illusion was strengthened by an actual degeneration, slight but unmistakable, in his sensory perceptions; his sense of smell had become defective - perhaps due to a chronic catarrh - and his hearing, too, was slightly impaired…

He fixed his eyes now upon the ground near his feet, where, in the thickening dusk, he could just detect a clump of Herb-Robert, its delicate pink blossoms vaguely defined against the darker mass of leaves. The plant, so familiar, rooted with so natural a grace in the hedge-bank, gave him a certain fleeting solace. As though to confirm his relationship with the exterior world, he pulled out a cigarette and lit it; but the cigarette was tasteless - it was some time now since he had been able to enjoy the flavour of tobacco - and the habitual motions of smoking seemed curiously unreal, as though he were watching somebody performing the action in a jerky, old-fashioned film.

He raised his eyes once again to the lighted window across the valley; but the last vestiges of his pleasure in the sight had drained away from him, he was aware now only of the intolerable sense of captivity which awaited him in the warm, fire-lit room.

Reynard Langrish has returned to post-war Britain; living with his deaf mother and working in the local bank he is once again subsumed into the commonplace rituals of an ordinary life. But peace and simple activity no longer satisfy. They are making him malignly sad. This is a man lost, living in a desolate borderland, pushed forth and back between two psychological foes who together destroy his mental health, he has no idea how to change his disconsolate existence. The first and most immediate foe is the squeezing claustrophobia of village life: the war has magnified its narrowness, whose boredom and undemanding repetitiveness overwhelm him with its banal emptiness, now felt with a special intensity. The local community, with its unvarying routines and its easy comforts, is producing a mental laxness that dribbles the liveliness out of a soul becoming dry with depression and neurosis. For these routines of civilian life, although giving structure to Reynard’s days, are yet too loose to give them meaning. The last war is the other malign force. The army inculcated a strong purpose through its harsh and regular rituals that in forcing the body into relentless activity enriched the soul with meaningful energy. Suddenly it all ends. The demobilised soldier drifts and is forlorn. The war over, the army left behind, there is little to replace such intense busyness; the individual relaxes and losing all purpose suffers the ennui of liberty. A mind becoming flabby and weak becomes susceptible to the illusory calls of an imaginary past, where life is believed once rich and full; this is the feel of past meaning transformed within the soul’s imagination into a pictorial paradise, where it condemns all present existence. The despondency intensifies as his isolation increases.

Reynard finds it hard living in this pleasant valley. But the war is over. There is no going back. And so he suffers the pain of unfulfilled yearning; hobbling along between a past and a future that is the melancholy present always. It is terrible; the sadness increasing each time he walks to the bank, works his eight hours, and returns home at the end of the day; where not even his mother’s music can assuage him. The joy of life has drained away. He must escape! There is nowhere to go. Only a fantasy is left: Reynard dreams of returning to the army… 

Roy Archer steps out of the night and invites Reynard join a special battalion. The secrecy, the glamour, the exhilaration of hard exercise, the harsh camaraderie; it is the freedom of servitude! Such promises are wonderful! The past has been metamorphosed into a magical fairy tale by this man’s presence, a wizard making the impossible miraculously possible. Reynard feels electrically alive. He is so happy! This is a holiday; if only… No. It will not last. Every dream must end; this dreamer woken up by the harsh illuminating light of one difficult morning: it is the first day in December, the deadline date for enlistment.

To-day, however, he paused longer than usual by the large dugout. Should he or should he not go in and explore it? The question seemed fraught, on this occasion, with an absurdly disproportionate gravity. He stood by the entrance, beneath the motionless, dripping trees, intolerably aware of the conflict between the positive and negative poles of his being. The magnetic ‘pull’ of each pole seemed almost exactly balanced against the other, so as to produce a complete inhibition of his will. It seemed to him, indeed, as he stood there, that he had no will left: the power even of physical movement had deserted him, he was rooted to the chalky woodland floor as firmly as the beeches themselves. This, he thought, was precisely what it must feel like to be a beech tree; and once again he felt the familiar process beginning - the centrifugal dispersal of identity, the ‘unbecoming’ of his very self. The sensation produced in him a sense of profound hopelessness: he would perhaps never see Roy again; nothing remained for him, now, but the monotonous, circumscribed life which he hated, but from which there seemed no prospect of escape.

The tug-of-war is reaching its climax. Reynard has to make a decision. The time is getting close. Today. This minute! Make your bloody mind up man! It is now that our hero remembers the awfulness of the army, with its loss of liberty; there is the abuse, the violence, the exhaustion; there is the unseemly proximity to other male flesh… Today he cannot endure such privations. Just the thought is ghastly, the whole thing made repulsive as the real memories rushing back overwhelm his delightful fantasises. The actuality of army life, he now realises, is far more horrible than the meaninglessness and claustrophobia of his mother’s cottage. Faced with an inexorable choice he finds that on balance he prefers a civilian’s liberty. On balance… Ah! if only he didn't have to choose. If today he didn’t… On balance… Make your bloody mind up! But…but… Still he cannot decide; he temporises.

Reynard’s sanity begins to crumble.1 He misses the deadline and so makes a decision by default, thereby suffering, in addition to the usual ills of village existence, the excruciating guilt over his own weak will; while, with those aeroplanes in the sky and the soldiers guarding the country lanes, he still lingers around a fading fantasy. Roy Archer rejects him. The dream is disappearing… It is now that Reynard collapses; his imaginary story takes over his life to become his only reality, transforming the fairy tale into a modern gothic horror-show, as madness first monopolises then tortures a helpless mind.2

Wandering around the hills Reynard stumbles into an army camp; where he is forced to enlist, and then held against his will, more prisoner than recruit. This army is being experienced as an oppressive machine that erases all the civilised virtues; Reynard feeling intensely the loss of a civilian’s freedoms. From the penthouse suite of an idealised romance he has taken the lift to the basement, with its cells overflowing with horror and despair. Trapped inside a mental dungeon, tortured by his own imagination as it obsesses on the worst aspects of army life, which he exaggerates, he finds there is no way out; an existence bleak, unrelenting and especially cruel to those who want desperately to leave it. We imagine a dandy stuck in a coal black cellar; it is dank, the pipes clatter, there is no one to talk to; hearing what he thinks is a rat, he creates a dozen compatriots, multiplies them by a hundred, a thousand; it is a marauding army… Yet even here there are moments of ecstasy; the exhaustion that comes of relentless activity producing odd moments of peace crystallising into epiphany.

At tea-time a sense of warm, relaxed well-being stole over him: he felt almost happy, and even found himself exchanging a few friendly words with a chance companion. The monotonous patois of the Army no longer seemed him alien and pointless, but pleasant and even rather beautiful - a crude, homespun fabric of friendliness, a basis of possible intimacy. Faces which had previously seemed to him repellent or subhuman were suddenly, in this tolerant mood of after-tea, transfigured; they had become friendly, kind, humorous - even in some cases positively handsome. Reynard was aware, once again, of a curious sense of relief, a perverse and inexplicable joy at his enforced servitude.

Madness doesn't stay still. Insanity enjoys no equilibrium. Unable to cope with the rigours of the camp, which are made far worse by his new rebellious spirit - the counter pull of civilian life is refusing to accept conscription - Reynard tries to escape. It is futile. All refuge has gone. There can be no return to the simple life, to sanity. The despair ratchets up as he suffers the worst degradations of being a soldier: severely punished for his insubordination, he is to receive a hundred lashes of the cat-o’-nine-tails… Trapped inside a mind punishing itself. For this is no modern army. We are not in Britain in the 1940s - neither Churchill nor Attlee instigated martial law. This is an imaginary world. A horror movie. An undemanding life has been made intolerable by ennui, memory, and by an imagination set free by depression: Reynard collapses completely. We can trust nothing he says; must investigate all that he believes and sees. Fighting his own private war he kills two strangers - Archer and a tramp - who he previously met in the valley, and around whom he has created a phantasmagoria; returning to the abandoned cottage, by now a ruin, he finds his mother decomposing in the bedroom… Less a real scene than the very texture of a bombed out mind, shattered fragments and burnt out furniture having replaced the old cosy order. Reynard is mad. This is one kind of liberty. Now he can make his choice. He returns to the camp to be locked up, sentenced and executed. Free! at last.3

This is an extraordinary novel, reading like Kafka yet populated by real, identifiable people.4 They agitate our doubts. For although we think that the action occurs only inside the hero’s mind we are only guessing; this is our way of making sense of this strange, discombobulating book. And yet… We wonder… It is a puzzle… Could it, could it really be the real thing? Devastating! Fabulous!5



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1. For a brilliant study of a mental breakdown caused by the inability to choose between what feels like two impossible alternatives see The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall.

2. Tomalin and Hall make the important distinction between believing in an idea and embodying that idea as a real presence. There is an ocean of difference in thinking it possible that the mind can leave the body and thinking that your mind has actually floated free of all physical constraints; a purely mental existence Crowhurst’s only solution to his impossible dilemma.

3. The affinities with J.G. Ballard are strong. And with Crowhurst too - he made the same choice.

4. In a 1960s' quiz show (Take It Or Leave It) John Gross highlighted a feature of Kafka that in his opinion makes him not quite of the greats - his characters are too flat, mere types.

5. We are in the company of a madman who believes himself sane; and we have no way of knowing if his belief is false, for we are reading the book from Reynard’s point of view; no distance given to see him from the outside. Only the unlikeliness of what is described makes us sceptical about these experiences. 

Our worry, especially towards the end, is that Reynard’s experiences will be explained away as dreams. Thank god no! This author risks the reader’s displeasure; Brooke prepared both to confuse and lose us, so we leave the book with doubts about its true nature. 

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