I really like Aickman's 'strange stories' and was curious to see if his writing would hold up over a full-length novel (finished in 1975 but unpublished until 2020).

Go Back at Once follows Cressida and Vivien, young women fresh out of boarding school who like quoting Shakespeare and hate boredom. After several horrible parties and a hilariously bizarre psychoanalysis session, they run off with Viven's aunt to the Adriatic city-state of ~~Fiume~~ Trino where ~~Gabriele D'Annunzio~~ 'Virgilio Vittore' is governing according to the 'laws of music'. The rest of the book consists of increasingly surreal run-ins with Vittore's eccentric devotees until the whole thing predictably implodes.

I'm happy to say that the absence of the supernatural did not impede Aickman's talent for being weird & unsettling. A bit like David Lynch, he's brilliant at creating images and scenes that feel significant at a pre-conscious level. A huge flock of birds is released during a banquet and the male guests stand up to fire tiny pistols at it. The city floods and a captured boat placed in the central square as a trophy starts sailing down the street -- below decks sailors(?) are singing 'The Internationale'. Cressida falls ill watching an unspecified spectacle of staged cruelty and has a vaguely homoerotic encounter with Vittore's 'sister' (possibly the goddess Diana?). A man called "The Professor" lives in a house that used to belong to a serial killer and hammers out tunes on a piano lined with human teeth.

An oneiric thread: Cressida dreams of being caged, tied up, suspended, while libidinous men fight and speak in unintelligible voices. Another character has night terrors, another is a somnambulist. Trino is a dream-city, where poems are posted on the public squares and the government officers preside over theater productions. Most of the action happens at night in labyrinthine halls. Interactions are inexplicably loaded with the threat of sex and/or violence, though it is rarely glimpsed directly. What does it all mean? Early in the novel, the psychoanalyst Dr. Blattner puts it best: "It is a common saying among analysts -- perhaps the only saying we all share -- that in analysis all is revealed in the first interview if only the analyst can divine it, which, of course, the analyst cannot and must not."

GBaO is also wickedly funny. Cressida's ingenuous narrative lens gets a bit annoying (and is definitely a bit sexist) but it does make a fantastic foil for both the self-important pronouncements of Vittore's entourage (made even funnier by Vittore's conspicuous absence) and the self-important mediocrity of London's high society. There's also lots of dryly funny imagery, e.g. "there were boudoir-designed furnishings, the colour of dried skeletons on the steppes."

I still think his short stories are his best work, but I had way more fun with this than I was expecting and would definitely recommend it to other weird-fiction aficionados.

(Also, given the origins of this site I'd tentatively describe this as 'rs-coded'. Aickman (closeted, catty, elitist, vaguely reactionary) would have made a great guest on the pod.)

Go Back at Once

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