David Lindsay – författare

Nicholas Cabot, 25 years old and newly endowed with his uncle’s fortune, takes lodgings at the house of retired tragedian Leslie Sturt, intending to devote his time to perfecting an invention for recording dreams.

At the Sturt household, Nicholas hears “Sphinx”, a short piece of piano music by local composer Lore Jensen. Nicholas sees the Sphinx as being the symbol of “The dreams we dream during deep sleep and remember nothing of afterwards…”, while Evelyn, the middle of the three Sturt daughters, says that the Sphinx is asking, “‘Why are you living in the world?’ As none of us can answer it, we all have to die.”

Soon after, Nicholas makes his first successful dream-recording, and finds it predicting a looming tragedy for the now creatively-bankrupt Lore Jensen. Meanwhile, he encounters a Sphinx of his own in the shape of Mrs Hantish, a young widow of whom Sturt says, “I do not think it is to malign her to place her in the fatal category…”

Originally published in 1923, this is the third novel from David Lindsay, author of what Colin Wilson has called “the greatest imaginative work of the twentieth century”, C S Lewis has described as “that shattering, intolerable, and irresistible work”, and Alan Moore has called “less a novel than it is private kabbalah”, A Voyage to Arcturus. Like the “spirit-usher” Backhouse from that novel, Nicholas Cabot seeks to “dream with open eyes”. Sphinx is perhaps David Lindsay’s most autobiographical novel, dealing as it does with the difficulties of pursuing a creative vision in the socially constricted inter-war years of the early 20th Century. It is also, thanks to its depiction of a grand masque and fancy dress ball at a large country house, his most identifiable as being written in the Roaring Twenties.

Ingrid Fleming has always believed a goddess lies buried beneath the forbidding, Devil-headed rock-pile atop Devil’s Tor. But when the pile is shattered in a sudden storm, it’s her cousin, Hugh Drapier, who enters the newly-revealed tomb.

Drapier has recently arrived from Tibet, where an encounter with the adventurer Henry Saltfleet and the archeologist Stephen Arsinal has left him in possession of a stolen sacred stone, the half of a broken whole, which has the power to induce visions of its arrival on Earth in the early days of primitive humanity.

Arsinal believes the stone to be sacred to the Great Mother, and key to a prophecy that will unite a chosen man and woman, and bring about the birth of a new saviour. He and Saltfleet return to England on Drapier’s trail, and arrive in Dartmoor just as the machinery of a thousands-year-long supernatural fate begins its final turn…

A troubled, troubling, ambitious and difficult work that David Lindsay himself called his “monster”, Devil’s Tor answers the imaginative pyrotechnics of Lindsay’s first novel, A Voyage to Arcturus, with a sustained maturity of insight into the intensely-felt and deeply-examined inner lives of its handful of characters, and the fate that has brought them together at the dawn of a new human era.

At times irrecoverably tangled in the attitudes of its day, Devil’s Tor nevertheless builds to a transcendent final vision of the ultimate purpose of human life and suffering

France, 1700 — an age of wit and sophistication, frippery and flattery, reputation and ridicule; an age of politics, romance, intrigue and the sword.

Gaston de Mailly, ex-solider and down-at-heel gentleman, is living in a Paris that has little use for his skill with a blade. Fortunately, his wit is equally sharp. Allying himself to the sceptical lawyer Fleurus, Mailly offers to try his hand at any case that can’t be pursued through the normal channels of the law.

And so, in a series of adventures ranging from Mailly having to save himself from a reputation-destroying joke at the Court of the Sun King Louis XIV at Versailles, to fighting his way out, with both wits and sword, from the tangles of an assassination plot, Mailly puts his shoulder to the Wheel of Fortune in an age of rapid rise and fall, sudden danger and artful deception.

In the rakish charm and misanthropic wit of his hero Gaston de Mailly, David Lindsay, author of the early-20th century classic A Voyage to Arcturus, found a way to cut loose from his more serious fiction and indulge in theatrical intrigue, witty adventure and the artful picaresque to a highly entertaining degree.

But readers of Lindsay’s work will still find his key themes here: the lone hero caught between conflicting powers in a deceptive world; the individual’s struggle to retain integrity in a constrained yet superficial society; and the search for a lasting and genuine soul-mate — all served with adventure and intrigue, wit and witticism, sword and poniard!

(The Adventures of Monsieur de Mailly was first published in the US as A Blade for Sale.)