BOWDER, Caroline. The Walled Landscape. Brighton: The Harvester Press. 1980. 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s green cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the unusual though pertinent dust jacket designed by Craig Dodd. This copy with a short handwritten review on University of Sussex stationery by Professor David Daiches, the revered Scottish literary critic. An about fine copy, the cloth clean and bright, the binding tight and perhaps with just a hint of a reading lean, the top edge a trifle dust-marked, else fine. The dust jacket with sticker price of £6.95 net to front flap, complete and fine but for mild stains to rear panel top edge and slight fading at spine panel.
Quite the novel, an allusive and inventive debut — the author’s only novel—which plays with crisp deftness the poetically macabre. Three ageing women, each too old to become mothers, gorge themselves on cakes and reminiscences of finer nights. Our protagonist, the deeply self-conscious Stella, endures the mystery of why her own father decided to depart this life via hanging himself from the Christmas decorations. The absurdism deepens when Feff, Stella’s manservant and unrequited lover takes an axe to Stella’s hapless friends, and yet what seeps is not cold red blood but toy stuffing. Stella then sets herself on her ant-waisted motorcycle and zooms off into the heart of darkness where she will meet her end—merely a road with a gap in it. Though seemingly one-dimensional, its slick and dreamlike narrative is Kafkaesque, and hints at a skilful satire of childless solitude and of ageing which all must surely confront. Uncommon.
BOWDER, Caroline. The Walled Landscape. Brighton: The Harvester Press. 1980. 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s green cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the unusual though pertinent dust jacket designed by Craig Dodd. This copy with a short handwritten review on University of Sussex stationery by Professor David Daiches, the revered Scottish literary critic. An about fine copy, the cloth clean and bright, the binding tight and perhaps with just a hint of a reading lean, the top edge a trifle dust-marked, else fine. The dust jacket with sticker price of £6.95 net to front flap, complete and fine but for mild stains to rear panel top edge and slight fading at spine panel.
Quite the novel, an allusive and inventive debut — the author’s only novel—which plays with crisp deftness the poetically macabre. Three ageing women, each too old to become mothers, gorge themselves on cakes and reminiscences of finer nights. Our protagonist, the deeply self-conscious Stella, endures the mystery of why her own father decided to depart this life via hanging himself from the Christmas decorations. The absurdism deepens when Feff, Stella’s manservant and unrequited lover takes an axe to Stella’s hapless friends, and yet what seeps is not cold red blood but toy stuffing. Stella then sets herself on her ant-waisted motorcycle and zooms off into the heart of darkness where she will meet her end—merely a road with a gap in it. Though seemingly one-dimensional, its slick and dreamlike narrative is Kafkaesque, and hints at a skilful satire of childless solitude and of ageing which all must surely confront. Uncommon.
