Golding (William), John Wyndham and Mervyn Peake. Sometime, Never:

three tales of imagination…
London, Eyre & Spottiswodde, 1956.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.

A genuinely remarkable collection: three novellas written especially for this volume and appearing here in print for the first time, by, to be clear, the future Nobel laureate two years off Lord of the Flies, the reigning master of the English catastrophe novel, and the creator of ‘Gormenghast’.

Golding contributes ‘Envoy Extraordinary,’ in which a barbarian genius arrives in ancient Rome bearing three inventions the Empire is entirely unready for (he later reworked it as the 1958 play The Brass Butterfly). Peake’s ‘Boy in Darkness’ sends a teenage Titus Groan out of the castle’s rituals into a dreamworld of mutated horrors – essential to the Gormenghast mythos and among the eeriest things he wrote. Wyndham’s ‘Consider Her Ways’ is the jewel for his collectors: a woman wakes, amnesiac, in a future without men, and the resulting argument about what women lost and gained refuses every obvious resolution. Critics have called it the quintessence of dystopian fiction, and it remains among the most anthologised and argued-over things Wyndham produced. An important collection, and a very good copy in very good jacket.