The Image of a Drawn Sword

<p>The calm of Reynard Langrish's quietly predictable life is shattered when on a night of rain-swept storm a stranger - a young soldier called Captain Archer - appears at his remote Kentish cottage. He takes Langrish to an ancient hill fort and introduces him to the men under his command all of whom share a mysterious tattoo - two snakes entwined around a drawn sword - and are engaged in preparations to defend against a nameless menace referred to only as 'the Emergency'.</p><p>As the dreamlike narrative rapidly accelerates into Kafkaesque nightmare Langrish is drawn into a world where illusion paranoia and reality unite with lethal consequences and disorienting shifts of time and perception culminate in a terrifying moment of pure horror.</p><p>Originally published in 1950 <i>The Image of a Drawn Sword </i>is steeped in the themes and images that occupy much of Brooke's writing - the relentlessness of time suppressed homosexuality condemned love self-hatred and futility; and above all an England that was both real and uniquely his own a mystical half-known natural world.</p><p>'In its way not inferior to Kafka . . . [it has] a haunting sinister quality' - Anthony Powell</p><p>'Seldom have naturalism and fantasy been more strangely merged' - Elizabeth Bowen</p><p>'He is subtle as the devil' - John Betjeman</p><p>'The skill and intensity of the writing made peculiarly haunting this cry of complaint on behalf of a bewildered Man' - Pamela Hansford Johnson <i>Daily Telegraph</i></p>