Unpublished during author Robert Aickman’s lifetime, Go Back At Once is an enjoyable, sometimes frustrating maze of a novel. It tells the story of two young women, Cressida and Vivien, who finish school in post-war Britain and decide that university isn’t for them. Instead, through a slightly clunky case of happenstance, they accompany Vivien’s aunt Agnes to Trino, an Italian island governed by the enigmatic Virgilio Vittore.
Cressida and Vivien soon find work, and the story that follows is an Escherian stairway in which nothing is at seems and everyone is playing a part. Aickman devotees will recognise the distinctive strangeness of the events that occur, with episodes involving sleepwalking, deception, disguise, thunder and war. A master of the uncanny, he appears to be trying his hand at broad satire here, not entirely successfully.
The novel gets weighed down by its conventional opening section, in which not a lot happens, and although the tone of this section is suitably ‘post-war’, its realism is mismatched with the surrealism that comes later in the book. The ending also feels unsatisfactory, with Aickman appearing to run out of steam. Nevertheless, it is fun, for a while, to get lost in this hall of mirrors.
Go Back At Once, Robert Aickman (And Other Stories)
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words JOSHUA REES