Or Imaginary Conversations.
A writer, who has lived for years in London, reluctantly acknowledges his growing obsession with the Ewyas Valley on the border of England and Wales. Commissioned to write about Walter Savage Landor's disastrous attempt to set up a senatorial estate around Llanthony Priory, he is sidetracked by more recent conspiracies: a bizarre series of twenty-five suicides in the secret defence industries, unreliable witnesses who claim to have uncovered the truth about that the Thorpe case, that coming together of slot-machine operators and carpet-warehouse wide-boys with the grandees of Liberal politics.
A burnt-out media bum called Kaporal, employed to researched these events, sends the narrator taped reports from his journeys up and down the M4, tapes that come to seem like messages thrown over the side by a lost and fraudulent round-the-world sailor - are they evidence, or deranged fictions, contrived to keep Kaporal on the payroll?
The valley is revealed as the site of persistent attempts to found or imagine utopian communities, all fascinated by the mythology of the west: the High Anglican renegade Father Ignatius, David Jones and Eric Gill (with wife, daughters and animals), hippie communes, Allen Ginsburg, Bruce Chatwin, teepee dwellers, mushroom gobblers, narco pirates.
The narrator is accused of one of the murders that Kaporal is researching. Incarcerated in an asylum on the River USK, long-suppressed memories of his childhood in Wales return to haunt him.
This remarkable prose work can be read as a meditation on place, a borderland where dreams come to grief and different historical times are alive in the present. It is a unique weaving together of fiction, history and autobiographical inspiration.
