Paperback, Sutton Publishing, Pocket Classics series, 15 vols, 1994-1999.
Book condition: a near fine set, unread – used as a reference set only and now surplus to requirements.
A great opportunity to buy a complete set at a very reasonable price!
The set comprises:
The Dark Lantern (1994)
Donkey Boy (1994)
Young Phillip Maddison (1995)
How Dear Is Life (1995)
A Fox Under My Cloak (1996)
The Golden Virgin (1996)
Love and the Loveless (1997)
A Test to Destruction (1997)
The Innocent Moon (1998)
It Was The Nightingale (1998)
The Power of the Dead (1999)
The Phoenix Generation (1999)
A Solitary War (1999)
Lucifer Before Sunrise (1999)
The Gale of the World (1999)
A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, first published in fifteen volumes between 1951 and 1969, is the culmination of Henry Williamson's writing life, first conceived in the 1920s. It comprises one long story, with deliberate minimum apparent internal structure between individual volumes. This method is known as a roman fleuve: a story which flows like a river from one volume to another.
One of the main aspects of the Chronicle, apart from its being an extraordinary and absorbing novel, is that it gives a detailed picture of the life of an ordinary family over the first half of the twentieth century. It is a picture of the social history of that time: one in which, due to the power of its author, we live as intensely as if it were happening to ourselves. One of the main themes is the plight of agriculture, another is suffrage: the politics of the late 1930s are interwoven into the later volumes. Transport looms large – especially Phillip’s obsession with fast cars (echoing HW’s own predilection!). The whole is bound together not just by Phillip’s life story, but by HW’s power of description of the natural world and its many facets – large sweeps of the brush setting scenes as if backcloths of allegorical plays, but filled also with the myriad minutiae of the tiniest detail of plants and insects and birds and animals. The work is indeed a masterpiece.
Opening in a London suburb still fairly rural in nature, these scenes are expanded in the first three volumes (known as ‘The London Trilogy’), while the content of the next five is devoted to the First World War (these volumes are considered by many to be among the very best writing on that war). We are taken through Phillip’s difficulties in love and writing: his first idyllic marriage ending in the tragic death of his beloved Barley in childbirth (an entirely fictional event); his struggle to become a writer; a second marriage and family; his first farming venture on the family estate which ends in failure – and then his second attempt in Norfolk during the Second World War and his involvement in the politics of Hereward Birkin (Oswald Mosley); and the amazing climax of the final volume culminating in the catastrophic flood that devastates Lynmouth on the North Devon coast, which finally releasing Phillip from his demons, so that at last he can begin his long-planned great series of novels. Thus HW brings us full circle.
To read more about the Chronicle, see Anne Williamson's A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, in her 'Life's Work' series.
