The Image of a Drawn Sword by Jocelyn Brooke


 This is a forgotten novel by a forgotten writer. I just finished it for the third time, and once again loved the mystery with which it is saturated. What exactly is going on remains mysterious throughout, both to the man we are reading about and also to the reader, who is never allowed to feel smarter or more perceptive than the protagonist. That the reader shares the protagonist's bewilderment adds to the novel's power.

There is knock at the door of the house where the bank teller,  Raynard Langrish, lives with his mother. It is Roy Archer, someone Langrish feels he might know . . . maybe. Archer takes Langrish to a boxing match and then for a few pints after the match. The bank teller finds himself exhilarated by the violence he has witnessed in the ring and by the alcohol he consumes. Under Archer,'s spell, Langrish begins training for . . . an emergency of some sort? a military operation? defense against an invasion? a war?—“But is there a war on, sir, or what?” “A war? I’m afraid you’re rather simplifying the issue, aren’t you?” 

Langrish ends up as part of a military that he had no intention of joining to fight forces that are never defined. It almost impossible to discuss this novel without invoking Kafka, as Anthony Powell did when he described the book as "'In its way not inferior to Kafka," a writer Brooke had, apparently, not read.

 A bugle call is heard in the distance. It is impossible to know what it portends or from where it is coming. We are happy, through the medium of Brooke's words, to hear it, to wonder at the chill it sends up our spines.

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