Published by Scorpion Press, 1998
With introductions by Tim Lebbon, Allan Ashley, Paul Pinn, Simon Clark and Rhys Hughes
I’ve had D F Lewis’s
Agra Aska on a shelf for some years now, and I’d say that I actually felt nervous of starting it. Sometimes his short stories appear to take the shape of ingenious puzzles and can be approached better in the morning with a clear head than late at night when simpler tales of hoods and horrors usually relax me with my mug of hot milk. But at last I began the book, and I'm glad that I did. There are a number of reviews of this book on the net. What follows here is a rough and fairly simple synopsis-so-far, with a few comments.
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Agra Aska is a multi-viewpoint novella, which opens in Bridge House boarding school in Britain during the Second World War. Those familiar with D F Lewis’s writing will anticipate that this prosaic setting will prove oddly skewed before too many pages are turned, but as an opening it allows the reader to come to grips with the book’s characters against a fairly comfortable and familiar background.
The book’s first narrator is John Bello, a pupil at Bridge House School. John is having strange dreams in which his friend David Binns accompanies him. In the dream a woman John imagines to be a royal personage appears from a white mist. The two boys' awareness of their sexuality develops along with that of a more complex and vaguely mystical development.
The relationship between the two boys, “although deep, was more intellectual than emotional.” The dreams of the female presence in the mist persist, until “I almost dreaded waking up and leaving the dreams’ dull embraces” (a pleasing vein of sensuality runs throughout the book).
John’s perception of events and sense of destiny is expressed through music, while David refers to “an indefinable concept he described as ‘Unheard Keys’. He used this when indicating the path of my body and mind through his own existence”.
Although the two boys don’t actually share John’s dream of the woman in the mist, they conjure from their imaginations a similar kind of mythic or mystic Goddess figure named Estrella, “a hybrid of both the school’s Matron and the headmaster’s beautiful wife”.
In this way the reader is gradually led into a world where the mundane world appears to blend with the mystical and what we assume to be historical might possibly be an alternative world.
Before the end of the first chapter is reached, we discover that this wartime boarding school does not exist in our own continuum – somehow the story seems to be shifting between realities without even bumping over the rails. The names of two teachers are similar to those of writers of this world, Robert Orwell and Governor Chesterton (G K Chesterton’s ‘metaphysical thriller’
The Man Who Was [Named] Thursday is referred to and deliberately misnamed later in the story). In John Bello’s reality, some cars have skis, a teacher descends in a mechanical moth, a great church straddles the city’s River, Zeus shines in the sky, while glamorous female Guides, whose brown uniforms bring to mind those of the WLA or WVS of our own history, show around visitors to the city.
While John Bello attends Bridge School, another narrator is introduced. Joan Turner is a pupil at Lady Margaret Academy where, in the darkened dormitory, something stirs at the foot of her bed. Even as she submits, the earth shakes as the city is attacked from the air. But even as the bombs save her from one threat, she is asked to submit to another: Chesterton has chosen her and has decided to exercise his Droit du Seignour.
These events take us four chapters into the book.
More will follow.
