Synopsis
|
It
is December 1999,
in London.
David Lambert,
jilted lover,
lapsed
archaeologist and
reluctant curator
of a museum
specialising in
Victorian
machinery,
receives startling
information about
the return of HG
Wells's time
machine from the
nineteenth
century.
Intrigued by who
might attempt such
an implausible
hoax, he
investigates and
propels himself
deep into the next
millennium.
Awaiting him is
a tropical Britain
of overgrown
ruins, wild
animals, strange
relics, but no
immediate sign of
human life.
Exploring this
luxuriant yet
menacing new
landscape, David
looks for answers
and
survivors.
As he searches the
remains of our
civilization,
roaming surreal
green paths that
were once
motorways, he also
moves through the
ruins of his life,
a terrain of
erotic obsession
and remorse
involving his old
friend Bird - jazz
musician,
classicist,
small-time crook -
and Anita, the
beautiful and
eccentric
Egyptologist they
both loved,
mysteriously dead
at thirty-two.
Personal and
universal, witty
and elegiac,
David's odyssey
builds to an
unforgettable
indictment of
human arrogance in
the tradition of
George Orwell and
HG Wells. |
Review
|
A
Scientific Romance
invokes the
adventure satires
of the Victorian fin-de-siecle,
and their literary
descendants, to
become a Nineteen
Eighty-Four
for our times.
'A mesmerising
account of
time-travel which
combines graceful
gestures to
genre-definers
such as HG Wells
and Richard
Jeffries with a
thoroughly modern
love story, in
which Ronald
Wright reveals
narrative and
descriptive
talents of the
highest
order. A
Scientific Romance
is a terrific
achievement'
D J Taylor |
