A. O. Chater : Julian Fairfield : 1st/1st Edition 1961 : FIne Condition

Julian Fairfield

By A.O. Chater

Published by Heinemann, London, 1961. First Edition. 8vo. Hardback book in original dust jacket. Jacket design by  William Belcher. 366 pages.

This is the first book by the eminent Welsh botanist, Arthur Oliver Chater of the Natural History Museum, London.

CONDITION
A fine first edition in a very good unclipped dust jacket. Boards and spine are in very good condition. Endpapers very clean as are all pages throughout. Overall a very good first edition.

SYNOPSIS
Twenty years old, this novel’s hero decides to free himself from domestic claustrophobia and launch himself into a new life…He boards a train to an unknown town in the north, assumes the name of “Julian Fairfield” and proceeds with innocence and confidence to deny his past and recreate a present.” The word ‘recreate’ here is a very sly and apposite one, for ‘recreate’ is exactly what Fairfield does: the new present he encounters in the town turns out to be an exact shadow of his former life, in a carefully crafted, subtle and ingenious series of moves by the author. The town itself is not in the least fantastical: it has a castle, cathedral, inn, factory, railway station, and yet the way that Fairfield encounters them, and how they mesh with his destiny, has an unreal dimension to it.

The rest of the dustwrapper’s narrative sticks cautiously to observable facts, until it ends by invoking the author’s intent: “It is A.O. Chater’s concern to probe his hero’s motives, and to question the understanding and the control that he has over these events. Julian Fairfield is an absorbing first novel by a young writer, an exciting and mature study of a soul in flight – a coward soul.

(Loc : Desk, Lower Shelf, left)