‘These are the voices of time, and they’re all saying goodbye to you…’

Eight short stories from the early to mid-1960s, an early version published in 1963, this revised collection published in 1974.

1. The Voices of Time (1960)

In an interview Ballard said The Voices of Time is his most characteristic short story, not necessarily the best, but the one which ticks off most of his obsessions. It is about entropy, decline and fall, on several levels.

It is set in a dystopian near future. Society is falling to pieces because of a sleeping sickness (‘narcoma syndrome’). One by one people are unavoidably sleeping longer and longer, giving them fewer and fewer hours of consciousness. Some humans have already reached a state of total sleep, never to wake again. These are called ‘the terminals’, and the reader wishes he got a pound for every time Ballard uses the word ‘terminal’. Thus the whole world is lapsing into a state of ‘detached fatalism’.

Some of these terminals (500 or so) are ‘housed’ in sleeping rooms in a research clinic out in a flat desert place like the desert areas of California. (It’s worth noting how many of these short stories take place in American settings. Is this because Ballard realised, in the late-1950s, that America was the society of the future? Or because the readers of the science fiction magazines he sold the stories to expected them to be set in America?)

The lead protagonist is the neurosurgeon, Powers (if I had a pound for every one of Ballard’s protagonists who is a doctor…). Powers was working at the clinic but realises he, also, is declining towards terminal sleep. He keeps a diary direct quotes from which punctuate the text, recording his slowly decreasing hours of consciousness, his mounting fear, and his attempts to make sense of what is happening. Part of this involves listening to tape recordings of interviews with sleepers, and also an interview he made with a biologist colleague, Whitby.

Whitby committed suicide. He had been conducting experiments on plants and animals in the clinic’s laboratory. He claimed to have identified a ‘silent pair’ of genes in plants and animals which, if activated, prompted weird mutations. Whitby had subjected all the animals and plants in the lab to X-rays and triggered their silent pairs of genes, with grotesque results. There are hints in the text that widespread atomic bomb testing might have created the background radiation which is sending humanity to sleep. Certainly animals outside the lab are also mutating, as Powers discovers when he’s out driving and runs over a frog which appears to have developed an inch-thick lead carapace, presumably to protect it from the background radiation.

Before he killed himself, Whitby had carved an elaborate mandala into the bottom of an empty swimming pool and Powers finds himself drawn back to it, as if it contains some hint of the truth, of what is happening. Whitby thought evolution had peaked and now life was rewinding, or winding down.

Powers had carried out experimental surgery on some patients to see if the sleeping sickness could be reversed. One of these patients is a disturbing young man, Kaldren, who lives in a modern house out in the desert which has been cunningly designed to form a labyrinth inside, so that Powers gets hopelessly lost every time he visits it.

Kaldren shows him several sequences of numbers, posts them to Powers, leaves them on his desk. When Powers confronts him about them, Kaldren explains they are numbers arriving from different stars in different quadrants of the sky. All of them are countdowns. To what? asks Powers. To the end of the universe, replies Kaldren.

Kaldren’s girlfriend, who he’s jokingly nicknamed Coma, visits Powers, who shows her round Whitby’s lab and explains the whole theory of the silent pair of genes and the plants and animals’ strange mutations. It’s in this scene that there’s a lot of exposition and we learn about Whitby’s research, Powers’s own theories, and Coma tells Powers that Kaldren is making a collection of ‘terminal documents, a random collection of art and artifacts which somehow symbolise the last days of mankind, an EEG recording of Albert Einstein, psychological tests of the condemned at the Nuremberg trials.

At the climax of the book it seems (it is told in an impressionistic stream-of-consciousness point of view of the lab animals) as if Powers comes to the decision to administer X-ray treatment to himself, thus activating his silent pair of genes. As a result he drives out to an abandoned firing range where he has for some weeks been constructing a vast recreation of Whitby’s mandala. He lies down in the centre of it and feels great waves pouring through his mind, messages from the ancient rocks around him and the distant stars. It seems as if he is actually listening to ‘the voices of time’. The paragraph which describes this is of surpassing beauty.

Coma and Kaldren find Powers’ dead body at the centre of the concrete mandala. Back at Whitby’s lab all the mutated life forms have run riot and died, maybe because in administering the X-rays to himself, Powers gave them all lethal doses.

2. The Sound-Sweep (1960)

Madame Gioconda is a retired opera singer whose best days are behind her. She has retired in a huff and lives in the ruined sound stage of a radio station which has – high symbol of urban alienation – had an eight-lane highway built over it, while she lives in increasing squalor, dosing herself on cocaine tabs and whiskey.

All day the derelict walls and ceiling of the sound stage had reverberated with the endless din of traffic accelerating across the mid-town flyover which arched fifty feet above the studio’s roof, a frenzied hyper-manic babel of jostling horns, shrilling tyres, plunging brakes and engines that hammered down the empty corridors and stairways to the sound stage on the second floor, making the faded air feel leaden and angry. (p.41)

(In these early stories Ballard is just a wonderfully vivid and sensuous writer.)

What makes it science fiction is that this is all happening in a future where an entire new area of audio technology has been discovered, ultrasonic music. Ultrasonic music is recorded at frequencies too high for human ears to actually hear but has been shown to have a definite impact on the human psyche. Not only this, but research has shown that it can be compressed i.e. an ultrasonic recording of a Beethoven symphony can be experienced in just a few minutes. Thus Madame Gioconda’s profession’s gone, hence her retreat to the shabby sound stage and her immersion in drugs and self pity. (All this is explained on pages 48-49)

Madame Gioconda is attended to every day by a devoted fan, a mute named Mangon. Mangon was an orphan, muted when his mother punched him in the throat as a toddler, who went on to develop extraordinary powers of hearing. This has enabled him to develop a career as a leading sound sweep in the Metropolitan Sonic Disposal Service (p.46).

As the ultrasonic equipment has got more sophisticated, it has been discovered that solid objects retain sound vibrations. As people have become more sensitive, more attuned, to ultra-high frequencies, many have noticed ongoing reverberations from traffic, parties, loud conversations and so on cluttering up their homes and offices. So they call a sound sweep like Mangon who comes along with his sonovac machine and hoovers out the upsetting sonic residues. It’s all hoovered up into storage tanks, then he drives his van out to the dunes to the north of the city, where there are miles and miles of concrete baffles which contain all the discarded babble of the city.

Marvellously weird and surreal idea, isn’t it? The plot, as such, is that Madame Gioconda uses Mangon to get blackmail material on an impresario of the new ultrasound industry, who had an affair with her years ago to further his career, then cruelly dumped her, one Henry LeGrande, and this involves two other characters, Ray Alto, a composer for the new ultrasound music industry, and his arranger-cum-gofer, Paul Merrill.

Briefly, Madame uses Mangon to identify sounds swept from LeGrande’s suite at Video City, and jot down compromising conversations with his PA. She uses these to blackmail LeGrande into letting her sing one evening at 8.30 on the radio, although it is ten years since any radio broadcast has included a human voice.

(In a side plot she has insisted she take this slot because it is when Ray Alto was scheduled to premiere his one and only piece of serious music, an hour long symphony titled Opus Zero.)

To cut a long story short, when she thinks she has triumphed, la Gioconda cruelly snubs and drops Mangon. He in turn decides to get his revenge and sneaks into the prompts box at the front of the orchestra pit of the big live radio broadcast with a sonovac machine, planning to hoover up i.e. mute her voice.

However, the ironic climax of the story is that the orchestra plays the overture and La Gioconda steps up to the stage to reclaim her place in musical history and… all that comes out is a pitiful tuneless squawking. Fifteen years of booze and drugs have ruined her voice. But she doesn’t know it. She squawks and screeches on, blithely unaware, while the audience grows restive then starts booing, while members of the orchestra pack their things and leave.

Mangon didn’t need his sonovac after all, in fact in a final act of revenge he breaks it so no-one else can use it to blot out her voice and spare her humiliation, before Paul Merrill can burst into the prompter’s box desperate to use it to silence the howling banshee. Mangon slips out the building, climbs into his sound truck, and drives away.

As often with a Ballard story, the details of the vision, the way he’s worked out so many aspects and ramifications of his weird dystopia, are a lot more compelling than the human drama he then concocts to fill it which, in this case, feels like one of those 1950s movies about middle-aged, drunk Hollywood movie stars. Compared with which the idea of sound residues which the sensitive can still hear, and which can be hoovered out of inanimate objects, is weird and compelling.

3. The Overloaded Man (1961)

First sentence: ‘Faulkner was slowly going insane’.

He lives in the new, utterly designed modernist settlement of Menninger Village, built to support a local mental home. Faulkner is a lecturer at the local business school, at least he was till he resigned a couple of weeks ago. He has been experiencing strange dissociative states. He has developed the ability to completely detach himself from what he sees so that the chair and table and room, the TV and sideboard, the french windows out onto the veranda and the swimming pool, all these become simply shapes with no meaning or connotations, ‘disembodied forms’ whose ‘outlines merge and fade’. He can’t wait till his shrill wife goes off to work so he can spend the day in these states.

At one point the narrator makes a comparison with a mescalin trip, under whose influence the folds in a sofa cushion might become the mountains of the moon or contain the secrets of the universe. Having taken LSD as a teenager and student, I know just what Ballard is describing here.

The story is well done but has a rather trite and predictable arc, which is that – despite a wristwatch he’s rigged up and sets in advance to give him electric shocks – so that he pulls himself out of his fugue state – nonetheless he is addicted, and longing to enter the state takes over his life. To the extent that even watching TV with his wife, he puts his fingers in his ears to enter the otherworld – until his shrill wife pokes him and asks him what he’s doing.

The predictability comes from the way that, at the story’s climax, he is an advanced state of dissociation when he becomes aware of something tugging at the pale extension of his consciousness (his arm), is vexed and irritated, and so he rearranges the looming buzzing interruption into a shape which is more reassuring and comforting, despite the sound of high-pitched screaming he can just about detect some way off.

The alert reader realises he has just murdered his wife. Then Faulkner steps down into the pool in the garden, lets himself sink below the surface of the water, and looks up into the shimmering blue above him, waiting to enter the ultimate dissociative state.

So: 1. It is a powerful and convincing description of an acid trip – I’d love to know a bit more of Ballard’s biography and if and when he started experimenting with drugs. 2. The setting of an ultra-modern, experimentally avant-garde housing estate of ‘corporate living units’ for the alienated narrator gives it a lovely dated feeling from the early 1960s which was just beginning to recoil from the impact of brutalist concrete architecture being erected all over Britain (inspiring, for example, Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange).

3. Once he’s done all this he doesn’t know what to do with the characters, so he has the deranged husband murder his wife then commit suicide. Hard not to feel this is only one step up from ‘then I woke up and it was all a dream’.

4. Thirteen to Centaurus

A powerful and eerie story about a space ship which is in flight to distant Alpha Centauri. It centres on young Abel, coming up to 16, and slowly let into the secret of what is going on by flight medical officer, Dr Francis (if I had a pound for every Ballard story led by a doctor) which is that the journey will take so very long that entire generations of families are going to be born, live out their entire lives, have children, and die before the descendants finally arrive at the distant star system. The 14 passengers on the ship (‘the Station’) are divided into three families or clans which pass on specialised tasks to their heirs and all this has been going on for fifty years.

That’s shock enough, which takes a fair few pages to explain and for the reader to process.

But there’s another twist which we may have started to suspect – which is that the entire project is a fake. After a man-to-adolescent chat with smart young Abel, Francis retreats to his private office, sets the locks and… exists the space ship, stepping out onto a gantry to reveal the whole thing is a mock-up inside a chilly air hanger somewhere in America, maintained by a grumpy crew of technicians and soldiers.

The project was begun in good faith 50 years earlier, and was funded to do genuine research into the psychological effect of very long-distance space travel. It is only by the application of continuous condition and sub-sonic sleeping drills that the ship’s crew have their normal human reactions (like for space and freedom) utterly suppressed.

Anyway, Dr Francis now attends a meeting with Colonel Chalmers and psychologists monitoring the project, where he learns that the authorities have decided to scrap the project. Society as a whole, and their political masters, have lost interest in space travel ‘since the Mars and Moon colonies failed’ (p.102).

So far, so Tales of the Unexpected. What gives the story its Ballard touch is that Francis argues for the project to be seen through to the bitter end i.e. for another fifty years, during which he himself will grow old and die inside the ship. Francis sneaks back onto the ship against orders, announcing he’s going to leave his private office (where he had the option of popping out, like he’s just done) and going down to C deck to live with the rest of the crew.

In other words, entombing himself in their fate.

There’s a final twist in the tale. For after weeks of spending full time with the crew, and taking part in the increasingly smart and savvy Abel’s projects and tests, Dr Francis is one day doing some basic ‘repairs’, when he hears secretive footsteps. He hides in an alcove and watches clever young Abel pad past, then retraces the young man’s steps and discovers…

That there is a loose plate in the ship’s corridor, which gives on to a loose plate in the outside skin of the station which can be opened and clearly gives onto… the aircraft hanger! It is old and rusty and well-used, going back decades, so chances are that old Peters, Abel’s father, knew, knew the whole space project was an elaborate fake and yet… chose to remain inside the ship, chose not to tell anyone, maybe preferring to be captain of a fake spaceship rather than a nobody outside. The conditioning and hypno-drills so thorough and deep that grown men preferred to stay within their fake but reassuring delusion rather than risk life out in the unknown real world.

Although this psychologically disturbed element has the Ballard feel, it is not ‘classic’ Ballard, it is too plot-driven. The Voices of Time and The Cage of Sand (see below) are canonical Ballard because they are about mood, that mood of decay and entropy and psychic disconnection amid a world gone to ruin.

5. The Garden of Time (1962)

Count Axel lives in a Palladian villa with his beautiful slender wife. It is not set in the future or another planet, it is not set anywhere. Like an 1890s aesthete he wanders the portico and garden of the villa, sauntering past the exquisite pond, while the enchanting strains of Mozart played on the harpsichord drift among the beautiful flowers.

But on the distant horizon he can see a vast, unstoppable horde of barbarians approaching, huge numbers of them, dressed in rags, heads down, some riding in ramshackle carts, a tide of filthy philistine humanity. And so every evening Count Axel picks one of the rare and previous ‘time flowers’ and, as the petals dissolve and melt, sending out strange shards of light, time is reversed and the horde pushed back over the horizon. But each flower works is less and less effective. The horde is coming relentlessly close. And there are only half a dozen or so time plants left in the garden.

As the horde arrives at the high walls of the villa, Count Axel and his wife forlornly pluck the last and smallest of the buds, delaying events for only a few minutes.

And then in the genuinely beautiful, fairy-tale climax of the story, we watch the horde storm the walls and pour through the garden except that…the entire villa is now ruined and, the wall collapsed, the building tumbled-down, the lake bone dry, the trees fallen across it, and the villa long abandoned. The horde crash through it, unstoppable, smashing and breaking the ruins that remain.

All except for a bower of densely-packed rose briars whose thorns deter the barbarians and in the middle of which stand the silent statues of a tall, noble man and his slender graceful wife.

This is a really beautiful and haunting story. Seems to me there’s a lot of Oscar Wilde’s fairy stories in Ballard’s imaginarium, and a lot of Wilde’s gilded prose in Ballard’s similarly exquisite and purple descriptions. In its haunting echo of parable or fairy story, this story is very like another early story, The Drowned Giant.

6. The Cage of Sand (1962)

1. We are in Cocoa Beach thirty miles south of Cape Canaveral some fifty years in the future. This resort, like all the others along the Atlantic coast, has been abandoned by humans. Fifty years earlier so many space ships were leaving for Mars carrying equipment and material that it began to be worried that the loss of weight might, everso slightly, affect the earth’s gravity and rotation, possibly eroding the stratosphere. And so over a twenty-year period millions of tons of Mars sand were brought back by the Americans and dumped along the Atlantic shore of Florida and by the Russians and dumped along the Caspian Sea. Unfortunately, the apparently inert sand turned out to contain viruses which proceeded to exterminate pretty much the entire plant life of Florida, turning the once swampy state into a desert. Inhabitants of the coastal resorts were told to abandon their towns in short order and never returned. Meanwhile, the fine Mars sand was whipped by sun and wind into ever deeper drifts and dunes which buried the abandoned resorts and climbed up the sides of the derelict hotels. (pp.138-9)

2. This characteristically Ballardian terminal zone attracted the usual type of damaged loners – the central protagonist Paul Bridgman, was an architect who drew up plans for the first city to be built on Mars but the contract was awarded to a rival company and he’s never recovered. Now he holes out in the shabby rooms of the abandoned hotels, covering the walls with his architect designs and plans, and endlessly listening to memory-tapes of the long-vanished residents, obscurely seeking out ‘complete psychic zero’.

The other two characters are short, stocky Travis who Bridgman has discovered was a trainee astronaut who had a panic attack as he lay in the launch rocket, causing the cancellation of his particular flight at the cost of five million. And Louise Davidson, widow of an astronaut who died in an accident in a space station some fifteen years earlier.

3. A number of space stations or rocket capsules carrying a gruesome cargo of dead astronauts circles the earth, seven in all. Their orbits are separate but twice a month they come into conjunction and fly overhead. On these nights Travis and Louise go up on the roof of the tallest abandoned hotel to pay their silent respects, each in personal grieving for a lost self, a lost identity.

4. What adds dynamism to the setting is that The Wardens are out to get them. For some years the wardens have been trying to lay roads out of prefabricated sections across the sand, which Bridgman and Travis have taken pleasure in sabotaging. The story starts as the wardens have brought in a new breed of wide-wheeled sand trucks. The narrative energy comes from several attempts by the wardens to capture our heroes, which they manage to dodge, escaping out into the remoteness of the pure dunes until the wardens have given up and driven off.

5. The climax of the story comes on the night of the next ‘conjunction’, when all seven capsules carrying dead astronauts fly overhead in a momentarily joined pattern. To the watchers’ surprise one is missing. Bridgman thinks it is the capsule of a defunct astronaut named Merrill and the story comes to a head as the capsule crashes to earth, creating a huge scythe of light across the sky and then a fireball which scorches over the Mars beach, over the tops of the abandoned hotels, crashing with a huge detonation among the red dunes.

Bridgman joins Travis and Louise as they run towards the blast crater, where Travis irrationally picks up a glowing fragment which burns his hands, Louise runs hysterically amid the wreckage, convinced it contains the vaporised body of her dead husband, while Bridgman watches them, stunned and, as the wardens close in with their nets and lassos, finally realises why he came to the infected beach and has never been able to leave – because this is as close to Mars as he will ever get. Because these great shifting dunes of red dust are his Mars. He’s made it, after all.

An abandoned beach resort. Abandoned hotels. Sand piling up everywhere. A handful of deranged or psychologically troubled characters. And space capsules carrying dead astronauts orbiting overhead… Classic Ballard territory.

7. The Watch Towers (1962)

At some point in the near future people are living in a city much like London, above which countless hundreds of ‘watch towers’ are suspended from the sky!

Behind the glass windows of the towers, shapes come and go and the inhabitants of the city have become convinced they are being spied on day and night by ‘the watchers’ and live in a state of permanent paranoia. The city’s affairs are run by a ‘Council’ which lays down the law, banning public assemblies and taking a strict view of personal morality.

Thus they disapprove of Charles Renthall who lives in an abandoned hotel (I wish I had a pound for every abandoned hotel there is in Ballardland) and is having a half-hearted ‘affair’ with a woman living in a house in a terrace road, Mrs Julia Osmond.

Basically, in the first half Renthall potters round, visiting a small circle of acquaintances (including, of course a doctor, Dr Clifton) fretting about the way everyone is wasting away their lives, passively acquiescing in surveillance from the towers. He decides to rebel against the general passivity and organise a fete! Yes, on the car park of the abandoned cinema owned by a local businessman.

This prompts visits from representatives of the Council asking him – in a very polite English sort of way – to calm down. And yet…

In the last few pages, Renthall has encounters with three or four of the same individuals (including Dr Clifton and Mrs Ormond) and all of them, to his great distress, refuse to acknowledge that the watch towers are there!

Disheartened, worried about his own sanity, Renthall wanders off into a derelict, bombed-out, abandoned part of the city as the sky clears and he sees the watchtowers in their serried ranks stretching off in every direction.

Is he mad? Or are they really there and everyone else is colluding to ignore them?

8. Chronopolis (1960)

Conrad Newman is a schoolboy in a future dystopia where all timepieces have been banned. His mother tells him not to ask about the public clockfaces which have had their hands removed. His father tells him not to ask silly questions about clocks because of the Time Police.

But his teacher, a Mr Stacey, is more relaxed and when he discovers Conrad is using a watch he took off the wrist of a man who had a heart attack next to him in a cinema, he isn’t cross. He gives it back to him. This isn’t a totalitarian society, just one which has agreed to live without time.

To show him why Stacy takes him for a drive into the abandoned centre of the city where they live, a city which was once inhabited by thirty million people, and now houses two million and still declining. As they mount onto a motorway flyover and drive past taller and taller buildings Conrad sees more and more huge clocks hanging from the skyscrapers.

Stacey tells him they were all turned off 37 years ago. He explains in great detail how the city of thirty million divided the citizens into classes and groups and then micro-managed their timetables. Eventually there was a revolt against a totally scheduled existence, a revolution which overthrew the tyranny of time.

The story takes a turn when Conrad notices a clock whose hand moves. He breaks away from Stacey who turns nasty, driving after him in the car, nearly running him over an then taking pot shots with a gun as Conrad legs up a fire escape and through upper floors of ruined buildings. Eventually Stacey gives up and drives off. Conrad falls asleep.

Next day the old man of the clocks is standing over him, his pockets full of keys, a shotgun under his arm. When Conrad shows him his wristwatch, the old man softens and shows him around. His name is Marshall. He used to work in Central Time Control, had survived the revolution and the Time Police. Now lives in a hidden den, cycles out to the suburbs to collect his pension and food, then quietly returns to the city.

Marshall shows Conrad his workshop, a former typing pool which is utterly covered with dismantled clocks and their workings. He’s got some 278 up and working again. For the next three months Conrad helps him with his work, but grows more and more fascinated by the one, huge master-clock which used to dominate the central plaza of the city. For months he works creating a new action, rewiring it and fixing the chimes. Finally he makes it work again and its huge chimes carry the tens of miles out to the distant suburbs where old-timers hear and remember their childhoods, some of them going to the police stations and asking for their watches back…

The story ends abruptly with Newman being taken into court. He has been tracked down by the Time Police and is sentenced to five years for his crimes against time, but for a further twenty for the murder of Stacey. He didn’t kill him. Stacey’s body was found in his car with a crushed skull, as if he’d fallen from a height. Newman thinks Marshall probably did it but takes the fall for him.

And in his cell he is delighted to discover… a working clock. Until after a few short weeks into his 20 year sentence, he begins to realise it has an infuriatingly loud tick!

— Like Billennium this is in a way a surprisingly conventional science fiction story, in which people act and talk pretty normally – albeit in a weird future – and it has a rather mundane conclusion – unlike the ‘classic’ Ballard story where characters are weirdly disconnected and the story doesn’t really end.

Commentary

Taken together, this is a brilliant collection of pleasingly dated and reassuring science fiction. Reassuring in the sense that, although most of them are meant to be about mental illness, mental collapse, alienation and psychosis, it’s all done in a gentlemanly, sometimes a rather Dad’s Army-style of English decency.

None of the characters are savage and brutal as they are in modern science fiction movies. When a member of the Council remonstrates with Renthall he says: ‘Look, my dear fellow’ (p.160).

Five of the eight stories are clearly set in America, but the two final ones buck the trend by having a very strong English vibe about them. More than that, there was something about the scruffiness of the settings which reminded me of Nineteen-Eighty-Four with its shabby London and even shabbier prole district.

He had entered a poorer quarter of the town, where the narrow empty streets were separated by large waste dumps, and tilting wooden fences sagged between ruined houses. (The Watch Towers p.172)

They crossed the main street, cut down into a long tree-lined avenue of semi-detached houses. Half of them were empty, windows wrecked and roofs sagging. Even the inhabited houses had a makeshift appearance, crude water towers on home-made scaffolding lashed to their chimneys, piles of logs dumped in over-grown gardens. (Chronopolis p.182)

Mind you, they also remind me of the final passages of H.G. Wells’s War In the Air, whose second half describes the wasteland of an utterly ruined London, too.

It feeds a very deep psychological appetite, doesn’t it, science fiction’s obsession with portraying our civilisation as smashed and abandoned. The plots may vary, but the underlying appetite remains the same.

Here the streets had died twenty or thirty years earlier; plate-glass shopfronts had slipped and smashed into the roadway, old neon signs, window frames and overhead wires hung down from every cornice, trailing a ragged webwork of disintegrating metal across the pavements. (p.182)

Credit

‘The Voices of Time’ by J.G. Ballard was published by Victor Gollancz in 1963. Page references are to the 1987 J.M. Dent and Sons paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

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