King Ludd

Albion Triptych #3

by Andrew Sinclair

The final part of Sinclair's ( Gog ) Albion Triptych will be intelligible only to readers familiar with England's history and mythology, and diverting to only a handful of these. George "Gog" Griffin, a student at Cambridge in the 1930s, is polishing his thesis in praise of the Luddites and studying Druidic runes. When he is sent down from Oxford for his "New Modest Proposal" (suggesting England eat its unemployed workers), he goes on a journey along a Druid "ley line," learning "what went wrong in the land of Magog so that Gog and his brothers are not able to . . . earn their bread in plenty and peace." He has encounters (some in dreams) with Robin Hood and the Pardoner, among others. Then, through Colin Graveling, a mathematician who is developing a "computing machine," Gog is asked to take some "perforated cards" into Europe in 1937, and the war finds Gog at Bletchley, musing on similarities between runes and Enigma code. The tale closes years later with Gog's son, who blithely fuses the work's myth and computer strains by asserting that computer games "are the myths of today--our Odyssey, our Beowulf." It makes one If that's all there is to myth, why write a trilogy on it?
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Genres: Fiction

Hardcover

First published September 1, 1988

About the author

Andrew Sinclair was born in Oxford in 1935 and was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. After earning a Ph.D. in American History from Cambridge, he pursued an academic career in the United States and England. His first two novels, written while he was still at Cambridge, were both published in 1959: The Breaking of Bumbo (based on his own experience in the Coldstream Guards, and later adapted for a 1970 film written and directed by Sinclair) and My Friend Judas. Other early novels included The Project (1960), The Hallelujah Bum (1963), and The Raker (1964). The latter, also available from Valancourt, is a clever mix of Gothic fantasy and macabre comedy and was inspired by Sinclair’s relationship with Derek Lindsay, the pseudonymous author of the acclaimed novel The Rack (1958). Sinclair’s best-known novel, Gog (1967), a highly imaginative, picaresque account of the adventures of a seven-foot-tall man who washes ashore on the Scottish coast, naked and suffering from amnesia, has been named one of the top 100 modern fantasy novels. As the first in the ‘Albion Triptych’, it was followed by Magog (1972) and King Ludd (1988).

Sinclair’s varied and prolific career has also included work in film and a large output of nonfiction. As a director, he is best known for Under Milk Wood (1972), adapted from a Dylan Thomas play and starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Sinclair’s nonfiction includes works on American history (including The Better Half: The Emancipation of the American Woman, which won the 1967 Somerset Maugham Award), books on Dylan Thomas, Jack London, Che Guevara, and Francis Bacon, and, more recently, works on the Knights Templar and the Freemasons.

Sinclair was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1972. He lives in London.