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Return to the Gate
Light wear to boards, content clean and sharp, solidly bound, good clipped DJ with some wear with one small tear and sunning to spine
163 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
About the author
William Corlett
32 books36 followersWilliam Corlett (8 October 1938 - 16 August 2005), was an English children's writer, best known for his quartet of novels, The Magician's House, published between 1990 and 1992.
Corlett was born in Darlington, County Durham. He was educated at Fettes College, Edinburgh, then trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He worked as an actor while embarking on a literary career during the 1960s, and wrote plays and adult novels as well as the children's novels for which he is particularly remembered. Several of his works were adapted for the screen.
Later in life he came out as gay, and it was from his partner, Bryn Ellis, that he gained some of his inspiration for The Magician's House. Corlett died of cancer at Sarlat in France.
Corlett was born in Darlington, County Durham. He was educated at Fettes College, Edinburgh, then trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He worked as an actor while embarking on a literary career during the 1960s, and wrote plays and adult novels as well as the children's novels for which he is particularly remembered. Several of his works were adapted for the screen.
Later in life he came out as gay, and it was from his partner, Bryn Ellis, that he gained some of his inspiration for The Magician's House. Corlett died of cancer at Sarlat in France.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 29, 2013
'Return to the Gate' by William Corlett is an unusual sort of book. I must say that I chose to read it coincidentally as I randomly picked a short book from the local library to take with me abroad on a holiday...
The first part of the book is nothing short of sublime poetry in prose form in my opinion. Pure class. Very emotional, reflective and somewhat sad. It is about an old man living alone in a sort of dystopian future where there is no sort of a communitarian bond between the people as a result of very bad economic conditions. The author believed, for this was first published in 1975, that this division between people ("not only economically, but emotionally and spiritually") had become a "growing reality".
Being set in the author's own town and village in Essex, and in his own house in which he also lived alone without knowing anybody, the author creates a kind of bond and insight between his creation and himself. Nice touch. I also liked the way in which the author adopts a 'play form style' for lengthy dialogues in some parts of the book. Makes it much more easier to identify who is saying what in my opinion as well. Helen, 'a young, aggressive and homeless' but ultimately misguided girl, the old man one day meets becomes his unlikely partner in life, though their relationship has its ups and downs.
However, I do believe that this book falls short of literary class only because of the fact that it could have been shorter, therefore being more effective and to the point in emotional terms. Some of its unnecessary length diminishes its emotional effect to some degree. Even so, the ending provokes many a tear in the discerning reader's heart. The old man's departure to the other world is the tragic climax of the book, being the end of the old man's dream referenced throughout the book in incomplete terms. For the book is also about hope, which is a 'growing reality' as well (death being the beginning of life, or another 'dream'...)
I hope you understand what I meant when I say that this sort of book is reminiscent of poetry in its style. An original book, one which I will not easily forget.
The first part of the book is nothing short of sublime poetry in prose form in my opinion. Pure class. Very emotional, reflective and somewhat sad. It is about an old man living alone in a sort of dystopian future where there is no sort of a communitarian bond between the people as a result of very bad economic conditions. The author believed, for this was first published in 1975, that this division between people ("not only economically, but emotionally and spiritually") had become a "growing reality".
Being set in the author's own town and village in Essex, and in his own house in which he also lived alone without knowing anybody, the author creates a kind of bond and insight between his creation and himself. Nice touch. I also liked the way in which the author adopts a 'play form style' for lengthy dialogues in some parts of the book. Makes it much more easier to identify who is saying what in my opinion as well. Helen, 'a young, aggressive and homeless' but ultimately misguided girl, the old man one day meets becomes his unlikely partner in life, though their relationship has its ups and downs.
However, I do believe that this book falls short of literary class only because of the fact that it could have been shorter, therefore being more effective and to the point in emotional terms. Some of its unnecessary length diminishes its emotional effect to some degree. Even so, the ending provokes many a tear in the discerning reader's heart. The old man's departure to the other world is the tragic climax of the book, being the end of the old man's dream referenced throughout the book in incomplete terms. For the book is also about hope, which is a 'growing reality' as well (death being the beginning of life, or another 'dream'...)
I hope you understand what I meant when I say that this sort of book is reminiscent of poetry in its style. An original book, one which I will not easily forget.
October 15, 2025
I gave a five-star rating on this website to the last William Corlett novel I read (my all-time favourite “Now and Then”). How would any other novel by him live up to that? Especially one written twenty years earlier - and looking so different. And so it was with a degree of trepidation that I began this novel.
“Return to the Gate” is only half the thickness of “Now and Then” with a lot less text and more white space. It’s broadly a set of journal entries, interspersed with bits of poetry (including John Donne and AE Housman), quotes from the Bible, notes in italics, and even sections set out like a stage play. There’s an experimental feel to it - disorienting, fragmentary, elusive.
But once I’d accustomed myself to this rather different reading experience, I found a strong resemblance thematically between the two novels. For both are preoccupied with hypersensitive, emotionally frozen protagonists re-living difficult memories and struggling with the present. As their titles indicate, both books involve returning to the past, however painful, as a way of being able to move on.
The main character of “Return to the Gate” is a playwright with the heart of a poet, an outsider literally exiled from his past and from all that has once been dear to him. It must be symbolically important that he remains nameless throughout the novel. His alienation takes many forms:
- Recalling random episodes of inexplicable human savagery (for example, humans feeding nails to dolphins) he feels like “a visitor from another world, observing the idiocies of the species I was visiting and never really acknowledging that I was part of that strange life form” (p15).
- He feels he needs evidence to prove who he is, because “without anything written to show on demand, I might cease to exist altogether” (p20).
- His sense of people’s suspicion and hostility towards him (“I’ve been so long on my own that I almost dread seeing them now” p35).
- His slightly surreal, fatalistic belief “that one day things would come to a head” (p33).
- An acquired brittleness so that “the suffering of others didn’t really touch me. The need for survival was all-engrossing” (p42).
- The loss of self identity, so that “it always surprises me to see how I look. I don’t recognise the face at all” (p58).
- Repressing his thoughts because “I don’t want all the memories that are flooding in. Memories corrupt” (p93).
Our unnamed protagonist lives in a bleak, hostile world that is clearly recognisable as the 1970s (when the novel was written) and yet also presents a disturbing dystopian future. This involves:
- Kafkaesque officials collecting data for uncertain purposes (“The law says that house checks, surveys and searches may be undertaken at any time upon presentation of an official sealed warrant” p16).
- Electricity severely restricted (p42) with black-outs and limited fuel.
- Food heavily rationed and all services (for example, the Depot and the Transport) run pretty poorly by “the authorities”.
- Information carefully controlled (“One never knew, of course, whether this information could be trusted; but it was the only one available to us” p41).
- Disorder frequently breaking out, so that “many of the houses in the neighbourhood still had part of their barricades from the May Bread Riots” (p46).
- Overnight curfew (p55) and martial law enforced by the feared Civilian Army (“I had known people who had disappeared overnight, never to be seen again rather than face the wrath of the CA” p70).
But there are also moments of happiness - both recalled from the past and happening in the present day. For example:
- As a once confident young playwright, “walking down Bond Street with a hot August sun shining down on me and the pavements shimmering with heat haze” (p36) - unlike the frozen tundra of his current landscape.
- The blissful luxury of shaving with hot water (p42).
- When he first moved to the village it “was a friendly place and, although there were warnings, the dark clouds gathering on the horizon seemed far, far away” (p49).
- The robin in his garden that he befriends and gives crusts to (p58).
- Listening on Christmas Day (curiously not cancelled by the authorities) to his old LPs including his favourite, Verdi Requiem, which “washed over me, sweeping away care, filling me and feeding me and giving me life” (p125).
- The feral auburn-haired girl who he calls Helen and reluctantly gives refuge to.
Troubled and prickly-tempered Helen is the catalyst for change in his life. She’s his antithesis in pretty much everything, which means they spend a lot of time antagonising each other. For example:
- She lives in chaos while his life is strictly ordered.
- She enjoys risk and breaking rules while he’s terrified of the authorities and complies obediently (until he uncharacteristically loses patience with the Tribunal).
- She has no respect for books and learning. Words are his livelihood and only certainty. (“It’s pathetic! Play scripts. Look at them all. Hundreds of them. Stories about people - what good did they ever do anyone? What’s the point of stories?” p95)
Helen leads the unnamed protagonist into numerous scrapes as civil war erupts between the various factions in his village. But paradoxically, involvement with real people in challenging circumstances gets him to confront his own prejudices and preoccupations. And he ends up making friends and seeing good in people he previously shunned (including the enigmatic Mark Langley who undergoes a transformation from vigilante yob to sensitive carer for the protagonist in his final illness).
And so we realise as we reach the final pages that what we’ve been reading are the meandering thoughts and memories of a dying man. Until this point I felt I hadn’t been able to pinpoint what the novel was really about.
In parts it feels like 1970s survivalist sci-fi - mankind struggling after some kind of catastrophe brought down upon itself by its own stupidity. So is it some kind of warning - rioting on the buses one day (p12), societal collapse the next? Or a political allegory - a cautionary tale of “the authorities” taking over because they weren’t sufficiently challenged?
I wondered, too, in places whether it was actually intended metaphorically - as a piece of 1970s counterculture, heavy with symbolism: robins, apple trees, auburn-tressed maidens and veggie communes. Even the potted wisdom sometimes sounds a bit hippy dippy - things like “if you are to suffer loss, then you must first experience the fullness” (p111) and “the end of the dream is the beginning of life” as the novel’s opening and closing lines.
So to be honest, while I wasn’t exactly disappointed by the novel, it did leave me feeling slightly let down. It was just too elusive for me, too unreal. It felt as though it was slipping through my fingers without my being able to register what it all meant.
I was pleased, though, that I did at least finally work out the meaning of the novel’s title. At the funeral service for the nineteen killed in the civil disturbances the Church of England vicar (curiously surviving under the New Order) reads from the Old Testament Book of Genesis about the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.
He reads aloud about the Tree of Life which features in the novel in the form of the apple tree in the protagonist’s back garden. And he reads about the gate, east of Eden, guarded by angels with flaming swords. The gate that the dying protagonist dreams he’s returning to in a spiritually-glowing ending that, perhaps surprisingly, turns out not to be metaphor or mysticism but conventional Christian belief.
“Return to the Gate” is only half the thickness of “Now and Then” with a lot less text and more white space. It’s broadly a set of journal entries, interspersed with bits of poetry (including John Donne and AE Housman), quotes from the Bible, notes in italics, and even sections set out like a stage play. There’s an experimental feel to it - disorienting, fragmentary, elusive.
But once I’d accustomed myself to this rather different reading experience, I found a strong resemblance thematically between the two novels. For both are preoccupied with hypersensitive, emotionally frozen protagonists re-living difficult memories and struggling with the present. As their titles indicate, both books involve returning to the past, however painful, as a way of being able to move on.
The main character of “Return to the Gate” is a playwright with the heart of a poet, an outsider literally exiled from his past and from all that has once been dear to him. It must be symbolically important that he remains nameless throughout the novel. His alienation takes many forms:
- Recalling random episodes of inexplicable human savagery (for example, humans feeding nails to dolphins) he feels like “a visitor from another world, observing the idiocies of the species I was visiting and never really acknowledging that I was part of that strange life form” (p15).
- He feels he needs evidence to prove who he is, because “without anything written to show on demand, I might cease to exist altogether” (p20).
- His sense of people’s suspicion and hostility towards him (“I’ve been so long on my own that I almost dread seeing them now” p35).
- His slightly surreal, fatalistic belief “that one day things would come to a head” (p33).
- An acquired brittleness so that “the suffering of others didn’t really touch me. The need for survival was all-engrossing” (p42).
- The loss of self identity, so that “it always surprises me to see how I look. I don’t recognise the face at all” (p58).
- Repressing his thoughts because “I don’t want all the memories that are flooding in. Memories corrupt” (p93).
Our unnamed protagonist lives in a bleak, hostile world that is clearly recognisable as the 1970s (when the novel was written) and yet also presents a disturbing dystopian future. This involves:
- Kafkaesque officials collecting data for uncertain purposes (“The law says that house checks, surveys and searches may be undertaken at any time upon presentation of an official sealed warrant” p16).
- Electricity severely restricted (p42) with black-outs and limited fuel.
- Food heavily rationed and all services (for example, the Depot and the Transport) run pretty poorly by “the authorities”.
- Information carefully controlled (“One never knew, of course, whether this information could be trusted; but it was the only one available to us” p41).
- Disorder frequently breaking out, so that “many of the houses in the neighbourhood still had part of their barricades from the May Bread Riots” (p46).
- Overnight curfew (p55) and martial law enforced by the feared Civilian Army (“I had known people who had disappeared overnight, never to be seen again rather than face the wrath of the CA” p70).
But there are also moments of happiness - both recalled from the past and happening in the present day. For example:
- As a once confident young playwright, “walking down Bond Street with a hot August sun shining down on me and the pavements shimmering with heat haze” (p36) - unlike the frozen tundra of his current landscape.
- The blissful luxury of shaving with hot water (p42).
- When he first moved to the village it “was a friendly place and, although there were warnings, the dark clouds gathering on the horizon seemed far, far away” (p49).
- The robin in his garden that he befriends and gives crusts to (p58).
- Listening on Christmas Day (curiously not cancelled by the authorities) to his old LPs including his favourite, Verdi Requiem, which “washed over me, sweeping away care, filling me and feeding me and giving me life” (p125).
- The feral auburn-haired girl who he calls Helen and reluctantly gives refuge to.
Troubled and prickly-tempered Helen is the catalyst for change in his life. She’s his antithesis in pretty much everything, which means they spend a lot of time antagonising each other. For example:
- She lives in chaos while his life is strictly ordered.
- She enjoys risk and breaking rules while he’s terrified of the authorities and complies obediently (until he uncharacteristically loses patience with the Tribunal).
- She has no respect for books and learning. Words are his livelihood and only certainty. (“It’s pathetic! Play scripts. Look at them all. Hundreds of them. Stories about people - what good did they ever do anyone? What’s the point of stories?” p95)
Helen leads the unnamed protagonist into numerous scrapes as civil war erupts between the various factions in his village. But paradoxically, involvement with real people in challenging circumstances gets him to confront his own prejudices and preoccupations. And he ends up making friends and seeing good in people he previously shunned (including the enigmatic Mark Langley who undergoes a transformation from vigilante yob to sensitive carer for the protagonist in his final illness).
And so we realise as we reach the final pages that what we’ve been reading are the meandering thoughts and memories of a dying man. Until this point I felt I hadn’t been able to pinpoint what the novel was really about.
In parts it feels like 1970s survivalist sci-fi - mankind struggling after some kind of catastrophe brought down upon itself by its own stupidity. So is it some kind of warning - rioting on the buses one day (p12), societal collapse the next? Or a political allegory - a cautionary tale of “the authorities” taking over because they weren’t sufficiently challenged?
I wondered, too, in places whether it was actually intended metaphorically - as a piece of 1970s counterculture, heavy with symbolism: robins, apple trees, auburn-tressed maidens and veggie communes. Even the potted wisdom sometimes sounds a bit hippy dippy - things like “if you are to suffer loss, then you must first experience the fullness” (p111) and “the end of the dream is the beginning of life” as the novel’s opening and closing lines.
So to be honest, while I wasn’t exactly disappointed by the novel, it did leave me feeling slightly let down. It was just too elusive for me, too unreal. It felt as though it was slipping through my fingers without my being able to register what it all meant.
I was pleased, though, that I did at least finally work out the meaning of the novel’s title. At the funeral service for the nineteen killed in the civil disturbances the Church of England vicar (curiously surviving under the New Order) reads from the Old Testament Book of Genesis about the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.
He reads aloud about the Tree of Life which features in the novel in the form of the apple tree in the protagonist’s back garden. And he reads about the gate, east of Eden, guarded by angels with flaming swords. The gate that the dying protagonist dreams he’s returning to in a spiritually-glowing ending that, perhaps surprisingly, turns out not to be metaphor or mysticism but conventional Christian belief.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews