Vu
Book Title: Vu
Author: Kenneth Sinclair
Coming out 19 December 2024
The Story
Gabriel, a twentieth century storyteller, is abducted while journeying in an unnamed land. He is summoned to narrate to the Princess Sheherazade, who occupies an imaginal world not bounded by time or place. His narration spans more than two thousand years, told over twenty evenings. It is a many-layered tale, in which poets, painters and players jostle with explorers, sages and scientists, hurtling towards the silver screen and the appreciation of string theory.
The last word is given to the birds, who fly through the narrative, calling us to attend to them and to the natural world in which, and against which, all human striving takes place.
Reader Reviews
Author Bio
Kenneth Sinclair was born in Scotland and has lived in London and Wiltshire.
His early writing, in the 1960s and 70s, comprised a number of stage plays, three of which were performed publicly. These are,
The Private Secretary (BBC Radio 4);
Blue Skies (Pentameters, Hampstead);
Candles in the Night (ADC Theatre, Cambridge).
A 1974 review of Blue Skies by Matthew Lewin in the Express and News – forerunner of the Ham and High – described the drama as, “a penetrating and amusing play about the hopes, dreams and suddenly-changing fortunes of new and established staff of a large company… The play very effectively lashes out at the petty rules and pompous regulations which large companies tend to generate within themselves. People find security in obeying policies and rules which they have themselves created – and it only takes a few minor upsets to knock the whole delicately balanced mechanism out of alignment.”
The ADC Theatre programme describes the Candles in the Night production as, “a move towards a more fluid, emblematic presentation, free from the inhibitions and limitations of naturalistic stage technique.”
Sinclair pushed his dramatic endeavours to the limit with an ambitious piece that includes, first, a meeting between the fictional Baron de Charlus and Leopold Bloom, followed by that of their authors, Proust and Joyce. In a personal letter, Harold Pinter wrote to him in 1980, “The play is clearly a highly ambitious piece of work. I think it is in the main part beautifully written, with elegance and wit and, as you suspected, I was intrigued by what you were setting out to do. I donʼt think it entirely succeeds and it is difficult to put oneʼs finger on the reason…”
After that, Sinclair turned his attention away from theatre, but retained a desire to break the boundaries in a new form of writing. He started working on Vu during the prolonged post office strike of 1988. It underwent many revisions before Gillian Paschkes-Bell began to work on it with him as his editor. Although he describes Vu as a novel, it retains only the barest development of character and plot. Rather, it emerges from his years of extensive reading and his interest in the arts, including popular culture. Vu is a collections of images in words that drift, as one reader put it, like clouds across the imagination.
Kenneth Sinclairʼs life is revealed through his poetry collection, A Breath Taken, which was published by Wordcatcher in 2022, shortly before the company ceased trading.