The Sword Cabinet

Since Winter Garden won the James Tait Black Prize in 1985, Robert Edric has continued to publish novels and short stories to critical acclaim. In 1986, A New Ice Age was runner-up for the Guardian Fiction Prize while his recent In Desolate Heaven, published in 1997, was welcomed as an "individual and important book, pared down almost to poetry, dismissing all the usual aspects of suffering in the trenches", (Jane Gardam, Literary Review). It's not a story of war, but you might say the same of The Sword Cabinet, a spare, sometimes bewildering, tale of "Show Business" and murder, family and loss. "Like every other confused and sorry tale that sets out to explain more than it can ever hope to," Edric begins, "this one, Mitchell's confused and sorry tale, ended badly because it began badly, because it began--just as it begins again here--all too literally in glimpses and shadows ..." And so it goes on. Edric's prose is compelling, rarely giving anything away as we follow the strange and spectacular, deaths of the Kings--showmen, escapalogists--and Mitchell in his quest to know what the "last of the showmen", Quinn, knows of his mother, what Morgan knows of the deaths of a succession of young women. Glimpses of the past, fragments from newspapers, from Quinn's memory, weave this clever and "sorry" tale, where "nothing was ever what it seemed". --Vicky Lebeau


Genre: General Fiction