The Scenic Railway

The rediscovery of Edward Upward's work excited enthusiastic comment among reviewers and readers when in 1994 Enitharmon published "The Mortmere Stories", "An Unmentionable Man" and a revised version of "Journey to the Border". The five short stories in this new volume, all written in recent years, reconfirm what Edward Mendelson in the "Times Literary Supplement" has described as Upward's 'unique perfected style ...that gives ordinary events a hallucinatory strangeness and renders dreams as if they were entirely ordinary, subject to the same ethical and political judgements appropriate to the daylight world.'A dying man finds affirmation in a career to which he had unsuccessfully given his life, a retired and cautious man finally has the courage to ask the woman he loves if she will come to live with him, a dying woman's dreams of revolutionary events seem to be coming true - Upward's stories give ordinary events a hallucinatory strangeness and renders dreams as if they were entirely ordinary. These five new, carefully rendered, quiet tales retain that unique mix of art and politics so crucial to the literature of the 1930s and 1940s for which he and his circle were so famous.