Description:

Completed by Robert Aickman in 1975, and only recently discovered in his papers, Go Back at Once is a delicious, delirious comic fantasia about the joys and terrors of a life devoted to resisting conformity. It tells the story of Cressida Hazeborough and her friend Vivien, two mordantly intelligent young women fresh out of school. The pair have little patience for the company of the marriageable men they are meant to endure, nor for any other bore's company, yet neither do they possess the means to live as they might wish: together, and apart from the demands of modern society. What’s a girl to do?
But then remarkable news arrives: a great Italian poet has conquered the tiny country of Trino, on the Adriatic Sea, and now seeks to govern it ‘according to the laws of music’. Could this new utopia be a refuge for Cressida and Vivien?
Escapist yet clear-eyed, old-fashioned yet queer, Go Back at Once reveals another side to Aickman, that of a satirist and wit deserving of a place alongside the mischievous greats of the twentieth-century British novel: Ronald Firbank, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Evelyn Waugh – not to mention Aickman’s contemporaries Muriel Spark and Penelope Fitzgerald.