Colin Spencer - Fiction

Fiction

Since 1955 Colin Spencer has had nine novels as well as numerous short stories published both in the UK and abroad. His work can be divided into the 4 semi-autobiographical works of the Generation sequence; the two satirical black comedies Poppy, Mandragora and the New Sex, and How the Greeks Kidnapped Mrs Nixon (republished in paperback under the title Cock-Up); the sexual realist drama Panic, a compassionate examination of the mentality of a child murderer; the experimental Asylum, merging the myths of Oedipus and the Old Testament Fall of Man into a narrative written in a style akin to poetic prose; and his first novel, set mostly in Vienna, An Absurd Affair, which he feels can be sensibly ignored.

That first novel was followed in 1963 by Anarchists in Love the first book of his four-volume novel sequence GENERATION which the author describes as the main core of his work, and “fictionalised autobiography.” Further volumes in the series The Tyranny of Love, Lovers in War and The Victims of Love appeared in 1967, 1969 and 1978. With a Dickensian breadth of characters and social settings, the four volumes follow the saga of the Simpson family from the end of World War I through to the 1960s age of sexual and social experimentation. It focuses in particular on the tortuous search for self-realisation and love by Sundy and Matthew, the two artistically gifted children of the raucously womanising Eddy. The sequence was described by Sir Huw Wheldon as a “work of serious purpose; affecting, hilarious and grave. It is a tapestry of unforgettable characters in all their seaminess and sadness, their idealism and desires.”