Andrew Sinclair - Gog

Praise for GOG

Sureness of talent, intelligence, sophistication, energy, charm, wit, wild and lyric imagination.

Eliot Fremont-Smith, New York Times

This randy romp of images, prophetic, paradoxical, perverse, seems more a cross-section of the national unconsciousness than any novel can properly be... it will bear comparison with the most serious attempts to get at the matter of Britain. Sinclair is still warming up. We can confidently expect things of him that none of his contemporaries are capable of.

Robert Nye, The Guardian

A marvellous book. It is a thoroughly exhilarating, freewheeling performance full of panache, effortlessly contained history, and spilling over with scenes that are impossible to forget.

Daily Telegraph

Gog is written in the present tense but the atmosphere is medieval. Its a Gothic fairy tale, all angles and distortions and devils in hobnailed boots; its a Norse mythology, full of giants with clubs and coalscuttle heads; its Druidic, Powysian, supernatural, the history of Albion, all her sons and daughters, all the rot and rain, all the pestilence, the horror, the dread and the delight bubbling up and erupting and resurrecting itself in the here and now, bursting out of the past as Gog tramps through the living land trying to fathom who he is. The book sears and scalds, its the vision of a cold, planetary eye, and somehow it all founders in the end, goes mad like a cancer and finally smashes in a blind fury of destruction. Im still reeling. I think theres genius in it.

Philip Callow, Books and Bookmen

It is an immense, sprawling, rambling, feverish hot-house of myth and gross vitality and confusion and fierce imaginative nightmare.

Northern Echo

The product of a very gifted imagination... brutal, beautiful, terrifying... an ambitious and extremely interesting book.

Glasgow Herald

A bustling, learned, feverish novel... a vivid nightmare with quiet interludes... full of energy, power, lust and humour. It sticks in the mind.

Oxford Mail

The authors comic gifts and the novels core sincerity about themes which really matter make Gog well worth reading.

Minneapolis Tribune

Also Available by Andrew Sinclair

The Raker

The Facts in the Case of E. A. Poe

GOG

A NOVEL BY

ANDREW SINCLAIR

VALANCOURT BOOKS

First published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1967

First American edition published by Macmillan in 1967

First Valancourt Books edition 2015

Copyright 1967 by Andrew Sinclair

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the authors intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

Cover by Henry Petrides

Prologue

The naked man lies on the sand spit between the two legs of sea. The waves well up the spit and wash the body of the man, who is nearly seven feet long. He is prone on his stomach, his face turned sideways, his mouth agape with scum running out of his gullet to join the backwash of the water. Long strands of seaweed foul him, dark as drying blood. One string of rubbery bubbled weed winds round his waist and drags back towards the sea. The man does not seem to breathe at all.

On the beach below the cliffs, two soldiers are strolling, their tin hats in their hands. Seeing the body they run forwards. They hoick the man over and pull him by the legs up the beach a little way; they can hardly drag him for his huge weight. Then one soldier squats on the mans chest and pushes down on his ribs, while the other raises and lowers the mans arms. Water and green bile spew out of the mans mouth, he gags horribly. The soldiers release him and prop him forwards, his head between his knees. One of the soldiers thumps his back. The man throws up more water, then, with a retch, he groans, the tears rolling down his cheeks from the salt behind his closed eyelids. The soldier at his back jerks his thumb at the other soldier, who begins stumbling away across the beach towards the cliffs. The soldier who stays by the naked man watches him for a little while. Then he goes over to the edge of the sea and makes a bowl of his tin hat and squats to fill it with sea and carries it back and begins to wipe off the weed from the flesh of the naked man. He works thoroughly, with the man moaning from time to time at the sting of salt on his grazes and cuts.

When the soldier finishes with wiping off the weed, he takes a packet of Woodbine cigarettes out of his pocket, flicks the bottom of the packet with his thumbnail so that the tips of two cigarettes jump upwards, and offers the packet to the naked man. But the man does not see the soldiers gesture. He is hunched forwards, his fingers twined together in one fist which rests on his closed kneecaps, while his fore head in its turn rests upon his locked hands. Above his forehead, a small and bloody hollow pocks his right temple. He breathes heavily and unevenly, occasionally coughing out a mixture of bile and seawater.

Did you hit a mine on that Yank convoy? the soldier asks, getting no answer. So he smokes and looks out to sea, as though the reply lies on the stretch of waves which have delivered the naked stranger. From time to time, he studies the bowed figure of the middle-aged man beside him, whose belly is already beginning to drag down the skin on his ribs. Twice more, the soldier opens his mouth to speak, but he closes his lips and says nothing. Eventually, he smokes his cigarette down to its end, until the stub burns the tips of his thumb and forefinger and middle finger, which hold the cigarette in a triangle of flesh pointing inwards at his palm. He throws the stub away towards the sea and squats to examine the naked man closely.

Something on the back of the left hand of the man interests the soldier, who leans forward onto his knees to study the mark. It is a tattoo of blue lines in the form of a fence round three letters that are half-hidden by the mans cheek, so that the soldier cannot read them. But the soldier sees that each side of the fence is pricked out in a sheaf of wheat, while the top of the fence is formed by a sickle.

Whats that you got there? the soldier says, but the naked man does not give a reply.

The soldier is puzzled. He looks back towards the cliffs; but there is no sign of the second soldier or of other rescuers. So he crawls on all fours round to the right of the naked man to see whether he can find further marks of identification. Nothing shows on the body or legs of the man except a thick covering of hair from the navel down; but, on the back of his right hand, there is another tattoo, this time of five half-hidden letters fenced at each side by a series of wheels joined with a lever and closed at the top by a frieze of crowns linked with a chain.

You all right? the soldier asks, anxious to re ad the hidden letters.

The naked man lifts up his head from his locked hands and turns his face towards the soldier. The soldier sees a long, square chin, cleft in the middle; spreading lips cracked with salt that fall slack to show bleeding gums and teeth jostling for place in a narrow jaw; a nose as pitted and spread as a labourers thumb; heavy cheeks which sit like two firm pats of butter between eye-sockets and jawbone; eyes bloodshot with exposure and slitted against the light; a jut of bone which pushes out black eyebrows and makes the forehead seem to slope backwards; brown hair plastered back against a knobbled skull with large ears slightly protruding and awry. The soldier has never seen such a strong face, outside films of Chicago thugs. He would avoid it in a bar.