The Caves of Alienation (Library of Wales)

616 Pages·2009·1.41 MB·English

by  Stuart Evans

Stuart Evans was born in Swansea in 1934 and brought up at
Ystalyfera in Glamorgan. He read English at Jesus College,
Oxford. After service in the Royal Navy, he taught at Brunel
College of Advanced Technology and, from the mid 1960s,
worked for BBC Radio in London as a producer in the Schools
Broadcasting Department. It was as a novelist that he established
his reputation, with eight long, technically complex novels
which are more inclined to the philosophical than is usual in
English fiction. They include Meritocrats(1974), The Gardens of
the Casino(1976), The Caves of Alienation(1977), and a quintet
known as The Windmill Hill Sequence. He also published two
volumes of verse, Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads(1972) and
The Function of the Fool(1977). He died in 1994.

the caves
of aLienation
stuart evans
L I B R A R Y O F W A L E S
Parthian
The Old Surgery
Napier Street
Cardigan
SA43 1ED
www.parthianbooks.co.uk
The Library ofWales is a Welsh Assembly Government
initiative which highlights and celebrates Wales’ literary
heritage in the English language.
Published with the financial support of
the Welsh Books Council.
The Library ofWales publishing project is based at
Trinity College, Carmarthen, SA31 3EP.
www.libraryofwales.org
Series Editor: Dai Smith
First published in 1977
Library ofWales edition 2009
Foreword © Duncan Bush 2009
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978-1-905762-95-8
Cover design: www.theundercard.co.uk
Cover image: Coast ofPembroke by John Piper
©Estate of John Piper with kind permission
of the National Museum ofWales
Printed and bound by Gwasg Gomer,Llandysul, Wales
Typeset by Lucy Llewellyn
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Acataloguing record for this book is available from the British Library.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way
of trade or otherwise be circulated without the publisher’s prior
consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which
it is published.
L I B R A R Y O F W A L E S

That was my choice which now is my rejection:
The caves of alienation, and the chant
Of phantom dancers, the anger and the fury.
And still between rifts of smoke in the acrid darkness,
For a gleaming moment, still the bright daggers besieging
This fiery lump which passes for a heart.
There is one sort of daybreak, a death renewed;
Here is another, a life that glimmers and wakes.
Henry Reed: Philoctetes
Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse.
Epictetus