Joseph Macleod, renowned for long modernist poems starting with The Ecliptic (1930, all published by Waterloo) as well as plays, prose works on theatre and acting, released his only published novel, Overture to Cambridge, in 1936. It’s as ambitious as Macleod’s poetry, now enjoying enthusiastic revival.

An extraordinary vision, as if the social novels and early speculative fiction of H.G. Wells had merged after a savage brawl in the pages of Wells’ The Outline of History as The Sequel. Overture to Cambridge is beguiling, richly- charactered, and strange, inflected with 1930s angst.

Though Macleod nods to his friend Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, he’s closer to Wells’ darkest visions, and 1984. Acclaimed when originally published, it’s a superb rediscovery by James Fountain, Macleod’s general editor:

“Unless men change their hearts now… they will be mere automatons… This is not a dream of tomorrow; it’s a need of today… Will you choose disaster, because you don’t know? Destruction and death, because you don’t care?”

80-year-old mayor of Cambridge Edward Wistow – also a university professor – undergoes a crisis and preaches to a rapt crowd. How does a 1936 novel set in the midst of Cambridge’s municipal life turn into a futurist dystopia nodding to Brave New World but fraught with war, theocracy and plague?

Whilst Wistow’s son Bill marries for money, daughter Nigella, in love, echoes her father’s idealism. Then a balcony collapses: Wistow finds himself in a world of “nightmare lived in the future, a grim and terrifying piece of prophesy as Mr Wells might have written” as a contemporary critic noted. Mutual slaughter, strictly supervised reproduction, plague; religious militias. It’s not far from The Handmaid’s Tale. Elsewhere, only Nigella and her fiancé offer hope.

(Waterloo Press 2024)

Below: Joseph Macleod in later life