In Zodiac Light

by Robert Edric

It is December 1922 and the aftershocks of the First World War continue to make themselves felt. Ex-soldier, poet and composer Ivor Gurney, suffering from increasingly frequent and deepening bouts of paranoid schizophrenia, is transferred to the City of London Mental Hospital, Dartford.

Neglected by the military and by his own family, and abandoned by all but a notable handful of his friends, Gurney begins a descent into the madness and oblivion which he believes has long been waiting to claim him.

Yet following his arrival at Dartford, there are still those who continue to believe in Gurney’s capabilities – in his ‘wayward genius’. For a brief period, it seems that he might find some calm and ease in his life, and thus achieve the status so many consider him capable of.

(From Publisher).

Robert Edric was born in 1956. His novels include Winter Garden (1985 James Tait Black Prize winner), A New Ice Age (1986 runner-up for the Guardian Fiction Prize), A Lunar Eclipse, The Earth Made of Glass, Elysium, In Desolate Heaven, The Sword Cabinet, The Book of the Heathen (shortlisted for the 2001 WH Smith Literary Award) and Peacetime (longlisted for the Booker Prize 2002).

An interesting and subtle analysis of the poet and composer Ivor Gurney’s creative  passion which made him mad, a novel based on his poem “In Flaxley Wood” (analysis done in the form of the novel).