Wheldon, David
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1950- ) UK physician and author whose first novel, The Viaduct (1983), is typical of his work in general through its treatment of our Perceptions of reality as essentially indeterminable; for the released prisoner at the heart of this tale, the eponymous viaduct insecurely serves as a kind of threshold, perhaps into another Dimension. The Course of Instruction (1984) entangles its protagonist in a bureaucratic organization as inextricable as one of Franz Kafka's. In A Vocation (1986), an exercise in sustained Fantastika, an abandoned railway track, once embarked upon, becomes for its protagonist the path of his life, and of his fellows whose dilemmas he encounters in his passage. And At the Quay (1990) reconfigures Wheldon's continuous scrutiny of the interplay between traveler and the worlds he penetrates; in this case, a messenger carries a message into a land where what is written down shapes the reality to which it has been addressed. [JC]
David Wheldon
born Moira, Leicestershire: 1950
works (selected)
- The Viaduct (London: The Bodley Head, 1983) [hb/Barbara Lofthouse]
- The Course of Instruction (London: The Bodley Head, 1984) [hb/]
- A Vocation (London: The Bodley Head, 1986) [hb/]
- At the Quay (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1990) [hb/]
links
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