After all, she writes “Hallo Love,” the final chapter of They, only a year later, in March 1975. from her earlier more fashionable novels.” Perhaps her admiration for such an astonishing volte-face-combined with the impact of the recent emotional disturbances she’d undergone-inspired Dick to try something similar herself. What we do know for sure, though, is that in Friends and Friendship Dick points out that what makes Brooke-Rose’s most recent writing “so remarkable” is its “divergence. These experiences could also explain her particular interest in “Coping with Grief,” the 1975 Sunday Times article that she takes such pains to credit at the beginning of They. She certainly underwent a period of intense bereavement and loss in the 1960s-this included the breakdown of a relationship, followed by the death of a lover who killed herself, an experience Dick later wrote about in her final novel, The Shelf (1984), and a suicide attempt of her own, which she talks about in the autobiographical essay included in Friends and Friendship (1974). Whether They was the result of something similar in Dick’s life, we can’t be sure. Orwellian fiction.” Ice (1967), Kavan’s enigmatic, almost psychedelic final novel-in which a man pursues a silver-haired woman across a snowy, post-apocalyptic wasteland-reads like a sinister dream sequence, a description that could also be applied to the unsettling, cryptic chapters of They.
Stylistically and tonally, They is much closer to the works of experimental British writers Ann Quin-is it just a coincidence that one of the characters is named “Berg,” the same as the eponymous protagonist of Quin’s 1964 debut?-Christine Brooke-Rose, and Anna Kavan.ĭick greatly admired her good friend Brooke-Rose’s avant-garde works, especially Out (1964)-a “race reversal” novel set in the aftermath of a catastrophic event that leaves white people suffering from radiation poisoning, but Black people unscathed-which Dick, writing in Friends and Friendship (1974), her collection of interviews with fellow authors, described as “powerful, sinister, near prophetic.
Not just because of the eerie, haunting power of the narrative therein, but because it’s a complete anomaly in Kay Dick’s oeuvre a surreptitious late-career aberration, the genesis of which is unclear, and whose strangeness never seeps into what she wrote after.Ĭompared to Dick’s earlier novels- By the Lake (1949), Young Man (1951), An Affair of Love (1953), Solitaire (1958) and Sunday (1962), all of which are tales of romantic or familial entanglements set against the backdrop of urbane European settings the writing of which was often praised as “Proustian”-it seems the work of an entirely different writer. When They was first published in 1977, it surely took readers by surprise.
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