Here is the Editor’s Note on the Text from my most recently completed novel: it is presented as having been written by Ted English and edited by me, which cunningly allows me to abdicate responsibility for the many mistakes which it is bound to contain. English has spelt taut as taught? Perhaps he meant something by it. I am only the editor, after all...
In editing and preparing War in English’s Apodidraskiana for publication, written in nineteen eighty-six and held by me since, I have encountered relatively few problems. I have restricted myself to eradicating small repetitious sections and correcting the names of some characters which appeared confused (it seems that English changed his mind about which twin he wanted to be his main protagonist, and so Alistair and Andrew were occasionally confused in his manuscript, as were Andrew, Andrew’s, Andrews and Andrews’).
The chief difficulty came in devising a suitable title for the novel, for, though English had always regarded the novel as The Family Plot, so little of his original idea for that novel remained that I felt it unreasonable to retain that title. Given that English was such a great aficionado of Thomas Love Peacock (it would take him but a few moments of conversation with some new acquaintance for him to recommend that the new acquaintance read Peacock’s every work), I thought it suitable to settle on the title which the novel now carries, War in English’s Apodidraskiana. Apodidraskiana is fictional state taken from Thomas Love Peacock’s Crochet Castle, the name being taken from the Greek verb meaning “to run away”; since English certainly ran away to the characters and locations in his novels and that this book is certainly a war between those characters and novels, the title seemed, and still seems, both reasonable and attractive.
The only other decision that I was forced to make that is worth mentioning is the decision whether or not to omit the last line of the last chapter (it is omitted in this edition). English himself was unsure of whether or not to include the line, which was as follows:
“And so it becomes clear that it is impossible for us to escape influence.”
The line is a difficult one to apprehend. The line immediately before it has echoes of the final line of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and so English seemed to have agonised over whether or not it was not a clumsy way of reinforcing a point that he had already made. He certainly drew a line through the sentence and rewrote it nine times, and the final iteration of the sentence has only the words “for us to escape influence” struck out. Perhaps he meant to indicate that the decision was impossible to make, perhaps it was his final despair, in any case, I feel that the point that it is most likely that he was trying to make was adequately made by the preceding lines, and so I opted to leave out this last line. Who knows, perhaps in subsequent editions I will reinstate it, perhaps I will not.
In any case, the novel as it stands is a fascinating insight into the mind of a novelist who has lost control of his lives, fictional and real, and, fortunately for us, is a very pleasurable read into the bargain. It is easy for me to see why English loved Tierra Del Mar. I hope that you love it too.
E. W.
The editor is proud to count himself a friend of Ted English, and is Professor of English at Crakethorne University.
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