A lot has happened since the first edition of The Long Drawn Aisle came out in 2015. Among the more solipsistic of concerns was the publication, in 2019, of The Passing Tribute, a follow-up to The Long Drawn Aisle. It was shortly after the release of The Passing Tribute that – try as I might – I realised it was impossible to divorce it from its forerunner. It is this which has led me to revisit and revise the text of The Long Drawn Aisle in a way which, I hope, provides some extra clarity as to the themes and characters appearing in both novels.
It is nearly twenty years since a full year of my life was spent buried in the vaults of the Public Record Office, the British Library, King’s College Library, and countless others in pursuit of my MA in Imperial and Commonwealth History. I still cling onto the zeal with which I immersed myself in the subject – about which I knew little at the outset – with a sort of honey-dewed reverence. Twenty years later the British Empire continues to be the spur for all sorts of fervour. One memory from that time stands out though; one well-suited to explain the motive forces of the Wilson family. In the basement of the Institute for Historical Research there were original bound volumes of The Times newspaper, dating back to the 19th Century, almost immured behind the new revolving stacks. It was in filing through these that I discovered the ‘plot’, so to speak, of The Long Drawn Aisle. Several reports from the Vienna Correspondent in 1913 announced that the Canadian and Pacific Railway was under investigation for helping to spirit out from the Empire men of conscription age. So were Archibald Mackenzie and Ulrich Kostler born. A decade and more later, when I came to research The Passing Tribute, I found those volumes of The Times were no more. They had succumbed to the great digitisation of the world. Would I have found out about the Canadian and Pacific Railway Company’s nefarious deeds had I been merely scrolling and scrolling, and not turned pages with a wandering, curious eye? I am not sure that I would. The screen has, for me, a habit or fixing the eye but seeing nothing but the fact.
Both novels take their titles from lines in Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Two hundred and seventy years after it first appeared, it is the poem’s duality of heart that stirs the heart still, as it did mine more than a decade ago now. One man’s folly is another’s conviction. What serves a name on a grave? So it is that to acknowledge both folly and conviction – the human condition – as being neither wholly right nor wholly wrong is the balance humankind must strive to achieve.
In June 1914 the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo. In writing this foreword in April 2021 I do so in the shadow of another ‘great event’, the Covid pandemic. Who in 1914 or 2021 can tell where either might have lead or might lead? These events of great magnitude are merely staging posts (at place as yet undetermined) in a long, historical process. They are as evolutionary as the world. But although history may indeed be just one thing after another, that is not a straight line to infinity: those ‘things’ go in circles. So we continue on, passing from one grave to another; always walking, always remembering.
Simon Marshall 