The Wooden Shepherdess (New York Review Books Classics)
Language: English
Pages: 440
ISBN: 0940322307
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Wooden Shepherdess is the sequel to The Fox in the Attic, and the second volume of Richard Hughes's monumental historical fiction, "The Human Predicament." It opens with Hughes's hero Augustine in prohibition era America, where he is a bemused onlooker and an increasingly fascinated participant in a country intoxicated with sex, violence, and booze. In brilliant cinematic style, the book then moves to Germany, where the Nazi Party is gradually gaining in power; to the slums, mining towns, parliamentary back rooms, and great houses of a Britain teetering on the verge of class war; and to the wilds of the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. The novel ends with a terrifying account of the Night of the Long Knives, as Hitler ruthlessly secures his hold upon Germany.
This new edition of the The Wooden Shepherdess concludes with the twelve chapters that Hughes completed of the planned third volume of "The Human Predicament," here published for the first time in America.
flog the skin off his back unless he resigned (it wasn’t till two years later that Father himself saw the light, and encouraged him to rejoin). Meanwhile his elders were busy electioneering too. Nazis and Stahlhelm and Reichsbanner marched and counter-marched on each others’ routes, each Laocoon-band wreathed in its boa-constricting brass and attempting to deafen the rival band with its thundering drums and its stertorous trombone work. Noses were bloodied and eyes were blacked, beer-mugs were
like a hare’s in-and-out the leaping shadows of seven men after him carried him into dead ground in a two-three seconds, and dropped him flat on his face well below the beam of the light. Thus pursuit had blundered right over him.... Only then did his brain wake up and begin to inquire what all this was about. It had plenty of time to wonder: for dawn was a long way off, and his trousers were soaking. All night he had lain in a berry-bush, longing for Alice May. Then morning came, and he crept
Augustine chuckled. “The sheep to be eating the Shepherd for once! It’s a bit of a change of role....” Because of his Christian upbringing, saying this kind of thing still made him feel a bit like a naughty small boy scrawling rude words on a wall. * But when Polly got to her room she had barely glanced at her Hitler icons: the photographs looked so insipid and posed compared with the Real Thing. Instead she leaned from her window and gazed at the moon in a halo of luminous haze which
presents to come. He had asked for a sabre, first; and he hoped there’d be no hanky-panky, the Christkind would bring him a proper cavalry one. But next on his list of requests was that cooking-stove everyone teased him about.... Would the Christkind think him a sissy like everyone else did—a boy who wanted to cook? Would Uncle Dolf think him sissy? That terrible thought made him blush to the roots of his hair, and he couldn’t swallow his tart. Wine, and a deal more small-talk.... Herr Hitler
charged with emotion, and knew that at any moment an accidental touch or a single word could alter the course of their lives.... At the prospect Joan felt panicky, torn in two. In earlier days she’d have married him like a shot had he asked her then, but as time went by and he didn’t, in self-defense she had grown more critical. Now she was pulled one way by the man she had loved at sight, the other by dreary jingles about young men who come to the age of twenty-six without a career of any kind