Library of Wales: The Caves of Alienation

Stuart Evans was born in Swansea in 1934 and brought up at Ystalyfera in Glamorgan. He read English at Jesus College, Oxford. After service in the Royal Navy, he taught at Brunel College of Advanced Technology and, from the mid 1960’s, worked for BBC Radio in London as a producer in the Schools Broadcasting Department. It was as a novelist that he established his reputation, with eight long, technically complex novels which are more inclined to the philosophical than is usual in English fiction. They include Meritocrats (1974), The Gardens of the Casino (1976), The Caves of Alienation (1977), and a quintet known as The Windmill Hill Sequence. He also published two volumes of verse, Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads (1972) and The Function of the Foal (1997). He died in 1994.

At the centre of Stuart Evans’ ambitious and enthralling novel is Michael Caradock, a well-known writer whose life has ended violently on an isolated Welsh island. The circumstances of his death are mysterious, but then his whole life and work are subjects of controversy. Are his work and death connected, and if so, on what level? In The Caves of Alienation, first published in 1977, Stuart Evans, displays the accomplished hand of a master craftsman in verse and prose, but also makes clear the startling ambition to produce a Welsh novel whose technical brilliance and intellectual power would allow it to take its place, unashamedly, in the ranks of European 20th Century fiction. He succeeded. The challenge for writers and readers is to catch up with him.The Caves of Alienation is multi-layered in its dazzling demonstration of virtuosity of style and narrative perspective -literally different novels within the novel ... that it is easy to underplay the thread that links fictive reviews to screenplay to cod biographies and the ventriloquism of reminiscence. For its story, constant and disturbing, is the touching and intriguing account of Michael Caradock, the alienated boy who lives his life as a man and a writer by soaring imaginatively away only to be forever and fatally tied down by the past.