“He had promised to find his cousin’s missing husband- across two continents- the only clues a few names scribbled hurriedly on the bottom of a letter”.
A lesser known novel set in the early 1960’s, but that has remarkable prescience for today , when powerful ego-maniacal forces are looking to manipulate the thinking of whole populations.
Tim Bedford is a successful painter with something of an expressionist style inspired by landscape. Against his better judgement he agrees to play amateur detective, when he promises to try and find the missing scientist husband of a cousin who is dying in hospital. The trail leads him from London and New York, to South America and finally Australia through a series of unlikely coincidences, as he stumbles to uncover a mysterious and increasingly frightening organisation. They are working to construct a mass communication network, a web that will enable them to psychologically manipulate millions of ordinary people – to produce discord, violence and the ultimate destruction of society for their own benefit. Fortunately equally strange but benevolent forces are slowly revealed that could well explain the coincidences. Together they may yet stop the ‘Wavy-8’ , but their time is running out .
Plot
Saturn Over The Water: ‘Vivid, fast-moving, crisp as an air ticket to a rare and unlikely destination. A novel that reads , as they say, like a bomb and sets the reader pondering once again its author’s exhuberent and richly grooved imagination.’
The Sunday Times
Written at the dawn of the 1960’s and the height of the cold war , the story unearths the mysterious and frightening organisation identified by the symbol of the ‘Wavy-8’. The tale begins when painter Tim Bedford visits his cousin as she lies dying in hospital. He agrees to go and search for her missing husband Jo Farne, a scientist who has disappeared from the mysterious Arnaldous research institute in South America. The only clues a list of unfamiliar names and places on a final letter he wrote.
At first a reluctant, blundering and naïve investigator, he nevertheless sets out on a risky trail that will take him via high society in London and New York, to an ominous institute in Peru, a weird Wagnerian settlement in Chile and then on to an unexpected and alarming climax in Australia. The characters he meets along the way are much too coincidental, suggesting odd forces are at work and not all can be genuine. There is danger at every turn but romance too as he strikes up a tempestuous relationship with Rosalia Arnaldous, feminist daughter of the institute’s Peruvian multi-millionaire owner. A headlong pace and the international settings combine with the artistic interpretations of the principles, to give it a strong visual and cinematic feel , whilst there is twinkle and mischief to the plot.
Themes
While in essence a thrilling and romantic adventure with a touch of magic realism , Saturn looks beyond the Cold war conflicts of its time, to a more fundamental concept that psychological technologies could soon be developed to enable mass manipulation and destruction of established societies. The novel is remarkably prescient in anticipating the likely exploitation of the future inter web and accompanying social media in the wrong hands. It also warns of the fragility of nature, and the power that it can in return unleash if it is disrespected. Priestley offers a much more serious and thoughtful subtext than its period jet set glamour might suggest.
Full of bright visual description , it incorporates all the style and colour of an exciting period of change in art, design, architecture and fashion. Available at good bookshops or from Amazon and other online retailers.
J.B PRIESTLEY 