There are two writers named Nicholas Royle: there’s the Nicholas Royle who’s a novelist and critic and used to teach at Manchester Metropolitan University; and there’s the Nicholas Royle who is a novelist and critic and used to teach at the University of Sussex. David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine is the work of the Sussex Royle – not to be confused with the Sussex Royals, Harry and Meghan.
Whoever the author, even if it were the Sussex Royals, you’ll never have read a book like this. Parts I and III function as a third-person narrative framing device – “It’s real life or what I call reality literature,” writes Royle – and seem to be based on Royle’s experience with his young family during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Part IV is a short work of fiction, based on historical documents and family rumours that suggest Royle’s paternal grandmother, the children’s-book illustrator Lola Onslow, had an affair with Enid Blyton.
Everything in between, amounting to the bulk of Royle’s book, consists of what appear to be his farewell lectures, delivered online, before he accepts “voluntary severance” from his university employers. They’re mostly about what Bowie and Blyton can teach us about life and literature, which is rather a lot: there’s a lecture on “The Undermind” (a term borrowed from Blyton); another lecture about telepathy (“A work of fiction is a work of mind-reading: the book takes you inside the thoughts and feelings of another or others”); another about something Royle calls “the Croydon Effect” (“the liminal or transitional space of the hypnagogic, where you are neither properly asleep nor properly awake’); and a lecture about fairies and what he calls “the tethe implex”, which is “about the realisation and affirmation of a transgenerational force of the mother, a force of art and song, Gran Phantasma”.
As if this weren’t enough, the book also contains an afterword by the eminent scholar Peter Boxall, which attempts to explain the book and put it into context: “To read David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine is to be gathered into the world that it imagines, so we no longer feel ourselves to be situated beyond its borders.” In other words, the whole thing is meandering, messy – and absolutely enthralling.
