Winchelsea ; Alex Preston's talk about his recently published novel; 18 March 2022

 

Residents of Winchelsea reassured by their social isolation in a historic hermitage might have been discomfited to find themselves exposed through the transient probing of the searchlight of Andy Warhol’s 15-minute celebrity. In the space of a week, the redoubtable Clare Balding and her historical-context delivery man rambled across from Winchelsea Beach to the citadel and laid bare our antient town’s idiosyncrasies to those massed ranks of Middle England who constitute the Radio 4 audience.  Barely had the Ramblers retreated to the archival sanctuary of BBC Sounds than Alex Preston found himself warily confronting the combined forces of the town’s Literary and Museum Societies in the New Hall where he had been invited to introduce his fourth and most recent novel, Winchelsea, to the assembled citizenry.   

Despite a critical following wind from the favourable reviews by publications ranging from The Economist to The Hastings Independent Paper, our speaker attributed his unease to a previous chastening experience where he was castigated by an audience member for the engineering solecism of placing a crankshaft in the engine of the 1930s Italian saloon car, a Fiat Ardita, in which two of the characters in his third novel were fleeing Florence.  Alex anxiously scanned the audience trying to divine the identity of the audience member possibly tasked with the relentless fact checking of his talk, on behalf of whichever jurat currently curates Winchelsea’s arcana.  Potential readers were assured of his respect when he declared that he favoured Virginia Woolf’s approach of treating the reader as an educated amateur.  Since sense of place was the key factor for author and audience, Preston’s listeners were interested in his list of associations with Winchelsea beginning with a visit as a two-year-old.  He told of the personally eventful odyssey which had created his romantically contorted Winchelsea; a night there drenched in bright moonlight, a storm out at sea witnessed from the town and the sense of its subterranean world of cellars and tunnels culminating in rubbing shoulders with the shade of his latest fictional heroine during a Cellar Tour.  His Muse also drew inspiration from the area’s past literary luminaries – Ford Madox Ford, Stephen Crane and Henry James, including the last’s fascination with Thackeray’s unfinished Rye/Winchelsea saga Denis Duval.  Lest all this seems excessively ethereal, he also bonded with the locale through wild swimming at Pett Level. 

  The author then treated us to a reading from the book where the town, its surroundings and the prevailing weather were described in lyrical prose.  The plot lines of the novel were explored in some detail; the vibrant smuggling industry of the 1740s and the modus operandi of the rival Hawkhurst and Mayfield gangs, the Jacobite leanings of some of the characters, genuflections before the modern cultural iconostasis in the ambiguous sexuality of the heroine  and the racially inclusive dramatis personae and a  crescendo building to a climactic Armageddon where revenge is dispensed in measures sufficient to leave even the Count of Monte Cristo sated.  It was entirely understandable that an audience, assailed for the last 2 years by myriad microbes whose battle standards bore devices drawn exclusively from the Greek alphabet, should fail to mount the required immune response and succumb en masse to the virus of literary narcissism, charging forward to purchase the essence of Winchelsea captured in this eponymous novel.  Sadly, Clare Balding missed Alex Preston’s talk but had she and her companion rambled on to Rye and sought to slake their thirst at the first hostelry they would have learnt from the board over the entrance to the Ship Inn of the resilience of smuggling as a local industry in the mixture of despair and exasperation permeating Lord Pembroke’s 1781 quotation displayed there “Will Washington take America or smugglers England first?”  and might perhaps have been minded to summon sympathetic sentiments for the crew of Rye’s Revenue Cutter, Amelia, tasked with sailing into a steady, if sometimes only metaphorical, headwind in their unavailing struggle against the integral part of the local economy that was smuggling. 

William Doherty