The Looking-Glass Self

It’s the sixties, and London swings, decade of the affluent, tuned-in, rebellious, sexually free welfare generation, product of post-war scientific management. Everything is possible.  Or so the media tells us. England swings like a pendulum do, goes the song, but despite the great post-war welfare experiment and all it promised, existence for Craig seems one long maze full of obstacles, on the wrong side of scientific management and unclear why. Approaching 25, he wanders from job to job, his one ’achievement’ his ’job collection’, giving spurious satisfaction. ’A kind of odyssey,’ he unwisely tells his therapist-cum-probation officer. ’Like the wanderings of Odysseus.’ ’That’s a new angle,’ mocks his therapist. ’But Odysseus didn’t choose to wander. He was returning home after a war. Your wanderings take you nowhere.’ On his odyssey to ’nowhere’, he encounters a world-weary therapist who denies causality and sees only excuses for inertia; a paranoid artist searching for the elusive source of creativity; a radical Marxist who believes everything is a label; a hippie who denies time. Slowly, he gains insight and realises he was shaped by some huge social experiment gone wrong. By the novel’s end he is taking control and understands the forces that shaped him, though not without help and not in ways expected, reshaped in part by unscientific chance -- and Eve. Through the characters and situations, you will experience an alternative Sixties, see behind the media myths, see a Sixties familiar yet unfamiliar and encounter resistance to change during a fascinating, if misunderstood, decade.