Re-Covered: The Orlando Trilogy
In her monthly column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.
The Orlando Trilogy—which has just been reissued in the UK by Bloomsbury (under the title Orlando King)—is British novelist Isabel Colegate’s masterwork about personal, political, and public mythmaking. Colegate takes the scaffolding for her tale from Sophocles’s Theban plays. Her Oedipus Rex is Orlando King, a young man who scales the greasy pole of power and privilege in the thirties. “We know the story of course, so nothing need be withheld,” she writes on the opening page. “We choose a situation in the drama to expose a theme: passing curiosity must look elsewhere, we are here profoundly to contemplate eternal truths. With ritual, like the Greeks. With dreams, like Freud. Let us pray.” The trilogy spans the middle of the twentieth century. By the end of the thirties, Orlando is a wealthy businessman and respected politician; he’s also inadvertently killed his biological father and married the dead man’s widow, and she has borne him his beloved daughter, Agatha. But the Second World War brings with it our hero’s downfall. Agatha, like Antigone before her, stumbles around in the wreckage—that of both the wider nation and her individual family—and finds herself forced to choose between her country and her kin.
