The Glamour-Land

The Glamour-Land by Michael Wood

In a frozen coastal landscape of brilliant blue, white, and red, a boy called Redcap tells other children of Glamour-Land, insisting that their visible world is only an enchantment of the Black Witch and that the Wise Queen will one day destroy it. Though mocked by one listener, he speaks with certainty born of inward knowledge. Years later, hardship overturns his life: after his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage, poverty forces him at eighteen from his northern home to dreary London office work. Cut off from the country, beauty, and visionary life he loved, he becomes outwardly practical, dependable, and successful in business while inwardly suffering from desolation. He protects himself with cheerfulness and common sense, yet longs desperately not to forget the unseen Glamour-Land. Hearing a choir sing of Babylon and Zion, he prays to go mad with memory rather than lose it. At a club he briefly declares that faith is the sense of the unseen and trust in it, a power that allies a person with the forces underlying the world; his acquaintances dismiss the outburst as strange because they know him as a solid man of business. After nearly twenty years in London, he meets the former boy who told pirate stories, now a successful writer married to the girl in the crimson coat. His old companion recognises that the office worker’s worldly prosperity falls short of his early promise and asks why he abandoned the stories of Glamour-Land. He answers that the part of himself that knew such things is dead, that his mind has become a hollow pipe for other people’s thoughts, and that he no longer knows what he knew in youth. Back in his room overlooking the river, an evening vision brings the scent of wild thyme and makes Glamour-Land seem suddenly present in the city. Realising he can afford to return north, he takes a holiday and revisits the jetty, the sea-bar, and the glowing hills. Yet the familiar beauty does not satisfy him. It merely awakens longing for an unnamed reality beyond itself. He understands that Glamour-Land was never simply the home he lost, and he returns to London feeling a stranger even in the country of his birth. He confides in an old watercress and pencil seller on a bridge, a ruined man who longs to reclaim one disastrous hour from his past. The old man says it may be better to believe that some unattained thing would bring contentment, but the younger man prefers truth. Alone again, he recognises that he does not know where Glamour-Land lies, though he still prays never to forget Jerusalem. Then many voices, speaking as one, tell him that the guardians of the Songs of the Glamour sing through whatever people they choose, regardless of rank, virtue, or awareness. They say he has sung those songs for more than twenty years even while believing himself mute and deprived. His long deprivation has emptied him of ordinary desires and made him into an instrument through which the songs could sound. When he asks whether he himself is nothing, the voices answer that he is “nothing—or all that is.” He meditates until the river, the city, and his own heartbeat seem parts of one life pulsing outward from the Unknown God of the Worlds.

By Michael Wood · First published 1987 · Genre: Literary Fantasy, Philosophical Fiction, Psychological Fiction · 3,893 words

First lines

He follows on for ever, when all your chase is done, / He follows after shadows, the King of Ireland's son. / ――――(? )

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visionary fiction · spiritual allegory · Edwardian England · London · northern coastal landscape · childhood imagination · lost innocence · the unseen world · faith · longing · alienation · urban drudgery

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The Glamour-Land is listed on Textopian as a short story by Michael Wood, dated 1987 CE.

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