The Lost Traveller

The Lost Traveller (1943) is a surrealist allegorical novel by Scottish poet Ruthven Todd, drafted in the mid-1930s and published during the Second World War by the Grey Walls Press. The protagonist, Christopher, finds himself adrift in a timeless desert landscape after what appears to be his own death, eventually arriving at a walled city governed by an unseen authority known only as "Him." Its faceless inhabitants live under a system of arbitrary, draconian laws that operate without logic or mercy. Christopher is eventually sentenced to capture the mythical Great Auk, a quest that drives the narrative into increasingly surreal territory as the boundaries between dream and reality dissolve entirely.

Todd acknowledged Kafka as a central influence, alongside the paintings of Bosch and de Chirico, and the novel shares Kafka's atmosphere of bureaucratic menace and purposeless authority. The faceless citizens, the incomprehensible sentence, and the absurd mission all work as allegory for the political terror of the 1930s, though the novel resists any single reading. With its drawings by John Craxton, it remains one of the more distinctive and neglected works of British wartime fiction. Todd's earlier novel, Over the Mountain (1939), covers related territory. Signed and dated 1944 by Todd on the front free endpaper.

Hardcover. First Edition. Octavo, cloth boards. London: The Grey Walls Press, 1943. #10758.
Slightly musty and bowing boards, else very good in basically fine dust jacket that has darkening of spine only.