Then We Shall Hear Singing

Then We Shall Hear Singing (1942) by Storm Jameson is set in an unnamed occupied European country five years after its conquest by a fascist power. The Dictator's representative, Governor Rennensee, is a man of genuine cultivation and private moral discomfort who nonetheless continues to administer the occupation with efficiency. Into this arrangement arrives Dr. Hesse, a scientist bearing a proposal from the regime. It is a neurological procedure capable of destroying the higher cognitive functions of the occupied population, suppressing language, memory, and cultural identity without killing the body. The village women who form the novel's emotional center, the resistance network operating beneath the surface, and the young people navigating forced labor and forbidden song give the novel its human texture. Jameson's method is oblique and restrained, working through implication and small observed detail rather than overt dramatic confrontation.

The novel was published in Britain in 1942 during the actual occupation of much of Europe, which gives its concerns an immediacy that most dystopian fiction approaches only in retrospect. Subtitled A Fantasy in C Major, it is the third of Jameson's three ventures into speculative fiction, following In the Second Year (1936) and The World Ends (1937, as William Lamb). First published by Cassell in Britain in 1942. This first American edition was published by Macmillan the same year.

Hardcover. First American Edition. Octavo, blue cloth boards stamped in red on spine. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1942. #11392.
Very good copy in very good dust jacket with couple tiny chips, nicks, and a short closed tear on front panel.