The Carp Castle

MacDonald Harris's posthumously published novel is set in the 1920's against a backdrop of airships, mysticism, erotic love and a Europe that is picking itself up after WW1. The League of Nations is a giant airship constructed by the same factory in Germany that made the Zeppelins, and is owned by Moira, the leader of a semi-religious cult. The captain is Georg von Plautus, a Prussian WW1 Zeppelin commander who harbours a terrible secret from a bombing raid over London in 1916. Moira's followers have embarked with her on an extraordinary voyage in this airship to a place that she calls Giaconda. The novel explores the lives of these characters on board taking the reader through a heady mix of sexual entanglements, metaphysics, and Blavatsky and Swedenborg influenced séances. Towards the end of the novel it is apparent that all of Moira;s devotees have one thing in common. This is perhaps MacDonald Harris' most surprising novel, even bearing in mind that each one of his 15 published novels never failed to surprise the reader of the preceding one. The Carp Castle was completed shortly before his death in 1993 and seems to have disappeared at this time. Its re-emergence followed the very successful re-publication of his most successful book The Balloonist which left critics in the UK asking for more, and is part of the renaissance of this immensely talented writer who had so many followers and critical admirers in the 1980's.