THE TRAGEDIANS

OF THE CITY

- a novel by

Richard Deakin

THE TRAGEDIANS OF THE CITY  a novel by Richard Deakin   (summary)

This novel is an epic attempt to suggest the apogee, decline and fall of the reigning “counterculture” of the sixties/seventies into the barren cynicism of the eighties.  It proposes an apparently minor reverse - the police mass action to effect the destruction of the “Free Festival” at Windsor Park - as the time that the flood of “revolution” in England (or simply socialism-liberalism-freedom of the people) began to be turned back.  The story moves to America and examines the fates of people whose personal pitfalls foreshadow the doom of that era, perhaps the most important cultural era since the great modernist movement of the twenties.  The central thread is a love story.

PART ONE gives the set-up, at the “Sloane” Court theatre in the middle eighties.  At the end of this episode, in the grip of memory-association we flash back ten years, to explain how our protagonist got stuck on the middle of a bridge...

PARTS TWO AND THREE detail a flashback to the seventies, with a young man, Jay, his new lover, Tanya, and her wild brother, Ryan, exploring the edge, first in England, then in America (Jay and Tanya in college-literary and Ryan in drug-running circles).  The betrayals in the central relationship - a tale of love betrayed by desire - and the parallel descent of the idealistic, outlaw brother into criminality, murder and self destruction, are meant to mirror the loss of innocence in that decade. 

PART FOUR The bitchery in the Sloane Court Theatre circa the late eighties serves to illuminate that earlier loss of innocence, and as a setting for an episode that is a coda to the main story and completes the narrative circle.