Safe Return Doubtful

This is a speculative coming of age story from the 1930s that in its eeriness and suspense is typical of Onions’s best writing, but also is a novel of its times, in its dealing with workers’ strikes.
A difficulty is that the tangents Onions takes to include aspects of historical significance mean the story temporarily loses the ‘atmosphere of uncanny dread’ that Mark Valentine speaks of in his introduction.

Oliver Onions was prolific in his writing, and though these days best known for his supernatural work, he did also write social comedy and historical fiction. Contrary to what one might expect, Onions was actually the name he was born with. He did change his name, in 1918 when in his 40s, to George Oliver, but always published under his birth name.

The story is structured as a memoir, of Peter Byles, now living in a monastic order, and looking back at his childhood, growing up in an industrial town, watching his father and his friends play chess secretly from the staircase above.

When Peter is 13 his widowed father dies, and he is left in the care of one of his father’s chess friends, Herr Doktor Kornelius Voyt. Peter seldom sees Voyt, a deaf mute, a tutor looks after his education, which includes learning to sign, and to speak his carer’s native German fluently.
Under Voyt’s care Peter matures quickly, both physically as well as mentally. From a skinny boy short for his age, he grows to 6 foot 4 in just a few months. He is encouraged to socialise with adults partaking of hard liquor. He experiences sex for the first time when just 14 with a housemaid. On a rare meeting, Voyt requires Peter to undress in order to measure him for a new suit of clothes. It becomes apparent that he is being prepared, or groomed as we might say nowadays, but for exactly what is not clear until the satisfying conclusion.

This is a fascinating book, to which the intrigue has only increased with time. These days a reader will see it more as troubling than worrying, or scary. The creation of the character of Herr Doktor Voyt is a triumph for Onions. It is quite understandable that such a person, with his strange way of dressing, his hermitic behaviour, and his charisma and mannerisms, would be beguiling to an adolescent, especially one who sees himself as alone in the world. Onions blends the supernatural with the rational with great skill, but I can’t help wondering if his intention was for the reader to see the book the way they do these days, rather than in the 1930s.