(Bernard) Jocelyn Brooke - Bibliography

Writer, poet, and amateur botanist, born in Kent, SE England, UK. He tried various occupations before joining the family wine firm. During World War 2 he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and re-enlisted after the war; but following the critical success of The Military Orchid (1948) he bought himself out and thereafter devoted himself to writing. He followed this with the second and third parts of the autobiographical trilogy (known subsequently as The Orchid Trilogy), A Mine of Serpents (1949) and The Goose Cathedral (1950).

His most famous works include the Orchid Trilogy (The Military Orchid (1948), A Mine Of Serpents (1949) and The Goose Cathedral (1950)) and the Kafkaesque Image Of A Drawn Sword. Though the Orchid Trilogy strays into a typically English vein of humour, the idyllic land of his childhood, and his obsession with la paradis perdu, often bring in an element of intense melancholy, something developed in paranoia and isolation in The Image Of A Drawn Sword.

Though certainly not among the most prominent of England's men of letters, Brooke's longing for things lost is a commonly-held sentiment, and one not quite so well done anywhere else as it is in his work, specifically the Orchid Trilogy.

Bibliography

Fiction The Military Orchid A Mine Of Serpents The Goose Cathedral Dog At Clambercrown The Scapegoat The Image Of A Drawn Sword Passing Of A Hero Private View The Crisis In Bulgaria Conventional Weapons Non-Fiction Wild Orchids Of Great Britain The Flower In Season Ronald Firbank Elizabeth Bowen Aldous Huxley Birth Of A Legend Poetry December Spring The Elements Of Death