In the Mind of a Landscape

Review of 'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun' (2016) by Neil Rushton

‘We are the children of our landscape’ wrote Lawrence Durrell, ‘it dictates behaviour and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.’ For the eponymous character in Durrell’s Justine (1957), this means embodying the peculiarities of the city of Alexandria during the 1930s. It is the notion that we are not only products of our environment, but that we can also characterize the landscape itself, in Durrell’s case, the city.

This approach lends itself to psychedelic writing in regard to the well-rehearsed mantra of set and setting. Rather than being two elements that require some degree of careful preparation in order to array a specific kind of experience or outcome, they are potentially a mutually intelligible spectrum of aesthetics. One so often reads the cliché of the landscape of the mind, however it is equally apposite to speak of the mind of the landscape.

The novel Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun (2016) by Neil Rushton does just this. An oftentimes disturbing and disorientating psychedelic tale, the novel is ostensibly about an unnamed protagonist with severe anxiety and trauma issues who is taken on an experimental series of drug trips in order to cure him. It intricately weaves science fiction, conspiracy, and psych literature through dreams, trips and time-slips.

Guided by an experimental psychiatrist, Oberon, and a psychoanalyst, Titania, Set the Controls is also a fairy story in the darkest mould. Caught for much of the tale in a complex mental state, the protagonist’s world is a realm of constant discombobulation. It is a place in which Britain is at once a recognizable and alien setting—one into which the reader is hurled, never allowed to rest or gain a secure footing through the protagonist’s narration.

However, we are never totally adrift. It is through Rushton’s clever use of the landscape (setting) that we are able to grasp the otherwise bewildering turn of events and experiences. This method is able to say much about the protagonist’s confused setting through the set of the landscape itself. Sometimes this is quite subtle, other times less so, for instance;

Reinforced, concrete tower blocks. They seemed imbued with a malady, a symbol of the urban underclass that had become a real sickness. The malaise was contained within the concrete itself, infecting us, unceasingly polluting our existence until it had gained control of every thought and action.

This Ballardian landscape, in which the protagonist lives by himself in a small flat, is a sickness that embodies its inhabitants. From his balcony, beyond the expanse of rooflines, he can see, ‘vaguely glistening patches of greenery in distant parks and gardens.’ They represent only a partial escape from the malady, subduing but still irrevocably tied to the landscape. Recollections of his mother and sister’s deaths are hinted at through the bleakness.

In his dusty, worn flat, LSD sessions with Oberon, expose this malady. Yet, it is only when Oberon signs him up to a new experimental research series that the British landscape shifts. A form of Anaclitic Therapy, 2C-C, and a fourteen-year-old sitter (called Alice, like his sister), propels the narrative down rabbit holes and into even stranger realms, resulting in a death. As with the narrator himself, we’re left unsure of the reality of what happened, but it shifts the setting.

Whisked off to a traditional country house, which the narrator is told by Oberon is owned by a mysterious ‘Collective’, he continues with ever-increasing drug doses of various phenethylamines and tryptamines. ‘I wondered if everyone were given the opportunity of living in such a place, would there be any social and political problems in the world? I smiled at my naivety.’ This setting, however, was a gateway to countryside time slips.

During one trip sequence, he finds himself being birthed from a Neolithic barrow; a place that makes him think of ‘death and of my new life’. He hears a voice, possibly from one of his Elf-named sitters. ‘Do you feel at one with the landscape?’ This question, as I have suggested, strikes at the heart of the novel, and by extension its own depiction of trips—where the aesthetic of the landscape’s mind becomes inescapably one’s own.

On other occasions, time-slips are subtly worked into the narrative through the landscape’s character. Walking into the local village through fields and woodland, for example, which appeared like ‘a representation of the perfect imagined England… harmonious and settled’. Small rows of cottages, many fewer and older cars; an imagined but vaguely remembered world. After an anxiety-ridden pub trip, he returns home, but now past new builds and endless, jammed vehicles.

Even such a worthless and nondescript memory as those treetops set within their hazy white sky, had already lodged itself in my brain somewhere and was perhaps even now informing a great collective subconscious that sucked everything – past, present and future – into it in order to inform… inform what?

Without wishing to give too much of the plot away, the protagonist’s world is increasingly fractured, subordinated to the goings-on of the (to my mind sinister) Collective. DMT and other experimental drugs (the recipe for one given by a fairy-like creature), engross him in what Oberon calls the ‘Phylogenic’ realm. This space is a collective consciousness, tying memory and experience together, collapsing time and potential to infinity.

By the ambiguous end, a quickly shifting setting is the reader’s only clue to the truth of the protagonist’s experience. Although not explanatory, in the sense of a plot reveal, it provides a geo-emotional mooring and insight. And as the stability of landscape collapses, unresolved, like the concrete tower blocks, setting excretes malady. This shapes the protagonist in a way that his unreliable and confused narration was unable to do throughout the novel.

Rushton’s Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun is anything but a light-hearted read. It revels in making the reader uncomfortable, in regard to both their orientation in the plot, and through the imagery and themes that it tackles. Yet, through landscape, it never leaves one completely anchorless, impelling one to read on. It is, I believe, a novel that warrants revisiting, neatly and richly entwining subtle ideas and bludgeoning visions.