ABSTRACT
“The Perilous Quest for Lyonesse” is a 12-novel sequence set in the early 15th century, mostly in Rockall, an imaginary island continent in the North Atlantic, named eponymously after a tiny islet only 20 meters wide. The brainchild of the late Professor Bill Sarjeant, an eminent world authority in his field of geology, Rockall is a world that in many respects rivals Tolkien’s Middle-earth in its detailed richness and amplitude, even while being grounded more immediately in a magic realism. The first four novels in the series, now out of print, were published in the 1990s by HarperCollins UK, while eight remain more or less in manuscript form.
In many ways, one could say of Sarjeant’s work what Henry James famously said of Tolstoy’s War and Peace; that, for all its brilliance, it was a “loose baggy monster”, marked by weaknesses of style and pacing. When Sarjeant died very suddenly in 2002, all further progress on the project was forestalled. As a novelist and writer myself, I had corresponded with Sarjeant and had a vivid sense of the magnitude of his achievement. By permission of the Sarjeant Estate, I have been given the commission to edit and rewrite the text of all 12 novels. In this essay, I will explain the genesis and development of Rockall as an imaginary world and my own contribution to its creative elaboration.
