Orpheus Ascending

Orpheus Ascending tells the story of the singer who falls dangerously in love, of the beautiful woman who becomes all things to him, and of the underworld king who claims her for his own. It tells how she is abducted and how the hero goes through hell to find her. Like Salman Rushdie, Nick Cave, Rilke Cocteau and Tennessee Williams before him, John Gibbens recasts the Orpheus myth in contemporary terms, this time in a strangely altered version of the London music scene in the late 1980s, a retro–future where violent unrest meets government backlash and where pastoral idyll becomes a precarious refuge from the perilous currents of history. It is a book about music, love and Fascism.