THE PRESENT IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY

"The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there," is the famous opening sentence of The Go Between, a 1953 novel by the English novelist, L.P. Hartley. It is used to set up a flashback to 50 years before, and to reflect on the changes in English culture and manners wrought by two world wars and the torrent of modernity.

SEA CHANGES: AN INTERVIEW WITH DEREK TURNER

by Andy Nowicki

The fact that Derek Turner’s magisterial Sea Changes is a deeply “relevant” novel ought not to fool the potential reader into thinking that it has the typical earmarks of a “timely” read. Though its multifaceted, intricately-weaved storyline perfectly embodies the “ripped from today’s headlines” cliché, Sea Changes also has the feel of a timeless work, written less for the day and more for the ages.

Indeed, though Turner is writing about events and phenomena that many find enraging—politically-correct British ethno-masochism, mass Third World immigration and the concomitant mounting threat of white extinction in England—Sea Changes is notable for not reading as an angry or incendiary novel. Those expecting a crudely cartoonish anti-anti-racism screed a la The Turner Diaries are sure to be disappointed. Though Turner clearly means to skewer and savage the anti-“racist” (read: anti-white) cant-driven dogmas and smelly little orthodoxies that saturate our era, he does so in a most elegant and compassionate manner, with malice towards none except the unforgivably disingenuous.