Novel: Lost Empires

Overview
Lost Empires follows Richard Herncastle, who, looking back from middle age, recalls the last calm year before the First World War. As a teenager in 1913 he leaves a northern town to join his uncle’s touring music-hall magic act, entering a glittering, shabby world of comedians, conjurers, chorus girls, ventriloquists, and managers who run their theatres like small kingdoms. The narrative is both a coming-of-age story and a meditation on time, memory, and the vanishing confidence of an era whose grand entertainments, and grander illusions, are about to be swept away.

Setting and Frame
The story unfolds on the provincial circuits and the Moss Empires houses, with their ornate auditoriums and unforgiving backstage corridors. Priestley filters this milieu through Richard’s older voice, which layers warmth and irony over youthful impressions. The music hall, gaudy, resourceful, precarious, becomes a living organism: its marquees and gaslights are bright; its dressing rooms, lodging houses, and railway compartments are cramped, smoky, and thick with gossip. The Edwardian public face of optimism sits uneasily atop private anxieties, and the distant thunder of history presses forward show by show.

Plot
Richard joins his uncle, a seasoned illusionist, as assistant and general factotum, lugging trunks, setting traps, and learning the clockwork precision under the patter. At first enchanted, he is gradually educated by the backstage rhythms: the crush of booking agents, the rivalries among acts, the constant improvisation required to survive indifferent audiences and hostile managers. He meets performers who take him up, tease him, warn him, and sometimes exploit him. He experiences sexual awakening, first infatuation, and the more complicated entanglements that come with mixed motives and borrowed glamour.

His uncle’s charisma, pride, and insecurity reveal the precarious economics of success. The magician thrives on secrecy and control, but the act’s mystique frays under the strain of travel, fatigue, and the desire to keep pace with changing tastes. Richard, a tentative artist with a sketchbook, tries to capture faces and gestures, sensing that the people he draws are already, somehow, past. He is proud to belong and yet watches himself from a slight distance, as if rehearsing the role of observer he will grow into.

A series of tours carries the company from one northern town to another, then farther south, the season shifting from late summer brightness to winter damp. Friendships shift; a scandal or two bruise reputations; a moment of professional crisis exposes the limits of bluff and showmanship. Richard learns how quick laughter can turn to cruelty, how the promise of love comes tangled with loneliness, and how even the most polished illusion is a shield against a more ordinary despair. By the time news of war punctures the routine, the spell is already thinning. The troupe disperses; some enlist; others cling to the stage as if it were the last safe light in a darkening street.

Themes
Illusion and reality are twinned throughout: tricks depend on misdirection, and so do lives. Youthful appetite wrestles with the older narrator’s rueful wisdom. The title points not only to imperial Britain but to the empires of theatre chains and star turns, empires built on applause and routine that vanish as completely as smoke in the footlights. Memory, class mobility, and the ambiguous solace of art thread the book, as does the sense that an entire civilization is taking its final bow.

Style and Significance
Episodic yet closely observed, the novel mixes affectionate detail with a steady, elegiac undertone. Richard’s backward gaze lends even comic passages a faint tremor, so that each scene carries two times at once: the headlong present of the boy and the haunted recognition of the man who knows what is coming offstage.