David Wheldon’s 1984 novel The Course of Instruction has been reissued by Valancourt USA.
Wheldon was a writer and medical doctor who also published research into treatments of Multiple Sclerosis. He died in January 2021.

The follow-up to David Wheldon’s (1950-2021) award-winning cult classic The Viaduct (1983), The Course of Instruction (1984) is a haunting and compelling novel in the vein of Franz Kafka, Dino Buzzati, and Samuel Beckett.

I had exchanged emails with David Wheldon over a number of years and was honoured to be asked by Valancourt to write the introduction to this reissue of The Course of Instruction.

Extract from my Introduction:

Every Sunday I would browse the bookstalls of Camden market. Blurbs with claims of ground-breaking or probing attracted my eye. I wanted a book that unlocked the secret of how the world and the mind operate. The blurb on one particular book intrigued me:

When the letter came, inviting Alexander to attend an unspecified course of instruction, he somehow felt oddly compelled to attend. From that moment on, his world changed, all of his certainties and logic called into question.

At the address specified for the course he encounters lazy staff, hustling for bribes, and general uncertainty about who the correct authority might be. As I read the book I felt an increasing sense of horror as the protagonist fails again and again to ask the right questions and escape from his situation. Yet nothing specifically horrific happens. I began to feel that the growing sense of dread was my own imposition on the story: that I was reading a different novel to the one the author had typed, though the words were identical.

The Course of Instruction is in many ways richer in ideas than the first novel The Viaduct. It’s the first of the novels that I read and the one that impressed me more. It also received a lot more attention in a recent academic article by David Lockwood. But it’s the first which won a major award forty years ago and now gets the lion’s share of attention the second time around.