Julian Mitchell (born 1935) is a novelist, playwright and screenwriter. His sixth novel, The Undiscovered Country, is a disconcerting and enigmatic work, experimental in both form and content. The first half takes the form of a memoir, narrated by "Julian Mitchell". The young Julian meets another new boy at prep school, Charles Humphries, with whom he develops an intimate friendship. Julian is fascinated by the other boy's dark looks, solemn wisdom and cosmopolitan background. He is Julian's "alter ego" (indeed, in real life, Mitchell's forenames are Charles Julian Humphrey), guiding a self-consciously unreliable narrator who perceives the surrounding world as "a jumble of unrelated, often nonsensical impressions".
As Julian progresses through life, Charles materialises mysteriously at different stages, in each instance displaying a new sort of sexual persona: he is an ostentatiously camp Cambridge undergraduate, a psychologically tormented beatnik, then a promiscuous amateur poet.
The second half develops this idea of proliferating identities. The author presents a manuscript allegedly left to him by Charles, an adaptation of The Satyricon by Petronius, a classical homoerotic text. Charles's narrative follows its protagonist, Henry, through a surreal underworld as he pursues an ideal lover of unsurpassed beauty and uncertain gender.
First published in 1968, the year after homosexual acts were legalised, The Undiscovered Country (which shouldn't be confused with Mitchell's 1981 play Another Country, which he later adapted into a film) clearly references the new culture of social and sexual freedom. The later part of the novel, however, offers disturbing visions of bizarre and violent eroticism – the subterranean world becomes a setting for rape, incest and sadism. "The undiscovered country" is a phrase originally used by Hamlet to describe an unknown afterlife. Mitchell's work also deals powerfully in ambiguity and doubt. Here, the self is fundamentally divided, questing after an unreachable wholeness as the sense of a stable reality is refracted and eroded.
