CORNWALL.- Having written over 170 books in the past 50 years, for his latest limited edition book, writer, painter, photographer and film-maker, Andrew Lanyon (b.1947, Cornwall) turns to Renaissance literature transposing it to the wilds of the West Country.

Lanyon’s new book revolves around one of his own favourite authors - the French, François Rabelais (ca 1483/94 - 1553), and the Spanish, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547 - 1616). He brings Rabelais from early 16th century France and Cervantes from late 16th century Spain, as young men before either had begun to write the work they are so celebrated for, to Cornwall in the 1790s to visit its tin mines. Turning the men, one a doctor specialising in anatomy, the other a soldier, into writers, both discover that everyone they meet or pass on their journey happens to be the author of a book or a sonnet. This is a story about the young Rabelais and Cervantes, two literary giants-to-be, who in a play being written about them by two playwrights, begin to talk about writing.

In Lanyon’s lawless hands the book documents how these two future literary titans came to write their great works purely because of this trip through time to Cornwall in 1790. However as well as the journey taken by the faceless playwrights themselves across stretches of moorland, and the journey their imaginary characters, Rabelais and Cervantes are making, there is the one eventually taken by Lanyon himself, who does not stop when he arrives at his narrative’s end but leaves his protagonists and sets out to find what he considers to be a most interesting place, namely his work’s middle.

As Lanyon explains of Rabelais and Cervantes on the Road to Cornwall, “It might be a little alarming for the reader to realise that in setting out to write, the author cannot have had much of a plan. A traveller who has no idea at all where he is headed would be unable to equip himself appropriately for the conditions, whether tropical or arctic. Who would join such a poorly prepared expedition? In the light of this revelation it will hardly come as a surprise, dear reader, having got only this far, if you just drop the book quietly back on the pile in the bookshop.”

Lanyon takes humour seriously and it is an ever recurring topic throughout his work. Writing about laughter he says, “Maybe it used to be an alarm, a dinner-gong in the jungle, one sounded to draw the rest of the tribe close to protect us from predators while we devoured the beast we’d clubbed to death.” Yet although his intention is here, as ever in his work, to amuse and to instruct, he is also keen to address one of his main concerns, specifically to fathom ways in which the activity of writing may be used to initiate original thoughts.

The physical and aesthetic experience of handling this book is as key as the contents within as Lanyon places his text alongside reproductions of his own photography and artworks as well as found imagery to create fantastical vignettes. It is an experience on every level.