Published by Heinemann in 1973 at £2.10, with the American edition following a year later. There was a Book Club Associates editon in 1973 using the same dust jacket art in a smaller format, and a Pan paperback in 1975.
This extraordinary novel is narrated in the first person by Robert Rolt, a landowner who has had a brief career in the Foreign Office but now runs the Dorset estates he has inherited from an older brother. Two years before the book begins his wife Sarah vanished. A man from a secret branch of the Foreign Office comes to him with surveillance film of a woman called Angela Starr who resembles his wife. Rolt is immediately sure it is her.
He meets her. She says she is an amnesia victim with no memory going back more than a year, but agrees on seeing photographs and handwriting samples that she must be Sarah Rolt. She returns to live with him. They visit Sarah's mother in Italy. There is a mysterious incident in which a speedboat may have been trying to kill them while they are swimming.
Rolt is now told that Sarah's family, who run a sinister multinational corporation called International Industrial Systems Ltd, are actually involved in weapons research and own a factory which should be destroyed. Will Rolt be persuaded to plant the bomb?
The final explanations involves an element of science fiction, the only time that Canning drifted into this genre. It also maintains the thread, started in The Python Project and culminating in Birdcage, of the essential nastiness of the British secret services.
The main setting of the story is Dorset, but parts of it are set near Tavistock in 'Caradon Abbey'. Caradon was the name Canning gave to the Cornish village of Calstock in his novel The Viaduct, and Calstock also figures in his late novel Fall from Grace. Canning spent several childhood years in Calstock at the end of the first world war.
 Heinemann first edition |
 Pan paperback |
 German translation |
Index of characters, locations and themes in The Finger of Saturn (in preparation) |
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