A O Chater

[Sand]

I have posted on Wormwoodiana a note about A.O. Chater's Julian Fairfield (1961), an "English provincial Kafkaesque", a "peculiar and memorable book":

http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2011/06/o-chater.html

[Soukesian]

Intriguing piece, with some interesting references. I remember reading a lot about The Viaduct in the Scottish press when it came out, but never got around to picking it up. Google returns very little on Peter de Mendelssohn: a German wikipedia page, some copies of "The Hours and the Centuries" and an article citing scathing comments by W.G. Sebald!

[Viva June]

Could Jocelyn Brooke's The Image of a Drawn Sword be another point of comparison? Brooke certainly gets the "Kafkaesque" label all the time (but then again, people throw that term around a lot). A further similarity, in terms of biography, would be the shared interest in botany.

[Sand]

Yes, the Jocelyn Brooke novel is a good comparison. There were a number of other English Forties & Fifties authors who were compared to Kafka - Rex Warner (The Aerodrome) was another.