Weird and Fantastic: Three Brief Reviews

• Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: At Tingle Alley, a number of readers named this book their greatest disappointment of the year--not because it was bad, but because it was overhyped. There's considerable justice in that position. Despite some bleak moments near the end, this novel might otherwise be described as "genial" or "pleasant." In style and plot construction, the novel somehow manages to combine fairy-tale prose, a faint tint of Jane Austen, and the Victorian multiplot novel. Unfortunately, it's not an altogether well-constructed Victorian multiplot novel, although if you can survive the first hundred pages or so, the pacing improves markedly. Clarke crafts a nice background mythology for her alternative England, much of it laid out in the discursive footnotes (which, I know, many people find annoying). Still, it would have been nice if the alternative past (the Raven King, etc.) had actually changed the Napoleonic present. After all, our narrator sounds suspiciously like a Georgian Tory, the political players all remain the same, George III is still mad, Napoleon gets his comeuppance at Waterloo, the early nineteenth-century class and racial politics seem to be what they were, and so forth. Speaking as a specialist in historical fiction, my ears (eyes?) pricked up a bit at the book's running conflict between theoretical magic, in effect a mode of antiquarianism, and practical magic, or magic as a lived activity; this theme takes us right back to a novel like Sir Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor, in which the oral prophecies are correct but the literate families are unable to interpret them as anything other than folk artifacts. I do recommend the book for those willing to relax and allow the world to wash over them, but don't expect fantasy's second coming.
• Lord Dunsany, In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales: Indefatigable horror/weird tales compiler and critic S. T. Joshi has assembled a varied collection of Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany's work, ranging from prose poems to fantasy tales. I confess that I found the famous early fiction, like the Gods of Pegana, difficult to get through. Dunsany's early style, which H. P. Lovecraft rightly described as "pseudo-poetic" (quoted in the collection discussed below), suggests an unfortunate mix of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and A. C. Swinburne, all on an off day; it's the kind of prose that confuses rhythm with insight. ("'Ah, now for the hour of the mourning of many, and the pleasant garlands of flowers and the tears, and the moist, dark earth. Ah, for repose down underneath the grass, where the firm feet of the trees grip hold upon the world, where never shall come the wind that now blows through my bones, and the rain shall come warm and trickling, not driven by storm, where is the easeful falling asunder of bone from bone in the dark'" [32]). On the other hand, I quite liked the Jorkens stories, which are cleverly crafted and entertaining tall tales, told by a wonderfully unreliable storyteller; "The Development of the Rillswood Estate," in particular, offers a deadpan and truly ridiculous satire on English social conventions. Probably the best-known story in the collection is "The Two Bottles of Relish," a murder mystery with a famously icky solution. My initial aggravation aside, though, Dunsany was a major influence on early fantasy fiction, making this book a must-have for anyone interested in Tolkien and Co.
• H. P. Lovecraft, The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories: Some cult authors have to be "caught," like viral infections. Tolkien is one. Lovecraft is another. Despite exposing my immune system repeatedly to carriers--i.e., anthologies of Lovecraft's work--I have singularly failed to come down with a bad case of Lovecraft. Quite the contrary: I persist in finding Lovecraft funny. That's all very well when Lovecraft is actually trying to be funny, as he sometimes is in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath"--"The ghouls were in general respectful, even if one did attempt to pinch him while several others eyed his leanness speculatively" (185)--but, as a general rule, one really ought not to be chuckling while some poor victim is being devoured by Elder Ones. To make matters worse, I read this latest anthology right after finishing Henry James' The Turn of the Screw--an unfortunate juxtaposition akin to Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt's long-ago mistake of reading Catcher in the Rye right after Crime and Punishment. But James' story did help me pinpoint why I've never managed to catch Lovecraft. Almost nothing happens in The Turn of the Screw; the terrors mainly derive from James' delicate manipulations of the narrator's high-strung subjectivity. And when he wants to suggest horrors beyond imagination--the ways in which the children have been corrupted by Peter Quint and the previous governess, for example--he does so with great economy of language. By contrast, Lovecraft's characters seem to exist on only two psychological planes: clueless and abjectly terrified. When they get frightened, they have a bad habit of expressing themselves like this: "In that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelessly and insanely at the ebony gates of oblivion" ("The Lurking Fear" 66). Moreover, Lovecraft doesn't do a good job of hinting at the unimaginable; we're told that characters are frightened by inscriptions, weird-looking architecture, or what-have-you, but the outlines are simply too vague.  On a more positive note, I was most interested when Lovecraft melded New England historical and traditional lore with the horror tale; at its best, the result was a bit like a psychotic version of Nathaniel Hawthorne. (In one story, a reference to Judge Hathorne floats by.) To be fair, too, I have enjoyed some of Lovecraft's other work, like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Overall, however, not even a sneeze.

Comments

[Bill Tozier]

I see the point about all three (though I'm just starting Clarke yesterday). I read Lovecraft when I was a kid, and have polished off all of the pastiches and such collected by Chaosium in the late 90s, and have to say that when you get right down to it, Lovecraft is about the formula. Viz: innocuous foreboding setup, denial of supernatural causes of inexplicable events, and climactic horrifying realization.

They're like Harlequin romances, in that. Indeed, they're comfort stories for me; I'll pick up one of the Chaosium books on a rainy day, and end up thrashing through it all at once (the stories, even by modern masters, do tend to be forgettable and therefore very reusable).

Dunsany I picked up for the very reasons you suggest: respect for ancestors. In his work I found (again) many reminders that our ancestors tend to be no better on average than we are....

The one that kills me, though is Machen. I got the Chaosium edition of The White People a while back, and it has sat by the bedside for months. I read a bit, get lost in some longwinded thing about Welsh moors and blear buildings of some sort, and implications I am culturally unsuited to catch, and lose the thread.

At least Clarke writes for us.

And on Clarke: The one thing that caught me, that many others would miss entirely, is the way the honorifics "Mr" and "Dr" are set without periods. I've been doing a lot of Distributed Proofreading of stuff form that era, and it's spot on. That was charming. I do wish they'd spaced out the " quotes, " though....

[Sredni Vashtar]

Lovecraft wrote for the pulps which probably explains the reliance on formula. Most pulp writers wrote according to a formula and were largely encourage to by their editors. See Lester Dent's (For twelve years, Dent turned out one 60,000 word novel every month, plus other writings) rules for writing for the pulps.

As for Clarke, I liked the first 2/3rds or so and didn't like the last third (the most "fantasy" part of the book), but that's more to do with my tastes (and I actually like fiction books with footnotes). But I think people who read the book based solely on the hype were the most disappointed.

For historical fiction, I think Dorothy Dunnett is my all-time favorite (though I have a soft spot for Flashman).

[Bill Tozier]

Just listening to Flashman and the Tiger in the car yesterday....

[Timothy Burke]

I think the take on Clarke that I've heard that most helped my appreciation of the book (from John Holbo) was that it's really an allegorical treatment of the mid-century conflict between British romanticism and utilitarianism.