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.