Grim(m) tale? The Jew's Beech by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff

The Jew's Beech by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797-1848) was born into an aristocratic Catholic family near Munster and spent most of her life in rural Westphalia. She never married and rarely tasted city life. This notwithstanding it appears that she was well aware of the prevailing literary trends of the day and her apparently "limited" life experiences did not stop her from exploring deep philosophical issues in her works.

Take this strange novella - "The Jew's Beech". It is, ostensibly, a murder mystery inspired by true events - the unsolved murders of a forester and a Jewish moneylender - which were recorded in the archives of the author's family. The story itself however is just a pretext for an exploration of such themes as good and evil, the corruptibility of young minds and the stifling prejudices which, in a small community, can cloud the minds of even the best of people. 

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff was primarily a poet and Die Judenbuche is her only piece of prose. For better or for worse, it is very much a poet's work. Let's start with the weaknesses first. A master storyteller could have made a nail-biting thriller out of this. Von Droste-Hülshoff however seems blissfully unconcerned about narrative conventions. Many facts are left unexplained, new characters appear with barely an introduction, the structure sometimes feels lopsided with flashbacks and flashforwards. Then there is the famously obscure ending, which lends itself to multiple interpretations and raises more questions than it answers. It leaves one wondering whether the author was being consciously obscure - a proto-(post)modernist, if you will - or whether she was merely unable to tie up the plot's loose ends. 

But in the novella's weaknesses lie also its strengths. The work is rich in allusion and metaphor - chief amongst them the striking image of the lone beech tree of the title. Although the book is firmly rooted in reality, the atmosphere conjured up by the novella is straight out of Brothers Grimm - magical forests, eerie apparitions and unsettling premonitions abound. Indeed this has been justly described as a "Gothic" work - it has many of the genre's tropes and is close in style to the literature of the "Uncanny" exemplified by Hoffmann and like-minded authors.

Alma Classics edition cover

English editions of this novella are rare. The Oneworld Classics edition I read (now reissued as part of the Alma Classics series) uses the 1958 translation by Doris and Lionel Thomas and includes an introduction and timeline.

It may not be "entertaining" in the usual sense of the word and is ultimately frustrating as a murder mystery, but this strange work is certainly worth reading.

Portrait of the Artist... "Painter to the King" by Amy Sackville

Velázquez Re-imagined 

Every so often, a novel comes along that challenges one’s expectations of the genre. Amy Sackville’s Painter to the King is one such work. It is, ostensibly, a fictional biography of Diego Velázquez, covering in particular the decades he spent in the service of King Philip IV of Spain and the relationship which developed between the artist and the monarch who was his royal/loyal patron. Sackville is surprisingly faithful to the ‘facts’, even down to what may seem trivial historical details. Yet, her novel is by no means a straightforward retelling of the life of Velázquez. For a start, she adopts a sort of stream of consciousness narration – which is often breathless and febrile, on occasion seemingly tentative or improvisatory. It feels as if we have stepped into a painting which is taking shape or as if we’re standing behind the painter, watching as he sketches at his easel. This impression is strengthened by the very ‘visual’ descriptions, full of colour and movement and the play of light and dark. Indeed, the chapters often have the atmosphere of a tableau, a scene ready to be set down for posterity.

At intervals, the third person approach is interrupted by the narrator intruding with her own ruminations. One should always be wary of identifying the author with the novel’s subject, but it is difficult not to see Sackville herself in the thirty-something narrator embarking on a literary pilgrimage on the steps of Velázquez. It is an inspired touch gives the novel a personal meaning and reveals it as a labour of love. At the same time, however, it can be taken as a warning that, despite all endeavours at authenticity, it is difficult, if not impossible, to recreate the past and particularly the thoughts and feelings of historical figures. This novel is, indeed, biographical and historical but is equally a very contemporary ‘imagining’ of the past.

Las Meninas (1656), often described as the artist's greatest achievement

And this brings us to the heart of what is, ultimately, a highly philosophical novel. I felt Painter to the King to be an exploration of the correlation between art and artifice, truth and reality, public personas and private feelings. The characters the novel are constantly preoccupied as to what will survive after their death – the King’s obsession with having his portraits painting is a way of ensuring his memory remains. But even though Diego is notorious for his devastating honesty and his inability to “lie” in his portraits, can we be sure that the King we know is not shaped by the painter’s imagination, just as Diego and his monarch speak to us through Sackville’s prose?

I found this to be a challenging novel, one which I read over a number of weeks alongside less demanding fare. But it is an impressive achievement and I would be surprised and disappointed if this is not – deservedly – recognised when the time for literary awards arrives.

Published April 5th 2018 by Granta Books

***

There are plenty of recordings of Spanish baroque music which could work as a soundtrack to this book.  This is one:

This is another album, featuring works from the Siglo de Oro.  Jordi Savall, one of my favourite artists, is brilliant at building themed programmes of early music and presenting them in concerts and on CD:

https://open.spotify.com/album/7hjesZSIUJuSpk1gfUfyjZ?si=CYvKwaR4TYyYSA5zSw1WIg

August

August

Late Summer in the Mediterranean

I lift the time-worn seashell to my ear...
 and suddenly I’m there again,
dazzled by the ochre sand
entangled in your hair,
jealous of the giggling whispers of the waves
teasingly caressing you
as I’d never dare.
A strum on a guitar, a broken melody
clears the fragrant air
heavy with the scent
of melons and desire.
In the purple dusk, village spinsters
prayer beads in hand,
look up to the gathering skies
and hasten back inside.

I watch an early raindrop
struggling down my windowpane

like a long-held tear.

Vacanze italiane : Antal Szerb's "Journey by Moonlight"

An Italian Honeymoon - Antal Szerb's "Journey by Moonlight"

On honeymoon in Italy, Mihály chooses a solitary nocturnal ramble in the back alleys of Venice over the pleasures of the bridal bed. It doesn’t take a psychology guru to realise that the marriage is not off to the best of starts. His wife Erszi knows that, this being her dreamy and eccentric Mihály (rather than her practical first husband Zoltán), the explanation for his erratic behaviour is most likely complex and slightly illogical. And that’s exactly what it turns out to be. 

After a (not so) chance encounter with an old acquaintance - János Szepetneki – Mihály decides to recount to Erszi his obsessive youthful friendship with siblings Tamás and Éva Ulpius, to whose “ring” he belonged together with said János and the ascetic Ervin. Oiled by a bottle of Italian wine, and egged on by Erszi’s insistent questions, Mihály implicitly reveals (despite his protestation to the contrary) that his relationship with Tamás and Éva had strong erotic overtones and that this might have something to do with his strange and evident discomfiture with the marital state. What is certainly clear is that Tamás’s eventual tragic death left a long-term mark on the close coterie of friends.

This long “psychoanalytic” session reminded me of a very different novel – Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage . And, like Murakami’s, this novel does develop into a “pilgrimage” of sorts - its first part ends with Mihály, not altogether innocently, contriving to catch a wrong train and separating himself from Erszi. In the subsequent parts of the book, we follow Mihály as, against the backdrop of an Italy exotic, magical, seductive and frightening, he tries to recapture the decadent aura of his youth.

Antal Szerb’s 1937 “Journey by Moonlight” (or, to give its title in its literal translation, “Traveller and the Moonlight”) is one of the best-known of modern Hungarian novels. It certainly deserves to be much better appreciated outside Szerb’s native country. Like all great classics, it is a multilayered work which lends itself to a variety of readings. It is, in its own weird way, a comedy of manners, with a streak of playfully sardonic humour always bubbling just beneath the surface. It is also a novel of “magical realism” written before the term was invented. It is an exploration of pre-World War II society – indeed, at its most obvious and superficial level, it presents to us a cast of characters who are all trying, unsuccessfully, to escape the bourgeoisie they find so suffocating. 

But, as translator Peter Czipott points out in the insightful afterword to this Alma Classics edition, a major theme in the novel is Szerb’s exploration of “nostalgia”. What Mihály is after are the dreams and ideals of his youth, now sadly replaced by humdrum, everyday life. But is it at all possible to go back in time? At one point towards the end, one character warns another not to try to live “someone else’s life”. But, the novel seems to be telling us, our youthful selves are as distant from us as “someone else”.

Szerb was not primarily a novelist, but a literary scholar who published respected works on the history of Hungarian and world literature. He lived for a time in Italy – his descriptions of the country are partly autobiographical but, in a quasi-postmodern twist, they also (knowingly) reflect common literary portrayals of the Bel Paese which Szerb knew so well through his studies. Indeed, one cannot help feeling that this is not the Italy of the Italians, or even that of the Rough Guides and Lonely Planet. This is, by turns, the darkly fascinating and haunting Italy of the Continental Gothic novels, the decadent Italy of fin-de-siecle writers (Mann’s Death in Venice comes to mind), Goethe’s sun-washed Land, wo die Zitronen blühn...

Journey by Moonlight might not always be an easy read, but it certainly is one which repays the effort and which is likely to reveal new depths if revisited. This Alma Classics edition is highly recommended, not only for its fluent translation, but also for its useful explanatory notes.

This edition published February 24th 2016 by Alma Classics (first published 1937 as Utas és holdvilág)

***

What music to go with this novel?  Two suggestions:

Elisabeth Grummer sings "Kennst du das Land...", a Goethe setting from the opera Mignon, by Ambroise Thomas

And then, of course, some decadent Mahler, now forever linked with the haunting images of Visconti's Death in Venice:

Losing one's religion : "The Incendiaries" by R.O. Kwon

R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries, a gripping debut novel about love, faith and their loss

The setting:  Edwards College, in the fictional town of Noxhurst on the River Hudson, in an unspecified year some time after 2001.  The main characters:  John Leal, once a prisoner at a North Korean gulag, now the charismatic leader of a Christian cult of hand-picked followers; Phoebe, a lapsed Korean-American piano prodigy and a student with a penchant for party-going who, unexpectedly, falls under Leal’s spell; Will Kendall, her boyfriend, who has enrolled at Edwards from Bible college after losing his strongly-held Evangelical faith.

  

The novel turns the narrative on its head, presenting us at the very start with the most momentous episode in the story, a terrorist attack in which Phoebe is clearly implicated.  We’re told that “Buildings fell. People died.”  Will, shocked, tries to understand what could have led to all this.  

This spare, concise novel can be stingy with narrative details and, as plots go, there’s little else of great import apart from what the blurbs and the above brief summary reveal.    To be honest, the underlying themes of “The Incendiaries” are not exactly new, either.   The “student on the fringe” who doubles as narrator is a recurring trope in college fiction, as is the “crush on the popular girl” – think of Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History”, or “The Virgins” by Pamela Erens.  Even the central image of the “God-shaped hole”, which Will repeats through the narrative as a symbol of his loss of faith, is not exactly original – attributed to Salman Rushdie, it’s an evocative metaphor which has since been regularly quoted and misquoted.

Yet, the praise for this debut is justified.  Indeed, I felt that Kwon has deftly managed to assemble a bunch of commonplaces and turn them into a gripping, thought-provoking book which is also, palpably, “hers”.

  

Take its deceptively simple structure.  The novel is split into forty short chapters, in which the narrative voice alternates between Will, Phoebe and Leal, making the book compulsively readable.  Soon, however, we realise that, in fact, there is but one narrator – Will – who, in an exercise of imaginative empathy, tries to give voice to the other characters.   This might explain why the chapters on the enigmatic Leal are the shortest.  Phoebe’s are partly based on a private journal which Will gets his hands on and are, as a result, longer and more detailed. But can we really trust Phoebe’s narrative as mediated through her lover?  

Will, in fact, is the classic unreliable narrator.  He has a love-hate relationship with the faith he has lost.  He still thirsts for it, and yet is ashamed of his evangelising years and, by association, of his upbringing and his past.  Will has no compunction about lying as a means to reinventing himself.  He admits at one stage I wish I hadn’t lied to you Phoebe, but with anyone else, if the option came up, I’d do it again.  If Will takes pains to hide his past, can we be sure about his portrait of Phoebe?  Are his motives as honourable as he makes them out to be?  These are just a few the many questions which Kwon tantalisingly raises whilst leaving to us to try and address. . 

More challengingly, the novel asks questions which go beyond mere narrative.  Leal’s group "Jejah" is first presented as just another Christian religious gathering and only later is it explicitly described as a “cult”.   Will, wary of religion and pained at his loss of faith, does not really distinguish between ‘mainstream’ religious movements and ‘cults’ – his anger seems to be equally directed against both.  But the novel, at the same time, does imply that there is a difference between the two, albeit one which can, at times, be tenuous indeed.  Significantly, in “The Incendiaries”, there seems to be an underlying comparison between love and religion/faith, with the extremism of cults finding a parallel in the excessive possessiveness which can taint first loves.   The final chapters even suggest that Phoebe might be a personification of the faith Will has lost – a reading which would add a symbolical layer to the novel.   

Kwon has stated that she was raised as a Roman Catholic and that, like Will, she is still, despite herself, grieving for the beliefs she has since abandoned – perhaps giving credence to Cordelia’s (rueful?) statement in “Brideshead Revisited” that “once a Catholic, always a Catholic”.  The Incendiaries can, in fact, be read as a meditation on faith – its comforts and its challenges, its fruits and its dangers, its allure and its loss.  At the heart of this novel is a cult with a warped expression of religion.  Yet I have no qualms about considering “The Incendiaries” a religious novel.      Nor about recommending this intelligent debut to fellow readers, whether believers, non-believers or in-between.  

Published July 31st 2018 by Riverhead Books

***

I'm choosing three tracks to go with this novel.  First on - Salve Mea by Faithless.  To me, this track (and others in Faithless's oeuvre) express a sort of existential yearning, a cry for the sacred in the secular, urban jungle that is the modern world. 

Doubt and the search for answers has rarely been as hauntingly expressed as in Charles Ives' "The Unanswered Question".  This performance is by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra. 

Finally, a text by St Augustine that the once-Catholic R.O. Kwon might be familiar with, here set to music and sung by Juri Camisasca on an album produced by multi-talented Italian musician/film director/artist Franco Battiato.  The track mixes the contours of Gregorian chant with subtle electronica:  Arcano Enigma 

Iraqi Gothic... Ahmed Saadawi's "Frankenstein in Baghdad"

Iraqi Gothic... Ahmed Saadawi's "Frankenstein in Baghdad"

Baghdad, a city torn apart by conflict, where car bombs sow death on a numbingly regular basis. Baghdad, a city where the balance between different cultures and faiths, delicate at the best of times, is jeopardised by covert lobbies and political pressure groups. Baghdad, a city whose sons and daughters are sacrificed – lost or dead in wars, or emigrants in foreign countries, lured by the promise of peace. 

These daily horrors are transformed by Ahmed Saadawi into a contemporary Gothic novel, in which the violence which stalks the streets of Baghdad is personified in the figure of the monstrous “Whatsisname”. Pieced together by Hadi the Junk Dealer from body parts of car bomb victims, the Whatsisname is animated by the soul of Hasib Mohamed Jaafar, a hotel guard killed in a terrorist attack. The spark which joins body and soul is the constant prayer of old Elishva, who has not yet lost hope of the return of her son Daniel, lost decades before in the Iran-Iraq War. The “Whatsitsname” embarks on a mission of righteous revenge against criminals, only to become himself (itself?) drawn into a vicious cycle of violence. 

Frankenstein in Baghdad won its author the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014 and is now available in a brilliant English translation by Jonathan Wright. It was suggested to me by my Goodreads friend Alan as a work of “Iraqi Gothic”. And “Gothic” it certainly is. After all, it features a monster nicknamed by the Baghdadi newspapers as “Frankenstein”, it contains brief but stomach-churning passages of body horror and it recycles and adapts several tropes of the genre. The ruins of old are replaced by bombed-out buildings, the cemeteries substituted by the tragic scenes following the umpteenth terrorist attack. There is also more than a nod to the Gothic in the fragmented narrative and the recurring theme of mistaken identities. Thus, the book opens with a “Final Report” about the shadowy “Tracking and Pursuit Department” which casts doubt on the veracity of the whole story as presented to us. Part of the novel is a transcript of an interview recorded by the monster himself or, possibly, an impostor posing as him. Throughout, there is a sense that “nothing is but what is not”. 

Yet, particularly in its initial chapters, what the novel reminded me of were not the classics of the Gothic but, rather, the works of Mikhail Bulgakov. In fact, as in Bulgakov, the fantastical elements often have a whimsical, surreal, fairy-tale tinge quite unlike traditional “supernatural” fiction – saints speak from icons, astrologers assist the army, the souls of the dead meet for chats. There is also a strong streak of dark humour and satire which sometimes had me laughing aloud. Admittedly, the novel becomes increasingly grim as it progresses and the final scene is poignant, bleak and very effective. 

It was recently announced that the novel would be turned into a film. I certainly look forward to that. This unusual and striking novel certainly deserves to be well-known.

Paperback, UK Edition, 272 pages

Published February 1st 2018 by Oneworld (first published January 1st 2013)

Sleeping Beauty: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

Book review: My Year of Rest and Relaxation 

by Ottessa Moshfegh

Literary folk-horror? "The Willow King" by Meelis Friedenthal, translated by Matthew Hyde

"The Willow King" by Meelis Friedenthal, translated by Matthew Hyde

Literary folk-horror or fictional history?

The 16th and 17th Centuries were an important period for the development of science as we know it. Unfortunately, the history we’re generally fed is a black-and-white narrative made of heroes and villians, with brave, progressive scientists forging ahead despite the supernatural trammels of religion (and, more specifically, the censorship of the Roman Catholic Church and its nefarious Inquisition). 

The truth is much more nuanced and interesting. For a start, within science itself there were several competing approaches. The “mechanical science” of Kepler and Newton would eventually hold sway, but one should not discount the influence of the “natural philosophers” – early chemists and biologists such as Robert Boyle. Natural philosophers tended to follow theologically suspect pantheistic views (hence their clashes with the Church) but most of them also dabbled in alchemy and magic even whilst trying to study these esoteric subjects “empirically”. Some natural philosophers investigated folk remedies and witches' spells, in the belief that they had a basis in “real” science. Thus we meet, for instance, Jan Baptista van Helmont, a 17th Century scholar from the “Spanish Netherlands” (modern-day Belgium), who published studies on a method for treating gunshot wounds, involving dipping the offending weapon itself in a salve made up of, amongst other dubious ingredients, blood and “moss taken from a skull”. But it would be wrong to draw too clear a line between the “natural” and “mechanical” philosophers and brand the latter as more empirical and secular in approach. Newton dabbled in alchemy too, and Kepler had his quasi-supernatural theories about the “music of the spheres”. On the other hand, Helmont, when not hunting for moss in graveyards, was carrying out groundbreaking experiments which have gained him the epithet of “father of pneumatic chemistry”. In other words, this was an era in which the greatest and most rational of scientific minds held opinions which were, by present-day standards at least, manifestly irrational. (Some books which delve into these matters : Miracles at the Jesus Oak: Histories of the Supernatural in Reformation Europe, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science).

In his novel “The Bees” (renamed as “The Willow King” in Matthew Hyde ’s excellent translation) Meelis Friedenthal takes us back to the late 17th Century and immerses us into the philosophical and scientific debates of the age. His protagonist Laurentius is a scholar who has just arrived to complete his medical studies at Dorpat (modern-day Tartu, Estonia), after having hastily abandoned his course at the University of Leiden under suspicion of heresy. Laurentius embodies the contradictions of his world. Well abreast of the cutting-edge works of Boyle and Descartes, he nonetheless clings on to the outmoded views of Aristotle and the medical theories of Galen regarding the body’s “four humours”. Besides, Laurentius appears to be still in thrall to the superstitions of the common people. Over the course of a feverish week spent in a rain-sogged Estonia, where peasants are suffering a terrifying famine and word is spreading of a mysterious and devilish “willow king”, he finds himself taken over by the supernatural dread which marked his boyhood.

This is undoubtedly a quirky work or – if you are feeling ungenerous – a flawed one. Apart from a few chapters, the novel is largely rendered in a third-person narrative which generally follows the interior monologues of Laurentius, interspersed with occasional, pointless exclamations (“Ah!”, “Right!”, “Hopeless!”, “Very well!”) The characters often indulge in learned explanations and debates, providing us (quite unsubtly) with historical context and an overview of current philosophical trends. The plot is initially sketchy and eventually downright confusing. 

Yet, despite my reservations, I lapped this novel up, haunted by its dark atmosphere and the author’s uncanny ability to recreate not just the sights and sounds of 17th century Estonia, but also the very thoughts of his characters. Indeed, my take on the novel is that it is a journey into the mindset of the period, and that the more fantastical parts of the plot are meant to represent the (for us) irrational beliefs of the time. Friedenthal moves deftly between genres – this is, nominally, a historical novel but, when Friedenthal pulls out all the stops, it ventures into Gothic and folk-horror territory and becomes deliciously creepy.

One final tip - it makes sense to read the author’s afterword before delving into the book. It gives context to the novel without any spoilers and might make the work more intelligible to those who are new to the exciting historical period it portrays.

Paperback, 288 pages

Published January 5th 2017 by Pushkin Press (first published 2012)

We sail the Gothic seas - Elizabeth Lowry's "Dark Water"

When I’m reading a book, I generally have quite a clear idea of what I like and don’t like about it. However, I must admit Elizabeth Lowry’s Dark Water flummoxed me.  It was a novel I lapped up, a real literary page-turner. Yet, throughout, I had this nagging feeling that something wasn’t quite convincing me.  Perhaps, by the end of this review, I’ll manage to sort my thoughts out.

The marketing blurbs describe Dark Water as a Gothic novel, whilst comparing it to “Moby Dick” or “Heart of Darkness”.  That is, I think, a good place to start.  I must say that I was also reminded of the “sea stories” of William Hope Hodgson.  Admittedly, no phantom pirates haunt these pages but there are other terrors aplenty...ooh, yes, there are!  And there’s the same sense of claustrophobia which, ironically, can clutch travellers on the open sea and which both Hodgson and Lowry portray so effectively.  Lovers of opera will also catch more than a briny whiff of Britten’s marine masterpieces “Billy Budd” or “Peter Grimes”: the latter, especially, in the final part of the novel.

Dark Water, however, also references what I would call the “asylum Gothic”, made popular in Victorian ‘sensation fiction’ and reprised in contemporary novels (Alison Littlewood’s recent The Crow Garden comes to mind).

The link between these two Gothic environments lies in the main characters. In the first half of the 19th Century, as a newly-qualified physician, narrator Hiram Carver joins the crew of the USS Orbis for a journey from Boston south towards Cape Horn.  Aboard ship he befriends William Borden.  Though barely older than Hiram, Borden already has a reputation in the seafaring world as the “Hero of the Providence”.  Years before, aboard the said ship, Borden negotiated with a group of mutineers for the life of the Captain and a group of sailors, and then led them to safety across the Pacific aboard a fragile dinghy.  He’s a living legend, no less.  Yet, something seems to trouble the man, and a violent episode on the Orbis threatens to bring his career to a premature end.

Back on the terra ferma, Hiram puts his marine adventure behind him and takes up a position at Boston’s Asylum for the Insane.  And so, he tells us,

I began to exist on intimate terms with all that is pitiful, misshapen, and unresolved in the human heart

At the asylum, he meets Borden again, this time as a patient.  For the sake of their previous friendship, Carver is determined to cure Borden, using a new technique which he has developed, at odds with traditional, less humane, approaches.  Carver, in fact, believes that psychological illnesses can be addressed by confronting head-on submerged memories - unwelcome recollections which we tend to bury in our mental “dark water” or, in other words, the “subconscious”.  But memory and truth are uncomfortable bedfellows and perhaps, raking up the past is not always a great idea.  

Lowry exploits the Gothic possibilities of the plot and, for good measure, provides the reader with some impressive set-pieces which further emphasize the novel’s association with the genre.  There is a particularly striking episode in which Carver visits a maimed cousin who lives in a dark mansion,

So exactly like a house of nightmare: a crooked mausoleum hidden away in a waste land of struggling trees, marooned on scant acres of blasted grass.  

The meeting takes place in a room with drawn curtains, where the host quaffs absinthe in a bid for oblivion.  There are other memorable scenes set against the wintry backdrop of the bleak Nantucket coastline.  

In other words, this is all so very much up my alley.  So why my reservations?  I guess part of my problem lies with the character of the narrator.  He first struck me as an interesting and complex figure, especially in his relationships with the rest of the crew and –on land – with his overbearing father and doting sister.  However, as the novel proceeds, so many contradictions surface that, for me at least, he did not remain particularly convincing.  He is often weak but, when required, breathtakingly ruthless. He can be patient with his patients, yet brusque and callous with the people closest to him. He is sometimes indolent, sometimes overbearingly ambitious.  He can be perceptive and sharp, yet incredibly naive.  He’s conflicted about his sexuality.  As a psychological study, he’s just too good to be true.     

And then there’s Borden.  He’s described as a sort of demigod, a supernatural figure.  Now I do appreciate that we’re perceiving Borden from Carver’s perspective, but the “elevated” language in which he’s consistently presented becomes rather over the top.  

And this brings me precisely to the distinctive aspect of Dark Water which, I suspect, will also be its most divisive one.  Throughout the book, there are several extended metaphors which invite a symbolic or mythical interpretation of the novel.  There are, of course, the pervasive ‘marine’ metaphors, not least the evocative image of the “dark water” of our minds.  But there are also recurring references to “food”, “hunger”, “thinness” and “leanness”.  Hiram’s superior at the asylum nicknames him Cassius because, like the eponymous character in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, he has a “lean and hungry look”.   Hunger, or the lack of it, is often indicative of a character’s state of mind. 

From there it’s but a brief step to imagery of a religious, theological, dare I say ‘sacramental’ nature.  Suffice it to mention, without revealing too much, that certain key episodes in the plot are imbued with ritualistic significance, although it’s not clear whether Lowry’s intention is merely to harness the power of religious associations or to present us with a grotesque parody of holy ceremonies.  For me, “Dark Water” worked brilliantly enough as a dark historical novel with psychological undercurrents.  This ‘mythical’ element was hardly necessary.  But I’m just as sure that others will find that it is precisely this added layer of meaning which gives this novel the edge over other neo-Victorian novels.    Anyone with even a passing interest in the Gothic should read this.

"Dark Water" is out on riverrun on the 6th September, 2018

***

The sea has inspired much great music.  I’m tempted to build a playlist to go with this book but, in the meantime, here are some works to get one in the mood.  Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Walt Whitman setting (from his first symphony) portrays a beach at night.  Benjamin Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes” from the opera Peter Grimes portray some of the many moods of the sea.  And there’s a sea-shanty for good measure.  Enjoy!

https://youtu.be/FDaMcBhVAmI

https://youtu.be/MNRT8SvfLNM

https://youtu.be/8aK6k6tt1z4

Dino Buzzati's twilight zone

"I Misteri d'Italia"

Dino Buzzati's twilight zone... 

It seems to me, fantasy should be as close as possible to journalism. The right word is not "banalizing", although in fact a little of this is involved. Rather, I mean that the effectiveness of a fantastic story will depend on its being told in the most simple and practical terms

Italian author Dino Buzzati is best-known for his existentialist novel “The Tartar Steppe” and for his short stories which skirt the genres of horror, fantasy, science-fiction and what we would today call “magical realism”. Buzzati was also a journalist for Corriere della Sera. In 1965 this newspaper commissioned him as ‘special correspondent’ to research a series about paranormal phenomena in Italy. The fantastical was part and parcel of his fiction and he dedicated himself to this assignment with gusto, traversing the Bel Paese to meet a motley crew of mediums, visionaries, mystics, witches and folk healers. 

In 1978, these pieces, alongside other works by Buzzati in the same vein, were  published in book form as “Misteri d’Italia” or Mysteries of Italy. They certainly form an intriguing collection. On the one hand, Buzzati is an involved narrator, personally participating in spiritualist sessions and exorcisms, and staying up to hunt ghosts in his childhood home. Being the novelist that he is, he can also conjure a chilling atmosphere or convey a character with the slightest of means. On the other hand, Buzzati adopts an objective stance, neither compelling us to believe the otherwordly events he describes nor dismissing outright the possibility of the existence of the supernatural. If at all, a trace of scepticism can only be felt in the occasional subtle irony or burst of dark humour. The words Buzzati reserves for his friend (and would-be occultist) Beonio Brocchieri could equally be applied to him:

Ha compiuto numerosi viaggi, tenendosi ugualmente lontano dai fanatici che interpretano ogni fenomeno come rivelazione di potenza sovraumana, quanto da coloro che vivono nel continuo terrore di "essere fatti fessi" e cio’ che esce dalle loro possibilita' di razionale comprensione lo eliminano tout court dicendo che sono tutte ciurmerie.

Reading this collection, one gets the impression that ultimately the truth or otherwise of the paranormal experiences described is not particularly relevant. What is more significant is the fact that there are people who choose to believe in such phenomena. For Buzzati this is intrinsically tied to a way of life which, even back in the 60s, was already slowly disappearing. Unsurprisingly, these pieces are shot through with a sense of nostalgia. Italy as the young Buzzati had known it was succumbing to modernity and its ghosts were, slowly but surely, being laid to rest.

Buzzati was also a painter.  This is his "Il Babau" from 1967 combining his penchant for surreal imagery and weird tales.