Christmas Gothic : Charles Palliser's "The Unburied"

Christmas Gothic 

A review of Charles Palliser's "The Unburied" 

I read “The Unburied” in December 2016 and loved it.  For me, this novel by Charles Palliser (author of “The Quincunx”) was a case of the “right book at the right time”. I received it in the run-up to Christmas, just as I was starting to tune in to carol broadcasts and to get out my choral CDs, whilst secretly wishing that my Mediterranean December would turn a tad foggier, colder and, generally, more “Northern”. And here was this atmospheric Gothic yarn, set in a late 19th century English cathedral city in the days before Christmas.

It is difficult to give a comprehensible (and comprehensive) overview of the novel’s convoluted plot without giving any of the twists away, but I’ll try. The main body of the book consists of an account by one Dr Courtine, a Cambridge historian who is invited to spend part of the festive season in Thurchester with an old college friend named Austin Fickling. Courtine and Fickling had become estranged, and Courtine eagerly accepts the invitation, seeing it as an opportunity to heal old wounds. He also is keen on spending time in the Cathedral library where he hopes to find an ancient manuscript which could shed light on a problematic episode regarding the reign of Alfred the Great. Once in Thurchester, however, Courtine becomes obsessed with two other historical, albeit more recent, mysteries – the 17th century murder of Cathedral Treasurer William Burgoyne (and the subsequent disappearance of prime suspect Mason John Gambrill) and the killing of Dean Freeth, ostensibly for political reasons but possibly for darker motives. Like the sleepy but deadly villages in “The Midsomer Murders”, Thurchester seems to be a veritable hotbed of criminality and intrigue. Before long, in fact, Courtine is embroiled in contemporary mysteries as well – chief amongst which is the puzzling behaviour of Fickling who, having invited Courtine to his house, now comes across as an increasingly reluctant and grumpy host. The evil which lurks in the historic city clearly goes beyond the petty "church politics" of the Cathedral canons.

In style, “The Unburied” is a veritable mash-up of Victorian genre fiction – the Gothic, the “English” ghost story, crime and sensation fiction are all thrown into the mix. It is rather as if Sheridan Le Fanu and Wilkie Collins teamed up to write a novel, with some help from M.R. James and (!) Anthony Trollope. In the initial chapters, the Gothic has the upper hand, as Courtine travels to a solitary, foggy train station and arrives at Fickling’s dark, creaky house; as the Cathedral (quite literally) throws up its dead and cloaked ghosts appear in the night. The novel’s debt towards the Gothic is also evident in its concern with old manuscripts and journals, unreliable narratives and multiple viewpoints.

Eventually, as secrets are slowly revealed – more tantalisingly than in a burlesque show – the sensation and crime novel elements come into play. The ending more or less manages to tie up all the loose ends (too tidily, perhaps?) - it is ingenious and satisfying and, considering the premises of the novel, does not unduly test the limits of our belief. 

Like a glass of hot punch, “The Unburied” is a real delight – a seasonal one, perhaps, but a delight nonetheless.

***

Carols dark and bright

Considering its setting, a soundtrack to this novel would definitely include a recording of cathedral choirs singing Christmas carols.  Festive carol services are, in fact, a major part of the English choral tradition, and one which we chiefly associate with the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge and its yearly Christmas Eve broadcast of the “Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols”.  The Christmas story, starting with the fall of Adam, followed by the promise of the Messiah fulfilled by the birth of Jesus, is told in a sequence of Bible readings interspersed with music. 

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the first Festival ever held at King’s, on Christmas Eve 1918.  What is perhaps less known is that the King’s College Festival is in turn based on a service devised in 1880 for Truro Cathedral by Edward White Benson, at the time Bishop of Truro and later Archbishop of  Canterbury.  Ghost story and paranormal aficionados might be aware that E.W. Benson was the co-founder of the Cambridge Association of Spiritual Enquiry, better-known as the Cambridge Ghost Society.  His sons Edward Frederic Benson (author of the “Mapp and Lucia” novels), Arthur Christopher Benson and Robert Hugh Benson, all wrote ghost stories – Edward’s are particularly chilling.

The service at King’s always starts with a lone chorister singing the first verse of “Once in Royal David’s City”.  I have opted, however, for a version by the Truro Cathedral Choir, in tribute to the ghost-loving Benson family.

Christmas is a feast that has managed to reinvent itself through time.  Its proximity to the Winter Solstice meant that certain traditions related to pagan winter festivals and their marking of the gradual return of better weather were subsumed into Christian celebrations and customs.   By way of example, door-to-door caroling finds its roots in the wassailing tradition.  In medieval times, the wassail was a celebration by which the lord of the manor would dispense food and drink to peasants in exchange for wishes of blessing and goodwill.  The links to modern-day carol-singing are clear, although some areas in Northern England and parts of Scotland, have kept the tradition known as “first-footing”, which is closer to ‘wassailing’.  ‘Wassailing’ also has links to the so-called ‘orchard-visiting wassail’. This refers to drinking and singing to the health of trees so that they give a bountiful harvest, and is a custom associated mainly with the cider-producing counties of the West of England. 

In other words, ‘wassailing’ is not a particularly ‘Christian’ tradition, and yet echoes of it are found in several Christmas carols, even those sung in church services.  A case in point is one of my favourite carols ever – “The Yorkshire Wassail” – arranged by the indefatigable folksong researcher (and great 20th century composer) Ralph Vaughan Williams:

For a different listening experience which explores the ‘folkloric’ aspects of Christmas, I would recommend “Lighten the Dark : a Midwinter Album” by the folk music outfit Kerfuffle.  The cd contains many traditional carols in brilliant folk arrangements, including a toe-tapping rendition of “I saw three ships”.  It ends however with a dark folk song which, in reality, is not a Christmas carol at all.  “The Bitter Withy” tells an apocryphal story from the childhood of Jesus, presenting us with a version of the Christ-child which is, all said, a sort of vindictive take on Harry Potter.  Jesus asks three stuck-up kids to play at ball with him, but they decline, scornful of his humble origins. To get his own back, Jesus builds a bridge over the river out of the rays of the sun, the boys blithely try to cross it and end up drowned.  Mary, who turns out to have a mean streak herself, punishes Jesus by hitting him with branches of ‘the bitter withy’ or willow tree.  And so, Jesus’s anger is directed in turn at the tree which has ‘caused him to smart’ – it will be the first tree to ‘perish at the heart’.  

Despite its dubious theology, this old folk song exerts a dark fascination.  Its origins are lost in the mists of time – the story itself seems to be based in episodes found in the apocryphal (‘non-approved’) ‘Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew’ and Infancy Gospel of Thomas, but some have also traced influences of an Egyptian legend which somehow found its way into Irish sources.  Its reworking as a folksong turns it into an example of ‘plant lore’ since it gives an explanation as to why the willow tree rots from the centre out, rather than the outside in.   The title by which it is known - ‘The Bitter Withy’ -  in fact, seems to shift the attention from the actual story to the final blasting of the willow tree.   

The folk song has often been recorded, but Kerfuffle's version can hardly be bettered.  Weird and eerie, it weaves into the arrangement phrases from “God rest ye merry gentlemen”, but when these appear they sound less like a Christmas carol than a sort of folk-horrorish round dance.

But, fan as I am of dark fiction and folklore, Christmas remains, to me, a season of light and hope.  And so I would like to end this brief playlist with a return to Ralph Vaughan Williams, and his festive Fantasia on Christmas Carols, a pot-pourri of English seasonal folksongs and carols.  One of the staples of English Christmas music, it is here performed by French musicians.  Inauthentic?  Possibly, but it’s Christmas, a season of unity, so why not?