A Whole New World
The Other Place and Other Stories of the Same Sort
by J.B. Priestley
A Review of the Valancourt Books edition
When I
was a teenager with plenty of time on my hands and a voracious appetite for
books of whatever genre, style or era, I remember reading a couple of novels by
J.B. Priestley. Back then, I wasn’t
particularly impressed. I thought his
works well-written, but rather dull, and quickly moved on to the next author
who caught my fancy. It therefore came
as a surprise to me when over twenty years later, browsing the horror fiction
section at Foyle’s Charing Cross store, I came across three volumes by J.B.
Priestley, published by the American indie press Valancourt Books. Given my prejudices following my earlier
encounters with Priestley, I surprised myself even more by heading off to the
counter with this collection of weird short stories rather than other enticing
dark titles on the Foyles shelves. I’m
glad I did.
The Other Place was
first published in 1953 and features eight stories written around that time, as
well as an earlier piece “Mr. Strenberry’s Tale”, dating from the summer of
1929. The full title of the collection
is The Other Place and other stories of
the same sort. The phrase “of the same sort” is telling, and
immediately conveys the fact that these stories are hard to categorize. They are works of speculative fiction, but
they are not ghost stories, nor do they comfortably fit under the wider
umbrella of “supernatural fiction”. As
John Baxendale points out in the introduction to this Valancourt Books edition,
the stories share some common themes and plot devices. Most of them involve situations where the
fabric of time and perceived reality wears thin, allowing characters to travel
in time, glimpse different eras or pass through moments of heightened lucidity
which show them reality as it really is.
Baxendale explains that the “time-warp” idea is probably influenced by
the ideas of Russian philosopher Ouspensky, whom Priestley was reading when writing
these stories. Ultimately, however, the “weirdness”
serves to express Priestley’s concern about the sorry state of the post-war society,
led by self-serving and self-satisfied politicians, and its capitulation to
what he would later term “Admass”, the combination of mass culture and materialism
draining the soul of modern society.
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| L.S.Lowry "The Canal Bridge" Copyright Southampton City Art Gallery |
Several of the stories present variants on this theme.
In The Grey Ones a man named Patson is convinced that an ‘Evil
Principle’ and its dreary agents ‘The Grey Ones’ are intent on taking over humanity. Patson’s psychiatrist takes all this with a
pinch of salt…or may have something to hide.
There
are two pieces which follow a quasi-identical premise. On the way to a dinner of the Imperial
Industrialists’ Association where he is meant to be the Guest of Honour, Sir Bernard Clipter almost runs over a strange man
who issues an ominous warning. At the event, reality seems to alter and Clipter
sees his fellows as the monsters they really are. In The
Leadington Incident something similar happens to cabinet minister George
Cobthorn, who eventually realizes that the audience he was so eager to address
is, apart from some unsettling exceptions, made up of persons who are either
dead or asleep.
Other stories
are built on the “time-warp” premise. In
Look After the Strange Girl, two sociology
or anthropology students visit the Edwardian Era and briefly experience a world
which would soon be altered by the First World War. This gives the author the opportunity to
compare the two worlds, as well as to indulge in some humour provided by the
anachronistic situation. (Priestley explores a similar idea in his novel Bright
Day, which is also soon to be reissued by Valancourt). In Night
Sequence, an unhappy young couple spend the night in a strange house, where
they meet the mysteriously alluring Sir Edward and his beautiful niece Julia,
and in the process, go through a process of self-discovery. Priestley included Mr Stenberry’s Tale in this volume, because “although it was written years before the others…it seems to me to
belong to this collection of tales”. I
am not so sure. It is certainly a weird
tale with elements of time-travel, but it is more in the line of the science
fiction of H.G. Wells, who is in fact referenced in the text itself.
Interesting
as the concept behind these stories is, they sometimes suffer from a certain “sameness”
and, possibly for this reason, some of the most pieces I found memorable were
those who broke out of the “mould” of the rest, even as they share the same themes
and worldview. Uncle
Phil on TV features a haunted television set. It is, on the one hand, darkly comic, but it
is also one of the more nightmarish stories in the collection. With its witty dialogue, and the action all
centred around the (then) new-fangled contraption acquired by the Fleming household
using the money from their Uncle Phil’s inheritance, I could see this working
as a play. In The Statues, journalist Water Voley has visions of gigantic statues
which momentarily appear throughout London. At first he believes they might be
remnants of the past, until he becomes convinced that he is being granted (in)sight
into a future much nobler than the workaday present. This concept of a reality much different from
and much better than the somnambular present is, of course, the same as in
other stories in the collection, but here Priestley imbues it with an almost
Gary-Buddenesque “urban Gothic” atmosphere.
I will
end with the title story, which opens and sets the tone for the whole
collection. Recounted by a Canadian
named Lindfield, he explains to a new acquaintance that he is looking for a
tiny English village which he once magically visited whilst staying at the dreary
and depressing town of Blackley. This village
is everything that Blackley is not, an achingly beautiful place where the weather
is always fine, everybody is happy and the world is bright with the hope and
promise of Love. With its echoes of the ‘lost
domain’ in Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand
Meaulnes and more than a hint of Arthur Machen, it exemplifies what is best
about this collection – the mixture of social critique and magical weirdness,
pessimism about the present and the hope of a better reality, even if sometime and
somewhere else, like Philip Larkin’s “…arrow
shower, sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain”.
Paperback, 198 pages
Published August 7th 2018 by Valancourt Books (first published 1953)
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