Solace House
by Will Maclean
Solace House opens
in 1993, with student Alex Lane trying to sort out his life now that the
university is breaking up for the summer. Unlike the others, Alex cannot go
back home, as a consequence of a mysterious family tragedy. Broke and alone, he
is preparing for the worst until he is offered the opportunity to join a group
of students clearing out a Victorian mental hospital that is being acquired by
the university and repurposed as student lodging.
Within the sanatorium grounds stands the eponymous house, once the home of the lonely and reclusive Edwin Flayne. Sorting through the hoards of junk left by Flayne, the students discover his journals, which reveal an interest in occult and esoteric studies. Evidently traumatised by the events of his childhood, particularly the estrangement between his parents and the departure of his beloved mother, Flayne seeks to regain the lost Arcadia of his childhood through complex quasi-mathematical rituals, obsessively recorded in his books. Through these, Flayne believes, he can access an alternate reality where time stands still and the past can be redrawn. Central to these rituals is the strange twilit cave ‘Bewise’, found behind Solace House, which contains evidence of prehistoric habitation and possible ceremonial use.
Each in their own way, the students become increasingly engrossed with Flayne, the house and its secrets. Meanwhile Alex and the beautiful, intelligent – but impulsive – Ella become lovers. Their relationship has all the markings of a youthful, hedonistic summer affair, yet it carries a darker edge, seemingly fuelled by their shared and growing obsession with Flayne’s writings. They also draw the jealous attention of Adam, a strange solitary figure among the student group. As the weeks pass, reality becomes increasingly frayed under the influence of a heady mix of marijuana, magic mushrooms and occult arcana.
The older I get, the less stamina I have for longer novels, and I tend to pass on any book that exceeds the 400-page mark. I made an exception for Solace House primarily because I had loved Will Maclean’s debut, The Apparition Phase, so much. After experiencing Maclean’s new novel – because an ‘experience’ it definitely is – I find myself in two minds about it, unsure whether it is incredibly ambitious or overly self-indulgent, or perhaps some mixture of both. I am not referring solely to its length, although at close to six hundred pages that is striking enough, but also to its deliberate and almost wanton complexity.
Interspersed throughout the text is an epic poem composed in a pastiche of an overwrought Victorian style, purportedly discovered in Flayne’s journals. In his afterword, the author assures us that the poem is entirely his own work and does not involve any assistance from AI. Even taking that claim at face value, one can imagine the hours of painstaking labour it must have required. By the end, the reader realises that there is more to this poem than first meets the eye. Then there are the intertextual references, the twists and turns of plot, the foreshadowing and dropped hints that make Solace House one of those novels one is tempted to revisit once the ending is known. Not least are Maclean’s attempts to render in coherent prose both the oneiric effects of hallucinogenic trips and the slow descent into a breakdown of reality.
Solace House has been compared to The Haunting of Hill House and The Secret History. I am not sure these comparisons are especially helpful. This is not really a work of ‘dark academia’, nor is it exactly a haunted-house story, though Maclean does employ some familiar tropes of the genre – for instance, the ancient telephone that rings ominously from under the junk. In truth, Maclean is something of a magpie (in a positive sense), drawing on multiple influences: such as the mystical Romanticism of Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as the occult British fiction and cosmic/folk horror of the early twentieth century – Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen readily come to mind. There is that quality I often associate with the best supernatural fiction: the lingering uncertainty as to whether the events described are truly otherworldly, or merely the product of a mind dislodged by illness or drugs (think of Oliver Onions’s classic The Beckoning Fair One). Beneath the layers of esotericism there also lies a rather different book – a nostalgic coming-of-age narrative, the melancholic story of a ‘last summer of youth’.
So what is my final assessment? I still do not quite
know. The novel is not perfect. It is probably overlong; it has its longueurs;
and at times its intricate machinery creaks slightly. Yet it held my attention
through its hundreds of pages, and it is one of those novels whose aura
continues to linger for several days after one has finished it. Perhaps the
closest comparison would be with the prog-rock albums of the 1970s (and not
just because of the drugs!): wildly ambitious, over-the-top, occasionally
erratic, but ultimately monumental.
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