Like a Hollowed-Out Tombstone

I feel like I'd better confess to you that the thought of reading literature aimed at children now, today, does not especially appeal to me unless it falls under the umbrella formed by the following two non-negotiable parameters: it's old, and it's British. "Old" is relative, I suppose, but for example as some of you know I recently read Watership Down by Richard Adams. British? Without question. Old? Over forty years at the time I read it. I'd say I was on safe ground with that one. "But why do you require these very specific exceptions?" I hear you asking. Hey listen, shut up. For the time being, I'd say this attitude is just open-minded enough to get YA loons off my back, and one writer it does allow within my purview is Robert Westall, a name I believe I remember vaguely from my far-ago days as a library page. Both British and dead, which is pretty old, Westall wrote a lot of fiction for children, most of which, from what I've gathered, revolved around either ghosts or World War II, which meets two other criteria I didn't even know I required. Recently I ordered three of his children's books (for those interested, they are The Scarecrows, The Machine Gunners, and Blitzcat. Yes, Blitzcat) because frankly I'm curious. That curiosity was stoked, ironically enough, by the one book of fiction for adults that Westall wrote, a collection of horror stories called Antique Dust.

First published in 1989 and recently reprinted by Valancourt Books, Antique Dust is dedicated to M.R. James, the post-Poe horror writer whose influence on British horror fiction has been almost as great as H.P. Lovecraft's has been in America. But Westall's stories aren't simply a collection of Jamesian retreads, though his presence is certainly felt. In fact, Antique Dust is something that as far as I can recall is unique in horror fiction. Or actually...okay, before I think myself in circles, what it is, is a collection of stories that all feature Geoff Ashden, an antique dealer in what my cursory research indicates is a fictional collection of towns, but which certain clues (such as "Muncaster") would seem to locate them in the North. Anyway, Ashden is in every story; sometimes he's a narrator with some fringe connection to the action, sometimes he's central to it, sometimes he's simply relating something he heard. As a structure, it's not unlike a series of short detective stories, or, more to the point, those stories about paranormal investigators by writers like Algernon Blackwood and W.H. Hodgson.

However, the resulting book is not so much a collection of tales of ghostly mystery solved by a heroic eccentric, but rather Antique Dust is a mix of horror and domestic drama. It's a very odd thing, really. In the first story, "The Devil and Clocky Watson," Ashden finds what appears to be a hugely valuable clock going for a song in a nearby antiques shop. The clock is covered with obscene designs and, Ashden learns, both from the seller and Ashden's own wife, that the thing is likely cursed. Unable to bring it home, due to his wife's unambiguous ultimatums, and certain to never be able to sell it for a profit, he instead vengefully gives it to Clocky Watson, an immoral dealer who specializes in clocks. Things go badly for Watson after that, but what's important to the book as a whole is that Ashden is depicted as someone who is not in possession of the purest of hearts, and the fact that he is married. Married to whom? Well, as you read the next story, "The Doll," which features a sinister ambulatory doll and which occasionally, though briefly and somewhat incidentally, recalls the Zuni Fetish Doll segment of Dan Curtis's Trilogy of Terror, you might assume Ashden married Ursula, the stunning doll expert with whom he shares that story's danger. "The Doll" takes place before "The Devil and Clocky Watson," and the introduction of Ursula would seem to solve the mystery of why Westall ordered the stories in this way, but no. Ashden meets his wife in another story entirely -- and I actually feel like I should say which one -- and their relationship forms an almost novelistic undercurrent to the remainder of the collection.

Because it's not a great one. The relationship, I mean. In "Portland Bill," one of the best stories in Antique Dust, Ashden falls under the spell of supernatural horror precisely because his wife's controlling, condescending ways have driven his heart, if not the rest of him (although who knows), to wander. This isn't merely a plot detail, but is in fact the story's resolution. Said resolution being both interesting for being what it is and a bit thin on excitement, coming as it does in the form of exposition, a problem that tends to run thick in the supernatural mystery subgenre. "The Doll" has that problem, as does "The Devil and Clocky Watson," to some degree, as well as "The Last Day of Miss Dorinda Molyneaux," which at least incorporates the "what happened was this" aspect somewhat more elegantly, and which, in any case, is one of the creepiest stories in the book. It's all about a sinister church and an eerie face that appears in photographs -- good stuff, although it does also briefly feature an example of Westall's very occasionally awkward phrasing. The story also features schoolchildren, and at one point Ashden is developing a photograph taken during a field trip to the disturbing church. He sees the face in the picture and thinks:

It wasn't my face, and it certainly wasn't Dorinda's. Far too ugly. And as it had a bald head, it certainly wasn't one of the children's.

This implies that not only is Ashden bald, but the lovely Dorinda Molyneaux is, as well. Which she isn't, otherwise we'd have been told that. Elsewhere, Westall writes "my bowels moved with lust for her," which is an alarming place to feel such a thing. Maybe writing so much for kids messed with his head when it came to this sort of thing.

My two favorite stories in the book are "The Woolworth Spectacles" and "The Ugly House," this last one coming close to being a novella at just under fifty pages. Both feature Ashden almost not at all, save a few "I heard this story" introductory remarks. In these cases, Antique Dust comes to resemble what I thought it was going to be in the first place, a sort of Amicus Productions horror anthology in book form (it would by no means be first such book), and I wonder if it means anything regarding the quality of these two that they go off-book in this way. The question of who's safe and who isn't certainly means more when the cast of characters are self-contained. Both stories are a bit nastier than what had come before -- these two bookend "Portland Bill," and together these are the last three stories, and I think comprise by far the strongest section of Antique Dust. "The Ugly House" strikes me as the most similar to M.R. James because it bears hints of James's classic "Casting the Runes," but just hints, just enough to complete the nod without trying to bask in reflected glory. I felt the most unnerved by this one, probably because even more than the Ashden stories there's something Earthly about it, even though the supernatural is all through it (the same goes for "The Woolworth Spectacles," about a shy young woman being forced by dark forces into a perverse version of "adulthood"; the story is nasty enough to be almost mean).

All of this brings me to a final point of interest with this book, one that stems from a natural question: doesn't Ashden find it surprising that A) the supernatural is evidently real, and B) that he keeps coming face to face with it? Well, the answer to B) is probably "Yes, a bit," but A) is probably a "No." Encountering the supernatural is not considered desirable by the characters in Antique Dust, but as you go along in the book you get the sense that they do accept it as the norm -- even "The Dumbledore," a non-supernatural story, for a while gives the impression that it could go either way on that count, and Ashden is prepared for anything. All of this is made explicit late in the book, a move which by that time merely confirmed my sense of things. But it's interesting, and it's interesting that Antique Dust isn't "about" that. It just is. It makes the book a little bit comfortable, if you get my meaning -- the body count in the stories is not very high, you see. Although there are still some moments that might make you wince, and one story ends with an implication so awful, if I'm reading it correctly, that I'm still wrestling with it.

The Devils Are Free on Earth

Paddy Chayefsky claimed that it was a only a cynicism about the then-current state of American television news that led him to write Network, and a bitterness stemming from his many years' experience as a TV writer had nothing to do with it. Maybe so, though I've always had my doubts. Then again, what the heck do I know about it? Rather than waste time wondering if Chayefsky was telling the truth or not, I could more efficiently address the situation of Arch Oboler, who, having made his bones as a radio writer, had every reason to dread, even hate, the cultural dominance of television; if he did little that was direct with these emotions other than accurately predict the future -- he once wrote that TV would do for radio what talkies did for silent films -- and despite the fact that he did do a tour writing for television, the frustration he must have felt over the constant march of technology was everywhere in his work.

Oboler is probably best known as the man behind Lights Out, the wonderful old horror anthology that aired originally on NBC radio but eventually on a variety of networks from 1934 to 1947. It was a job Oboler inherited from Wyllis Cooper, the show's creator, but many of the most famous stories were written by Oboler, such as "Chicken Heart," a quite odd piece of work when you stop and think about it, but one whose influence on the horror and science fiction genres is nearly incalculable. Consider that this radio play, which lasts about eight minutes, was first broadcast in 1937, and then consider that without this story about a chicken heart turned gigantic and deadly by science run amok, would there be a Them! or The Giant Claw or Tarantula or and etc.? (Godzilla? I don't want to overreach here, but "Chicken Heart" predates World War II and would turn up as the subject of a very famous comedy routine on a stand-up album by never mind who almost thirty years later. "Chicken Heart" has legs, is all I'm trying to get at.) (On that note, when everybody was making fun of Stephen King for supposedly swiping the premise of his novel Under the Dome from The Simpsons Movie, what those people didn't know to do was point out that The Simpsons Movie had already lifted it from Oboler's 1966 film The Bubble.)

Like Rod Serling, the American cultural figure he most resembles, Oboler was a writer whose creative instincts were mostly political in nature, and like Serling he merged those instincts with genres like horror and science fiction -- not always seamlessly, as I'll demonstrate later, but anyway that's also something he shared with Serling. One way in which he differed from Serling was his surprising ruthlessness. Lord knows Serling could go dark with his stories, or at least not stifle the darkness of Richard Matheson or George Clayton Johnson or Charles Beaumont, but did he ever go as far as Oboler did with his Lights Out radio play "Burial Services," which climaxes with a young paralyzed girl being buried alive? I've only read about "Burial Services," but Oboler carried this bleakness with him when he transitioned into writing and directing films, and I've seen it on display in his movies Five and Bwana Devil. Bwana Devil, from 1952, was a pioneering work of early 3D filmmaking, but that aside it's also an early cinematic depiction of the story of the Tsavo lions, which killed several workers during the building by a British company of a railroad line in Africa, a little piece of history that briefly became an en vogue kind of thing to know about back in 1996, when The Ghost and the Darkness, the Stephen Hopkins/William Goldman film on the subject, came out. Anyway, in the film, in Bwana Devil, an adorable young boy (Miles Clark) wanders happily away of the safety of the camp, and with minutes left in the film his body -- partially eaten, on assumes -- is found by a horrified Barbara Britton. In Five, possibly Oboler's best work since he left radio behind, or since radio was taken from him, that hope has been engendered in the hearts of the small handful of survivors of a nuclear apocalypse by the baby being carried in the womb of Susan Douglas Rubes is no guarantee that their hope hasn't been misplaced. Let's put it like that.

Before checking the facts, my gut feeling was that Five was made after Bwana Devil because as effective as the latter film can sometimes be, and as strong as the final couple of jolts are, it is nevertheless a film that throughout feels like one hampered by compromise and a meager budget, and perhaps a paucity of visual imagination on Oboler's part -- faking a lion attack in the 1950s couldn't have been easy, but he too often relies on close-up reaction shots of witnesses, and even victims, who are often seen making "Ow!" faces as a lion rips them apart. I assumed, therefore, that the more assured and more plainly independent Five came after Oboler got fed up with the money men. Free of needing to tell a story that should naturally cost more money than is at hand, Five has the cheap black and white sharpness and immediacy that would later characterize classics like Night Tide, Carnival of Souls, and Night of the Living Dead. This doesn't mean that Oboler had those kind of chops, but watching it, it feels like the weight of Bwana Devil has been lifted from his shoulders. Except that Bwana Devil was 1951 and Five was 1952, and maybe having the weight of Bwana Devil lifted from his shoulders is what led to The Twonky in 1953. Based on a story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, The Twonky is ostensibly a science fiction satire of TV and its effects on society, you know, shit like that, but as a comedy the movie flails around so desperately that even at just about seventy minutes the manic pace has somehow transformed into cold syrup. On top of that is the explanation behind the powers of the sentient and extraordinarily powerful TV set, or "twonky," which is that it's not a TV set but rather an alien thing that randomly took the form of a common Earth object. Clearly, television has yet to recover. Ruthless, The Twonky is not, though you can't say that Hans Conreid, who plays the harassed owner of the TV (except as a college professor he never wanted one anyway), doesn't give it his all.

As a creative option, film pretty much died for Oboler after that. He wouldn't make another feature until One Plus One in 1961, and he wouldn't make another feature that anyone remembers until The Bubble in '66. It was between this and Domo Arigato, his last film from 1972, that Oboler would produce one of the strangest works of his career, this time a novel, his only one, 1969's House on Fire. 

House on Fire, which was recently reprinted by Valancourt Books, may or may not bring the spotlight back around to Oboler, but to what end I couldn't say. It's such a deeply strange book. The germ of the story appears to have been in his head for more than a decade prior to publishing House of Fire, because the basic premise is the same as that of a short TV film he wrote in 1958 called Hi, Grandma! Basically, in House on Fire, a young boy named Mark Elias is discovered to be a genius, and by inventing a...an invention, he wins a full college scholarship, to whatever college he chooses. As you'd expect with a boy genius, Mark is solitary and deeply focused on his inventions; he's aided, and adored, in this by his younger sister, Shirley, and the two of them spend a lot of time in Mark's room behind closed doors. As the novel opens, Sam and Mary, Mark's parents, are planning a family celebration in honor of Mark's achievement. Present will be Mark's brothers Dave and Nat, and his sister Harriet. There will also be two reporters, one a radio veteran named Tony Dumont, and a shy, virginal cub reporter for a small newspaper named Robin Shepherd. Both are covering Mark's story ostensibly from an uplifting human interest angle, but when Robin and Tony meet each other in the apartment building elevator, Tony strikes her as self-centered and bloviating, and she doesn't entirely trust him.

There's something quite mysterious about Mark and Shirley, though, Mark in particular. It seems to have something to do with their grandmother, Sam's mother, who we're told has recently died. Sam and his siblings don't appear overly torn up by this, however, and Sam's wife Mary is somewhat dismayed by this, though neither her husband nor her in-laws are much interested in holding back their opinions about the dead old woman. She was, evidently, a horrorshow -- it's said she purposely drove her own husband, Sam's father, to suicide -- and if Sam and his increasingly unstable sister and brothers have one great concern regarding Mark and Shirley, it's that the time they spent with their grandmother, which was not insignificant, has warped them. When Mark unveils his new invention, after Tony and Robin have left the party, it turns out to be, he says, a machine that can communicate with the dead. The gist of all this is that soon after his demonstration, which produces only a high-pitch whine and the sound of a screeching cat, Nat collapses and dies.

And so on. One interesting thing about House on Fire is that it was published after Levin's Rosemary's Baby and before Blatty's The Exorcist, Tryon's The Other, and King's Carrie, the other other novels that joined together to produce the boom in the genre that fueled it for the next two decades or so. Which proves only that as always, Oboler had a knack for being on or near the ground floor or major genre developments without ever being recognized for it. Of course, House on Fire isn't as good as those other books. One thing that may have held it back, though this is something that I myself don't hold against it, is the sense that this is a novel that is badly out of step. By which I mean, House of Fire couldn't have felt current in 1969, even with its references to Vietnam and what Amy Landecker as Mrs. Samsky in A Serious Man calls "the new freedoms."  But House of Fire is written like a novel by an ex-radio writer who understands that form's approach to style, structure, and atmosphere. This could be seen as a plus, and in fact that's kind of how I see it: the novel is 175 pages long. Nat collapses and dies on page 65. This is the first truly concrete piece of evidence the reader has that something is seriously wrong in the Elias home. Before that what you get is a lot of conversation, most of it occurring within the apartment of Sam and Mary Elias, among them alone, or eventually among them and Sam's siblings, and once with another tenant, a woman who brings a cake for Mark -- all of this being preparatory to Mark's big party -- a woman, I'm just now realizing, never again appears in the novel, though her sudden presence would seem to indicate a significance that she doesn't actually possess.  It's strange.

Also strange, or not, depending on how you feel about it, is the fact that very little of any of the conversation between any of the characters is "important," that is, very little of it relates to the plot. Mary telling Sam to not eat any cake before the party. What college Mark should choose. Harriet's concerns that her virginity will be a barrier in her relationship with a man she met (virginity is kind of a thing in this book). All of this dialogue, and the tone of it, especially when many characters are in a room talking, recreates the atmosphere not of reality but of old radio shows, where sound is everything. To create a mood and make a scene believable, those radio shows had to pour on the noise, so that everyone talking fast, one after another, with plates and forks pinging together, surrounds the listener. That's more or less what Oboler is doing in the first third of House on Fire, and even in 1969 it was a throwback, but it's a throwback to something I like. Better, it's not a self-conscious throwback -- it's simply how Oboler thought, and worked.

Then someone, usually Mary, will say something that will remind everybody else of the deceased grandmother, and things begin to spiral. After Nat dies, of course, the plot takes off, as does a subplot about Robin falling for the photographer who was assigned to accompany her to the Elias's apartment. And this is where House on Fire almost completely goes off the rails. I'll spoil it, because I have to talk about it: the young man, Bob Farrell, is a wonderful fellow. He's so wonderful, in fact, that it's hard to not imagine that something is wrong with him, or at least that he's doomed. When Robin goes back to his place after dinner and it turns out he owns a very early kind of microwave, this interest in new technology pegs him, in Oboler's world, as someone very suspicious indeed. And it turns out he's a pornographer who drugs women and photographs them nude. Tony Dumont, whose relationship with Robin up to this point has been adversarial even though the reader knows them to be on roughly the same team, learns this and swoops in just in time to save her. Well, the photos are taken, but Tony gets those, and when Robin comes to he tells her what's what. She's having an understandably hard time with this, so Tony decides he'd best leave her alone. However, before leaving:

Tony Dumont said, "I forgot to tell you one thing. You don't have to worry about having been raped. Mr. Farrell is quite incapable. He cannot be aroused by anything but boys." Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, "I didn't either. That's not to say I wasn't tempted." He went, closing the door behind him.

Now. Okay. Look. The Bob Farrell episode has little to do with the rest of the book, other than to demonstrate the vileness of which men are capable. And typically I don't object to the inclusion of characters or incidents which have little bearing on the main plot. I don't need to have things joined up for me. But when our male hero tries to sweet-talk our female hero by saying he was tempted to rape her, some sort of explanation might be nice. This being quite apart from the fact that this whole section of the book is completely absurd, far more absurd than the supernatural elements, despite the fact that what Farrell is up to has been done time and again, and no one has yet invented a machine to communicate with their dead, demonic grandmothers. What Dumont says is, of course, appalling, and when I read it, and subsequent passages dealing with Robin's sexuality, I began to think that House on Fire was becoming unsalvagaeble. There's other stuff involving Mark and Shirley which, while never graphic, nevertheless made me wonder just how skeevy this thing was going to get. In its implications, at least, it turns out the answer is pretty dang skeevy.

However, while none of what I've just described is in any way good, the novel does become strange, and complicated (in a way that, admittedly, is hardly addressed), enough that I feel like it would be too easy to assume that Oboler thought Tony's way with women, for example, was just swell (the Mark and Shirley stuff I don't know about, but I'm inclined to think that it was either Oboler's attempt to boost the evil in a way William Peter Blatty would later do much more successfully in The Exorcist, or that Oboler was pressed into it by the publisher -- either way, it's a bad idea that adds nothing, and Oboler should have given it a wide berth). Late in the novel, the character has a crazy monologue that reveals things about him which makes it easy, if you're feeling generous, to at the very least imagine Oboler connected in his own mind to the earlier comments about rape. As well, the character Oboler seems to most identify with, a blind artist friend of Tony's, even makes an accusation related to Tony's intentions towards Robin that he, Tony, doesn't like at all. Admittedly, it's possible I'm looking for excuses here, when my usual inclination is to wince about these things but not otherwise feel too tense about something a man who died over twenty years ago wrote over forty years ago. It's just that House on Fire is such a wild, galumphing thing that it's hard to not try and find some central joist that will keep it from toppling.

The evils of technology might provide it. Apart from Bob Farrell's microwave, there is the question of whether Tony will abandon the magic of radio for the spoon-feeding of TV, and of course there's the central idea of a new invention that threatens to take down a whole family. In one of the several conflicted theological discussions in the book (another thing that links House on Fire with Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist), Dave Elias talks about God having "his eyes burned out by the fires in the concentration camps, by the hell over Hiroshima." In that same argument, Tony -- an atheist who butts heads quite condescendingly with Robin, a believer who is portrayed, intentionally or not, as someone who possesses a faith that is entirely unexamined -- blames everything vile in the world not on God or demons, but on man who has done these things "all through history," a phrase which both expresses an unwavering belief about man's nature and could be read as a code for what Oboler regards as the worst kind of progress: the kind of progress that allows men to kill each other on a grander scale.

That may be trite, and I suppose it is either way, but it would be more so if in Five Oboler hadn't been one of the first artists to really deal with the subject. And he kept trying to deal with it, even when it sits somewhat uneasily within what, if you strip it down, is a rather straightforward horror premise -- a premise, by the end, that you realize was hardly dealt with. That doesn't mean the ending of House on Fire isn't strong, because I think it is, or that the novel as a whole isn't worth your time, because something this bizarre always is. It reads like a book written by a man who had too much in his head and was having a hard time holding focus. It was also written by a man who was fed up with technology and was ditching it all in favor of a pen and paper. Maybe he saw it as his last chance.

He Had Simply to Open His Pen

I've read more than one author express the opinion that the perfect form for prose fiction is the novella -- it's short enough to keep the writer focused and long enough to break free from the tyranny of "not a word is wasted," which I'd say more readers than writers consider the strength of the short story. Of course this isn't the opinion of everybody, but in my own meager way I think I understand it: if the only rule was to write until you're done, I believe we'd have more novellas than novels, or anyway more novellas than we currently do. The problem now of course, and this has been the case for some time, is who will publish them? If you're a writer of a certain stature you might once have placed a novella in a special issue of a sympathetic magazine, but I'm not sure any such magazine exists now, for anyone. Those writers of stature can also publish a collection of three or four novellas, or sometimes you'll see a novella published as a standalone novella; this sometimes does still happen, but I suspect some readers feel ripped off (in fairness, on some level I can't blame them). Anyway, there it is, roughly speaking, and so it was interesting to learn recently about Alan Judd, a British novelist who gained a fair bit of notice in 1981 with his novel A Breed of Heroes, and whose fiction by and large seems to tend towards the tradition of military satire that is so hallowed in England, but whose best-known and most acclaimed work is a 90-some page horror novella from 1991 called The Devil's Own Work.

And as I so often wonder, where do I begin with this thing? As a work of horror, the novella, which was published as a standalone book in 1991 and has just now been reprinted by Valancourt Books, won the Guardian Fiction Prize, is easily pinned down -- almost too easily, I was at various times tempted to think, but The Devil's Own Work is as a whole rather elusive, however easy it may be to compare its plot to other books and stories. Which I suppose I should dispense with now, so the plot is this: a narrator, unnamed, is telling us the story of his friend Edward. No last name. Edward was a famous novelist whom the narrator knew for most of his life, though he, the narrator, imagines that friendship meant less to Edward than to him, as Edward was in many ways quite closed off and perhaps incurious about the lives of others. At any rate the friendship endured, and as the narrator's life proceeded along more or less "ordinary" lines, Edward sought his place in the literary world, writing articles and reviews and one novel until he wrote a damning career overview of the aging lion O. M. Tyrell. This leads to a meeting between Edward and Tyrell, which is succeeded very shortly by Tyrell's death by heart attack. Not terribly long after this, Edward's career as a novelist takes off. Among the clues pointing to the kind of horror story The Devil's Own Work is are the mysterious and beautiful woman who was Tyrell's final companion in life, and the fact that the first time the narrator sees Edward after the old writer's death, Edward is smoking cigars which he'd never done before, but which Tyrell had.

So there you go, case closed. And it is that kind of story (although I've seen some reviews from 1991 that say this is a book about demonic possession, which is wrong, and the kind of conclusion those who don't read horror jump to, which might sound snobby, but oh well), but it's possible that Judd wasn't terribly interested in The Devil's Own Work reading as a horror novel, even though it's got the plot of one, and the ending of one, and the title of one. But it's actually that title that's the key to whatever point it is I think I'm trying to make here. Here's the narrator, talking about Edward's writing, and the general state of contemporary literature, following Edward's sudden increase in productivity and fame:

Edward prospered...He became a leading writer among what were then known as the post-modernists, exponents of something called "fictive realism" according to which reality and fantasy had the same status. This resulted in writers thinking that they could write what they liked, that they had no obligation to convince or render, that they need not discriminate except on grounds of what pleased them. The cause of this was a failure of imagination, or of belief in the power of imagination to interpret life, and it led to contempt for the reader. It had, I think, an intellectual justification at the time, a supposedly absolute skepticism which maintained that since reality was no more to be trusted than fantasy nothing could be finally proved -- whatever that meant.

...I know I am old-fashioned...but I have been made so by experience. It was the new truths that failed me, not the old ones, and I do now believe that anything that confuses reality and unreality, or that attempts to equate the two, is the devil's own work.

I don't think it's unfair to assume that, though ostensibly the beliefs of a fictional character, that this literary philosophy roughly corresponds to Judd's own, and, suffice it to say, I disagree pretty much completely with the literary philosophy laid out here. I'm particularly hung up by the phrase "This resulted in writers thinking that they could write what they liked," implying as it does that they couldn't. Among the sins that the narrator has grown to believe Edward the writer committed, as did O. M. Tyrell before him, is the favoring of literary style over meaning -- in other words, and not even particularly other, he's a style over substance writer. Judd leads us in this direction early when he has Edward explain that the concept of his first novel, written before he met Tyrell or Eudoxie, his sinister and beautiful companion (and before he got the strange manuscript, which I mention only to hammer down the summary a little bit more), was to write a novel that was free of conscience, but had to acknowledge his failure when he realized that in if a conscience is noticeably absent from a novel, that deliberate absence will almost by definition render the conscience present. If you follow me. Anyhow, the idea was noticed and appreciated by Tyrell, and its clear that he believes the actual goal is not out of reach. But what I'm reminded of is the time William H. Gass (I think it was him, but it might have been Stanley Elkin or John Hawkes or somebody else entirely) said that the word "daffodil" was more beautiful than the flower itself. One might debate this and not lose sight of the point, but it's a point that Judd, in The Devil's Own Work regards as evil.

Or at least I think he does. Not literally evil, of course, but apart from that question is the one about what precisely Edward is writing. I find The Devil's Own Work fascinating, and disagree with it though I do, and though I'm with Nabokov in believing that asking what a writer is trying to say can only lead to tedium, I'm in love with the fact that The Devil's Own Work is a horror story about competing literary philosophies. But it would be much easier to grapple with if we were given some specific details about Edward's novels. The only detail we get about anybody's fiction is the understandably, given the circumstances, on-the-nose bit about Tyrell's last novel being a play on the story of Faust. But in terms of style or even general story or concept behind anything Edward writes after meeting Tyrell, we're given nothing. How important is this, though? Well, ironically, and it's not at all outside the realm of possibility that Judd is fully aware of all of this, that depends at least in part on how much significance you place on what Judd is trying to say. Aha. Plus, as I understand the term fictive realism (not terribly well, I sometimes think) and the kind of fiction such a theory might produce, The Devil's Own Work, with its unreal supernatural elements sitting within it as realistically as descriptions of dinner dates and small talk, would fit in comfortably with everything the narrator disdains. On top of that, though I said earlier that I don't think it's unreasonable to imagine the narrator's opinions coming from Judd's own mouth, any first-person narrator, who in terms of plot seems only to function as an observer, worth his or her salt will actually bear more of the story's weight than one might at first glance think. So how much does it matter that the narrator believes himself to be boring? How important is it that the narrator, who is not a writer, has such a fascination with the writing process? Does he cling to the not overly warm Edward for so many years simply because Edward is a writer? Everybody's entitled to their opinion, and, for instance, I don't believe one needs to be a novelist or film director to criticize novels or films, where, really, does this narrator get off deciding what writers can or can't do? And finally, though I acknowledge the complete subjectivity of this, how important is it that I needed to go back and check to see if the narrator was indeed never given a name, and I hadn't simply forgotten it?

But there's a real passion to the opinions expressed by the narrator, and I can't let go of the idea that they belong to Judd in reality, which in some sense would render The Devil's Own Work nonsense, because what it's "trying to say" would be, for me, nonsense. Though not ineffective nonsense, and anyway it's not lost on me that potentially the best way to gain a better understanding of what's underneath this strange little book is to become familiar with the novels Judd wrote before it, and after it (Judd wouldn't write another novel for ten years after publishing The Devil's Own Work, a fact which probably means nothing, but from this distance looks like it might). In an afterword to this new Valancourt edition, Judd writes that one of the primary inspirations for the novella was the night he met Graham Greene and they talked about Ford Madox Ford, who had recently passed away. Judd left that meeting realizing that he didn't like Greene (not a brand new opinion, as I understand it), but wasn't entirely sure why. Judd also says that he believes The Devil's Own Work is the best writing he's ever done, and is nothing at all like the rest of his work. We're all left to ourselves, to make of this what we will.

Punched Paper Tape

In my experience, there are two basic types of hard science fiction story. Before I tell you what I think those are, I should note that my two favorite pure science fiction writers are Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg; you might extrapolate from this that between hard SF and soft SF, soft SF wins out (hard SF, for those uncertain of the distinction, being science fiction the relies heavily on technical details and real science, while soft SF is more theoretical, fantastical, human, and, in my opinion, more poetic). But I do believe that hard SF has its charms, if that's really the word I want, and as I say those charms seem to me to be divvied up between two kinds of stories: in the first kind, a group of highly trained scientists in the semi-distant future deal with some kind of crisis, or seek an explanation for something or other, by going into outer space, or perhaps they're already there. In the second kind of hard SF story, a group of highly trained scientists wearing neckties in more or less the present day are alarmed by something happening, or coming, to the Earth. I have a special fondness for this latter type. Though it's been several years since I read either one, and who knows maybe if I went back to these books I'd no longer like them, my preference for these stories was cemented by Blood Music by Greg Bear and Childhood's End Arthur C. Clarke, and was more vigorously highlighted when I read Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, which is a story of the other variety, and didn't care for it much at all. If you're going to dump a lot of actual astrophysics on my head, I'd like someone to be driving a car to a lab in California in the 1950s first.

So imagine my delight when I learned that Valancourt Books announced their reissue of Sir Fred Hoyle's 1957 hard SF classic The Black Cloud. The novel begins, in fact, in California, at the observatory in Mount Palomar. While performing the routine task of looking for supernovae by photographing sections of the night sky and comparing those to photographs taken earlier of those same sections of the night sky (I can guarantee you that I've just badly oversimplified this process, but anyway...). While doing this, the young scientist discovers a very strange abnormality among the start, which, after one thing and other, and the involvement of loftily placed scientists in both American and England, turns out to be a mysterious black cloud that is heading towards the Earth. The first half or so of The Black Cloud is given over to the gathering together of the scientist heroes and their procedural battles with the American and British governments, but mostly to speculations regarding what the cloud is and what it might do to the Earth. The worst-case scenarios are very bad indeed, and range from human extinction via ice age to human extinction via fatally hot temperatures -- the variety of these speculations is due to no one, at this point, having any idea what the exact properties of this cloud are.

Spearheading both the run-ins with the governments and the speculation, as well as the response by the scientific community to the pending dangers, is a man named Chris Kingsley, an astronomy professor at Cambridge. A blunt man who doesn't suffer fools, which means he's kind of a dick, and possibly a genius, Chris Kingsley is the source of this novel's many faults, but also of its many fascinating qualities. Readers unfamiliar with the hard SF subgenre might disagree and say that the real problems with The Black Cloud stem from Fred Hoyle's insistence on transcribing the entire, scientifically thick, conversations that lay out every theory that anybody has about the cloud, including all the theories that turn out to be wrong, which is most of them, as well as Hoyle's belief that it is sometimes necessary for him to show his work. But with a book like this, complaining about the scientific theories would be like complaining about a murder mystery you're reading because all the characters do is wonder about who killed that one guy. No, it's Kingsley who is the show here, for good and bad, and so is -- and both are because they're inextricable -- Hoyle himself. Fred Hoyle is quite a figure in modern astronomy, and if you begin reading up on him be careful because it's a little bit of a rabbit hole. But as Geoffrey Hoyle, Fred's son, writes in his foreword to the Valancourt edition of The Black Cloud:

By the 1950s it had become established that neutral hydrogen existed in the Galaxy, and for the first time the spiral structure of the Milky Way could be seen. This discovery led my father to speculate that there might be molecules present in the Galaxy. He had first made a theoretical prediction that there were interstellar molecules in a scientific paper with Ray Lyttleton in 1940. He wrote a well-reasoned paper in the mid-1950s that was rejected when sent for publication...In 1963 the radio detection of the molecule hydroxyl was made and so began the field of Molecular Astronomy, vindicating my father's early predictions...

Less prestigious was his work to prove that the biological source of humanity came from outer space, probably from a comet, and his apparently baseless arguments regarding certain paleontological...well, anyway, read up on all this yourself, if you care to. Suffice it to say that nowadays, Hoyle is thought of as a scientist of dubious merit, but some of his theories, as well as his stubbornness in the face of almost everybody tell him he's wrong, found their way into The Black Cloud and the character of Chris Kingsley.

And where, really, to begin? With the fact, I suppose, that clearly the reader is meant to regard Kingsley as a hero. This despite the fact that after all of the lead scientist characters are sequestered at a country estate to work on the problem and it is revealed that for security reasons they will not be permitted to leave (nor will anyone who is later allowed to enter the grounds), we learn that Kingsley knew this would happen and knew that his contact with various people, both scientist and non-, would lead to those people being sequestered with him. On one hand, well, yes, let's get the best minds we can possibly get working on this, but also there due to Kingsley's string-pulling are various musicians, including one woman you get the feeling (though Hoyle doesn't waste a ton of ink on this) Kingsley wanted there with him to stave off his own loneliness. He at least has the decency to feel guilty about this, but only just. He also points out (not to her, whom he never tells about his duplicity) that she will be safer on the estate than she would out in the unprepared world, which may well be, but that he made the decision for her, and the other non-scientists, points to...well, it maybe points to why Richard Dawkins is such a fan of this book, let's put it like that.

There's also the matter of secrecy. Kingsley claims to be against it, and later, when tension between the scientists and the various governments, is at its highest, Kingsley points out that he has always been against telling the world of the potential dangers posed by the black cloud. By this time, catastrophe has befallen the world, and while rebuilding is certainly possible, literally hundreds of millions have died (it was the heat that did it after all, or largely the heat). Earlier in the book, Kingsley says when confronted by the official demands for secrecy that if he says nothing it will only be because he chooses to. Apparently he chose to. Kingsley keeps mum and in the aftermath of global devastation wants to claim a halo, to paraphrase Robert Heinlein speaking about something else, for not doing, or doing, what he doesn't believe, or care, that the government should have demanded that he do, or not do, to begin with. Or something like that. The gist is that morally speaking Kingsley think he's above reproach, and Hoyle maybe thinks so too, but he comes off to me as an appalling hypocrite

In order to really get to the heart of the Kingsley/Hoyle enigma would involve spoiling big chunks of the second half of The Black Cloud, including the exact nature of the cloud, but I'm not sure I'm willing to do that. However I do have to point out that, among the many other strange things that go on in this novel, what the cloud is is figured out by Alexandrov, a Russian scientist on the team, but somehow, after Kingsley asks Alexandrov to clarify his theory, the other characters give the credit to Kingsley when it turns out to be correct. This is baffling! And also an example of why The Black Cloud is compelling, because Hoyle's personality is present everywhere. This is something that I could not say about, for example, Rendezvous with Rama, and I would also say that it's a potential problem for hard SF as a whole, but not for The Black Cloud. For more of this, see an earlier chapter that features Kingsley going on at length to Marlowe, an American scientist of some standing, about why he, Kingsley, thinks scientists should enjoy places of greater power and social standing in the world, but ends -- literally this is the end of the chapter -- with Marlowe, having patiently listened to it all, telling Kingsley that he's maybe simplifying things just a bit too much.

There's so much more that's strange about Hoyle's portrayal of Chris Kingsley, and the terrible things he does that Hoyle and his colleagues try to morally justify (I think most of this can be boiled down to "the people who react badly to you are not scientists and so they don't get your truth, Chris"), but why ruin it for you? You should also know that while The Black Cloud is not a disaster novel as such, it nevertheless does contain some rather interesting deaths -- interesting in who dies, and when, and how, and how Hoyle presents that material. Because I don't want to spoil any of this, I'll just say that Hoyle handles all of that stuff rather well, and the novel's end is sort of terrific. It is, in its way, which is the way of a certain strain of think about both science fiction and science, very pure.  It's mainly Kingsley, the person that he's placed at the center of this that Hoyle can't get right, because he doesn't realize how wrong Kingsley is.

A Trysting House for Noisy Couples

 



James Kennaway was the author of seven novels, but only five were published during his short lifetime.  The first of those, Tunes of Glory, is perhaps his most famous, and even in that case the fame now reflects more on the Ronald Neame film version, starring Alec Guinness.  One of his posthumous novels has maybe the greatest title ever given to a story about someone discovering that their bad habits have drastically shortened their life -- it's called The Cost of Living Like This.  In that book (which I haven't read, but will, and soon) the lead character is dying of lung cancer at the age of 38, and one might pair this with one's knowledge that Kennaway himself died at 40 and think "Ah, I see," but no, Kennaway died when he suffered a heart attack while driving.  This was forty-five years ago now.  Since then, people will occasionally watch one of the films Kennaway wrote, such as The Battle of Britain and The Shoes of the Fisherman, as well as Tunes of Glory, the screenplay for which he was responsible for.  The novel Tunes of Glory has sporadically regained some kind of grip on a life in print (the most recent edition I've been able to find naturally has a picture of Alec Guinness from the film on the cover), while his other novels, which also include Some Gorgeous Accident, a fictionalized account of the affair Kennaway's wife had with John Le Carré, have mostly slid from view.

Until now, or until recently.  Valancourt Books, a terrific publisher that focuses on forgotten or neglected literary, horror, Gothic, and gay fiction.  Last month, Valancourt put out a new edition of The Cost of Living Like This, and tomorrow they'll reprint Kennaway's 1963 novel The Mind Benders.  The Mind Benders was also adapted into a film, again with a screenplay by Kennaway, this time directed by Basil Dearden, and starring Dirk Bogarde.  And listen, I'll have to cop to this eventually, my experience of Kennaway, apart from a distant viewing of The Battle of Britain, is confined to a recent reading of this very book, which is to say, The Mind Benders. But as often happens when the judgment of history has been found wanting, and a writer like Kennaway is rescued from the void, my reaction, even to an imperfect book like The Mind Benders, is one of excitement, as though Kennaway was a talented newcomer, not someone whose entire life's work has already been produced, and whose death occurred almost fifty years ago.

The novel begins by introducing the reader to Major Hall, an officer in British Intelligence, nicknamed "Ramrod" because of his very narrow and rigid approach to his work.  Kennaway's first sentence tells us that Ramrod is "hardly as exciting as his celebrated colleague...James Bond," which when reflected upon once you're deeper into the book is a knock on both Ramrod Hall and James Bond.  Bond is a ridiculous fiction whereas Ramrod, Kennaway argues with that very precise type of sardonicism perfected by mid-century English writers, is what such men are really like. I'm always skeptical when such an argument is made in a work of fiction, but that doesn't mean Kennaway's way of going about it isn't delightful.  Later in the novel, after Ramrod has watched a strange film that is central to the novel's plot and Ramrod's own investigation, Kennaway writes:

The film puzzled more than impressed him, which was not perhaps too surprising, as the only thing that really impressed him were pantomimes on ice and actors flying in Peter Pan.  'Damn clever,' he'd say of them, or sometimes, 'Damnably clever.'

To clarify things, Ramrod is investigating a Nobel Prize-winning scientist named Sharpey, whose Communist past and current strange behavior have put him under suspicion of espionage.  When Sharpey leaps to his death from a moving train -- as his naïve young colleague Jack Tate watches in horror -- Ramrod is led to investigate Sharpey's actual work, which has to do with sensory deprivation.  At the college where Sharpey and Tate work is a lab where Sharpey and another colleague, an American expatriate named Longman, have built a tank and suit and overall environment that allows them to reproduce the basic conditions suffered by a French scientist named Bonvoubois, who was found stumbling frightened and half-mad from a natural, Arctic form of sensory deprivation. It's not the cold that affected him, and, subsequently, student volunteers, so strongly, Sharpey and Longman realized.  The film Ramrod watches, with Tate and Norman, Sharpey and Longman's lab assistant, shows the two scientists, one dead and one not yet met by Ramrod (or the reader), explaining themselves:

'It hadn't anything to do with low temperature,' [Sharpey explains on the film]... 'Bonvoubois and our student guinea pigs had been affected not by the cold but by their prolonged isolation. One week later we changed the name of the laboratory outside our main building to "Isolation".'

With Tate not being smart enough and Norman merely being an assistant, that leaves Ramrod with Longman.  Longman, it turns out, is the protagonist of The Mind Benders, though he doesn't appear in person, as it were, until page 42 if this 145-page novel.  Longman is married to Oonagh, whom Jack Tate is in love with, and he, Longman, has been missing from the lab for several weeks. Sharpey died, Kennaway tells us, and Longman fled. When he goes to Longman's home to question him, Ramrod (and Tate, who, to put it bluntly, finds excuses to come sniffing around) finds a calm man who is deeply in love with his wife, with a kind of weary, or even melancholy, uxoriousness, and this love is reciprocated.  But when he learns of Sharpey's death, and of Ramrod's suspicions that Sharpey was a spy, Longman returns to the lab, against Oonagh's protests.  Up to now, Sharpey had entered the isolation tank.  It was Sharpey who jeopardized his sanity.  Now, to find out what prolonged stays in the sensory deprivation tank can do to a man, and may have done to Sharpey, Longman takes the place of his dead friend.

Copyright Hamish Campbell/TSPL/Writer Pictures

So what is Kennaway going after here?  Not what you'd expect, I suspect.  Coming to The Mind Benders at this late date, it's hard to not think of Ken Russell and Paddy Chayefsky's Altered States, and I did wonder going in if the similarities would be strong enough to cause me to cast a sideways glance at that later film from here on.  But outside of sensory deprivation as a launching pad, the two stories have almost nothing in common, other than that the tank does cause characters in each to regress to a more primitive form, or mindset.  It's what this is all in aid of in The Mind Benders that sets it apart.
When we first meet Longman and Oonagh, and learn of the virginal Tate's love for her, it seemed to me that this was merely another example of mature domestic matters standing alongside, or perhaps even overshadowing, the genre plot that you thought was going to be the thrust of the thing -- this isn't uncommon in English fiction from this general era.  You can find this kind of domestic drama sharing center stage in horror novels as diverse as Simon Raven's Doctors Wear Scarlet and Kingsley Amis's The Green Man. In The Mind Benders, however, it's not a matter of one thing sharing center stage with the other as it is the domestic drama actually being the center stage on which the genre material performs. Or vice versa. I haven't figured out which it is.

Anyhow, while Sharpey's story is resolved, it's what the isolation tank does to Longman, and by extension Oonagh, that is the reason the book exists at all.  Suffice it to say, what it does to Longman is unpleasant, but while Kennaway himself makes the Jekyll and Hyde comparison he does so only in passing.  Even though at times for the reader it will remain to be seen how badly Longman's personality has been twisted, in other words, how far, how evil, he will become, what's unsettling about The Mind Benders are the moments of almost homey cruelty, the kind of casually nasty remark by Longman about Oonagh, and heard by third parties, to whom these comments are often addressed, that may remind the reader of actual domestic nastiness they may have witnessed, or experienced.

So the idea of "sensory deprivation" becomes a rather clean metaphor for what it takes, psychologically as well as in relation to actual senses, for a man to not ruin what he has. A man specifically -- I don't know when Kennaway's wife cheated on him with John Le Carré, but it would be interesting to know how it coincides with The Mind Benders.  Was the novel a somewhat disguised attempt to address that part of his life, or is it merely a coincidence?  Or a foretelling?  The novel's end is not its strongest bit.  Too much of the dialogue comes pretty close to being of the "These are our themes" variety (there's also symbolism involving a dog that is at once obvious, silly, but somehow successful, possibly because Kennaway kind of throws it away), and things conclude too neatly. I wonder if Kennaway wasn't sure if he should really go for it.  As a matter of fact, as Paul Gallagher writes in the introduction to the Valancourt Books edition, The Mind Benders was written specifically as a companion to the Basil Dearden film -- in effect Kennaway novelized his own original script, as Elmore Leonard did with Mr. Majestyk and Budd Schulberg did with Waterfront. If he was unable to go beyond a certain point with the film, perhaps a need to remain faithful to the screen version forced him to go easy in the novel as well.  I don't know.  But even if the novel The Mind Benders peters out a little bit at the end, the rest of it remains an unusual and gripping genre novel, not about spies or violence, but about marriage. Which I think we can agree is an unlikely thing for a genre novel to be about.