‘I am pursued with blasphemies, cries of despair and appalling hatred. I hear those dreadful sounds called after me as I turn the corners of the streets; they come in the night-time, while I sit in my chamber alone; they haunt me everywhere, charging me with hideous crimes, and – great God! – threatening me with coming vengeance and eternal misery. Hush! do you hear that?’ he cried with a horrible smile of triumph; ‘there – there, will that convince you?’
Sheridan Le Fanu, The Familiar
I’ve been meaning to read In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu for some time. This is a famous collection of five supernatural stories, first published in 1872. I’m a fan of M.R.James, who described himself as a disciple of the Irish writer. I’m also partial to a gothic tale or two, and Le Fanu’s stories also stray into this territory.
Green Tea opens the collection and is easily Le Fanu’s best known ghost story. Quite simply, it’s a magnificently constructed and well written tale. It’s also very scary. It concerns the doomed Jennings, who begins to see a menacing small monkey wherever he goes. This is perhaps a hallucinatory symptom of the green tea he has been overindulging in, or perhaps it is something more sinister. The most chilling aspect of this story is, whether or not the monkey is real or in his disturbed imagination, that he is most troubled by the fact that the monkey appears to relish the fact that he can see him. And only he can see him. What can be worse than being a lonely demon that nobody can see? What can be better than being allowed to suddenly haunt somebody to death? You’d really pull the stops out, wouldn’t you?
In a Glass Darkly is framed by the case notes of one Dr Hesselius and Green Tea is a study of Jennings’ deterioration. Hesselius treats his patient as an interesting specimen rather than as a friend or as a doctor treating a troubled man, but this is also exactly what the reader does. If they are really honest about it. We know that Jennings is a hopeless case. We know the monkey is going to get him. Like the monkey, we relish that fact.
The next two stories, The Familiar and Mister Justice Harbottle, follow similar themes. Both deal with personal hauntings with inevitably gruesome endings. Both follow men with guilty secrets, men responsible for the death of others who will get their comeuppence. In The Familiar, Barton is haunted by a menace that only he can see and one, like in Green Tea, that will claim its victim in the end.
The longest story in the collection is A Room at the Dragon Volant. Here Le Fanu can take his time to establish atmosphere and subtle menace, a menace so slight it’s like a nagging itch. At times it is difficult to see where this story is going; the exciteable narrator relates more of a mystery tale than supernatural or horror and it’s nowhere near as disturbing as Green Tea or The Familiar. Still worth a read though, as is the final story Carmilla. This is notable for being an early vampire story, and the tale influenced Le Fanu’s fellow Dubliner Bram Stoker for Dracula. Carmilla is the story of a lesbian vampire, predating such Hammer classics as The Vampire Lovers and Twins of Evil by a century:
I stood at the door, peeping through the small crevice, my sword laid on the table beside me, as my directions prescribed, until, a little after one, I saw a large black object, very ill-defined, crawl, as it seemed to me, over the foot of the bed, and swiftly spread itself up to the poor girl’s throat, where it swelled, in a moment, into a great, palpitating mass.
If you’re a disciple of the ghost story or the gothic tale, even a Hammer Horror or two, it’s worth spending some time with Sheridan Le Fanu.
‘I’ve lost all sense of proportion regarding alcohol. You know how they say time slows down as you get older – or is it speeds up? One or the other. Days whizz by so that it’s Christmas every other week (God, what a prospect). Well, a similar thing happens with alcohol. Alcohol slows down as you get older as well, so that it takes more and more to get you pissed. Whereas when you’re young it flashes through your body like lightning, doesn’t it? You can feel it going into your blood, you can feel all the little blood cells getting drunk … and then you can feel it here – ‘ he touched the front of his head – ‘it gets you right in the frontal lobes. I remember in the army – that was the first time I ever drank much. And then you think, “What’s the point, how much time have we got left on this earth, do we really want to spend it feeling dizzy?” On the other hand, do we really want to spend it sober? You know there’s a theory that senility is nature’s way of stopping you from worrying about death? Alcohol does the same thing. What’s the difference between senility and drunkenness? Drunkennes is artificial senility.’
In A Curious Earth, Gerard Woodward follows the progress of Aldous Jones, first encountered in his previous two novels August and I’ll Go To Bed At Noon. I must confess that the premise of Aldous as a central character in a novel was somewhat unpromising. Anyone who has been reading this series may agree; previously Aldous stood on the sidelines of the action, an easy going and dreamy head of the mad Jones household of sixties and seventies English suburbia. With the more interesting characters gone, mostly due to the devastating effect of the demon called alcohol that haunts these novels, how could the gentle retired art teacher possibly hold his own? Thanks to Woodward’s skill as a writer, he does us proud.
We first met the Jones family in August, where Aldous takes his family to the same spot in Wales for the annual camping holiday. Innocent times, although we slowly begin to follow his wife’s Colette’s drift into addiction – firstly glue (sniffing something quite new and perfectly legal in the 60s) and then alcohol. I’ll Go To Bed At Noon follows a darker path, with Colette and other members of the Jones family in the clutches of the bottle, most disturbingly their son Janus – who is gripped by alcoholism and madness with tragic consequences. But although these novels deal with much sadness they are also terribly funny and I’ll Go To Bed At Noon is one of the most entertaining books I’ve read in the last few years.
At first I wasn’t sure if Woodward could go any further with the Jones family but proceedings quickly fall into the familiarly entertaining style. It starts with Aldous, now widowed and living apart from his surviving grown up children, slowly taking comfort in the bottle himself. He slips into apathy and increasingly eccentric behaviour; one amusing scene has him proudly displaying the mouldy potatoes growing into a huge plant in the cupboard to his perplexed daughter. Following a health scare he attempts to get his act together and visits his son in Ostend, where Woodward can really let rip with his trademark humour – Aldous losing his false teeth on a cross channel ferry, his general confusion at being abroad for the first time since the War, the many characters he meets who far more eccentric than himself (these include an insane author of several volumes on sexual perversion, and the young and attractive love interest for Aldous and the sudden appearance of her irritating and bullying husband).
Best of all is Woodward’s prose. He is a writer who can work wonders with the everyday, and with ordinary thoughts, hopes and regrets. Aldous falls in love again, rediscovers life and has some very high hopes for the old Jones family home. A Curous Earth is a wonderful celebration of the ordinary, with Aldous Jones enjoying a late flowering before our very eyes.
