Here’s a helping of the gothic, the fantastic and the downright scary. At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft is the story of a particularly disastrous expedition to Antarctica. One group of explorers meet a very gruesome end, whilst a second make some very disturbing discoveries.
It certainly is an effectively chilling story. For me, the opening chapters work the best in how they hint at the horror in the frozen wasteland. Think of having to describe John Carpenter’s film The Thing, but not being allowed to go into gory detail, in fact only being allowed to vaguely suggest what has happened to the alien’s victims. Lovecraft cleverly hints at the impending fate of the explorers; their isolation, the nervousness of their dogs, the very vastness of the unwelcoming landscape:
In the whole spectacle there was a persistent, pervasive hint of stupendous secrecy and potential revelation. It was as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space and ultradimensionality. I could not help feeling that there were evil things – mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accurse ultimate abyss.
At the Mountains of Madness was rejected by the magazine Weird Tales when it was written in 1931. It’s difficult to see why, as weird it certainly is. But conventional, at least for the time, it isn’t. Whilst the opening chapters sit comfortably in the horror/science fiction genre, the later ones veer off into gothic territory when a second group of explorers unwisely decide to look further. Lovecraft paints a very detailed picture of a vast, ancient and seemingly abandoned city; his description is so vivid that I felt I was walking through its claustrophobic caverns. Creepy and disturbing, but not quick-fix horror.
If you haven’t been scared off by the cover art above, it’s from a 1991 edition of the book – described by Amazon as a mass market paperback. You couldn’t find more of a contrast with the cover of a different edition, below, which has more of a connection with the story, showing the foolish explorers travelling into Antarctica by air.
The first cover suggests the quick-fix horror, the second more a Boy’s Own adventure about to go wrong, or a 1930s update of an H. Rider Haggard adventure. A sort of King Solomon’s Mines where no one gets out alive – or sane.
Our room looked over roofs down to where this funny quay crooks into the sea. Gulls dived and screamed like Spitfires and Messerschmitts. Over the English Channel the sticky afternoon was as turquoise as Head and Shoulders shampoo.
‘Ah, you’ll have a whale of a time!’ Dad hummed a bendy version of ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’. (The bathroom door’d opened by itself, so I could see Dad’s chest reflected in the mirror as he put on a string vest and the shirt he’d just ironed. Dad’s chest’s as hairy as a cress experiment.) ‘Wish I could be thirteen again.’
Then, I thought, you’ve obviously forgotten what it’s like.
David Mitchell is a writer who has the ability to assume any number of believable and different voices. He proved this in Cloud Atlas, with its array of six seperate narrators that shifts from the 19th Century to a distant and dystopian future. Black Swan Green is far less ambitious with Mitchell adopting one voice for the entire novel, that of a thirteen year old boy.
Jason Taylor lives in Black Swan Green in Worcestershire. It’s 1982. Adolescence and early Eighties Britain is seen through his imaginative eyes; girls, school, friendships and family life. Mitchell scatters references to appropriate television shows and news from the period (the Falklands War casts a large shadow) throughout the novel. Taylor appears a bright lad, he’s recently won a poetry competition. There are, however, things playing on his mind; he suffers from a stammer (referred to throughout the book as Hangman), and he’s constantly conscious of the fragile pecking order that exists in his peer group.
The threat of madness and death looms heavily in Black Swan Green. In one chapter, Jason and his friend stumble across a summer party at a country asylum that is disturbingly cut short, and he has several encounters with other unhinged and potentially dangerous characters. These are usually eccentrics living on the fringes of his comfortable surroundings, such as the larger than life Madame Crommelynck or the band of gypsies he befriends. Jason also constantly refers to children in his school who haven’t quite made the grade when it comes to intelligence, and adulthood is often viewed as a sad, lonely and unfulfilled as personified by parents, neighbours and teachers.
A novel from the point of view of a young male invites comparisons with other recent fiction, particularly The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon and Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre. I’m sure there are countless others that I haven’t read in a trail that goes right back to J.D.Salinger. Black Swan Green also reminded me of Bad Behaviour by William Sutcliffe in how peer pressure means everything to a thirteen year old and how the balance can easily change. Mitchell describes each boy’s status as being similar to army ranks, and Jason slips down to the very bottom as the novel progresses.
My disappointment with Black Swan Green came from my expectations of David Mitchell. Cloud Atlas was such a strange and original novel that I was expecting something similar, and the opening chapter of Black Swan Green is fantastic, describing a lake where many children have died in the past where Jason and his friends play on its frozen surface, the menacing phone calls that his parents are receiving and a very odd encounter at a house in the woods. The novel just doesn’t follow this promise and is more content to settle into more familiar territory with everything interesting, the threats of madness and death, only remaining under the surface. It’s not that I expect every novel I pick up to be dark and disturbing, but I do expect this if the opening chapter suggests so, and where there are many references to accidental deaths haunting the book. Ultimately, Black Swan Green reminded me the most of another book set in 1982 and narrated by a thirteen year old boy, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole. This isn’t a criticism, it’s just not what I expected.
Visiting some friends for New Year, we were greeted by overindulged adults complaining of illness. We were also surrounded by overexcited children, still not done with Christmas. While the grown-ups drifted in and out of consciousness and the kids busied themselves over a Playstation, I decided to seek out a quiet corner and read. And I picked a cracker of a book.
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield is about stories, both real and imagined. It touches on memory, duality, motherhood, loneliness and decay. It is also about mystery; ghosts, real and imagined, identity and the magic of the storyteller:
I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leant over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and children play their make believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams.
Margaret Lea is a lonely biographer, still living with her parents above their antiquarian bookshop. Early in the novel we learn that her mother is something of an unloving and distant figure in her life. Margaret has also discovered that she is one of twins, the other having died as an infant.
Enter the elderly Vida Winter, a famous, reclusive and prolific novelist. The two come together when Margaret is mysteriously invited by the sick Miss Winter to work on her biography. Her story is, as she tantalisingly describes, one of libraries, of ghosts and of twins. Margaret visits Vida Winter and listens to the story of two very unusual twins, Adeline and Emmeline, and begins to piece together a story that entwines the life of the novelist with the lives of others and with her own.
For a first novel, The Thirteenth Tale is an impressive read. It easily passed what I call The Pause Test, where I am in no hurry to finish a book, and will often actually stop and pause to think about it for a while before continuing. Diane Setterfield skillfully constructs the mystery of the novel; you want to keep reading Winter’s strange story just as much as Margaret wants to hear it. It is also very much a book about readers and reading, Margaret’s whole life revolves around books and she describes how she can lie in bed reading throughout the night. The relationship between truth and fiction and the role of the writer is called into question, but much more than in a novel like Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, another book about libraries and mysterious authors which I confess left me cold. The Thirteenth Tale easily drew me into the lives of Margaret Lea and Vida Winter.
Setterfield artfully stitches her themes into the book. Where it could so easily have been portrayed clumsily, the ghost of Margaret’s lost twin and the other hauntings in the story are subtly handled. Vague, misshapen reflections stare back at Margaret from every dark window she sees, mist and rain make their entrance at the most appropriate moments and half-heard sounds and half-remembered dreams all contribute to the captivating story.
The Thirteenth Tale is very much a mystery story, one which Margaret Lea manages to piece together after finding a different account of events to Vida Winter’s. This is the crux of the book, not only how no two versions of a story can be the same, but how a storyteller will only tell the version of a story that they want you to hear, even if they claim to be telling the truth. I confess that I only unravelled the mystery at the same time as Margaret, although looking back I realised that there were plenty of clues scattered through the chapters for the detectives out there.
When Margaret falls ill towards the end of the novel, a doctor jokingly prescribes a course of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories to pacify the sleuth within her. For me, The Thirteenth Tale reminds more of Barbara Vine’s fiction in how the intricate links between past and future are explored and eventually explained. Dickens also gets a mention in this novel and, like Dickens’ fiction, some readers may find that all of the loose ends are tied up rather too neatly. For me, however, The Thirteenth Tale was an excellent read.
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