Diving Belles by Lucy Wood, Bloomsbury Publishing

There is a vein running through modern short fiction that adheres to the dictum ‘less-is-more.’  This can be congratulated where what is being described uses just enough words for us to care about the content; after all, few wish to be bombarded by overtly purple prose.  But if there isn’t enough content at the outset, we are left floundering wondering what we are expected to care about in what remains.  This is the issue I have with this, Lucy Wood’s debut.

  I anticipated at the very least some semblance of character motivation and sense of purpose.  In DIVING BELLES there is too little of the former and none of the latter.  This isn’t to say the collection is without merit.  Wood’s conciseness and conscious avoidance of cliché (to the extent some of her similes and metaphors challenge instant recognition) are without question and work well. 

  With ‘Notes from the House Spirits,’ the most successful entry, a home’s ghost relates its various domestic invasions by the material world.  In the title story, a widow in denial takes up the chance to return to the underwater site where she last saw her husband.  In each case we are given enough information to follow the prescribed structure of the story.  Throughout the other ten entries, Wood otherwise remains strong on setting mood via her descriptions of nature and its elemental changes.

  Elsewhere, the approach of minimalist ‘poetic’ prose leaves too much to call on from the reader.  Strangeness alone fails to communicate the uncanny or inspire any emotion when it feels like strangeness for its own sake.  Recognisable character-types are, at the outset, vital so the strangeness that gradually encroaches, from, or, upon them, becomes the issue.  I am reminded of the on-stage celebrity singer who, after singing the verse of a well-known hit, points his microphone to the audience for them to complete the chorus.  Yes, we might be able to fill in the gaps but would have preferred it came from the star we paid to hear. The result is a feeling of being short-changed.  Consequently, here, ideas remain inevitably under-exploited.

  Of these remainder, the sense of unreality, presumably intended, is misplaced.  Characters merely ‘do’, either out of habit or routine, with no subjective intent or narrative momentum.  Each tale’s ‘climax’ peters out as we wonder just what the author was trying to portray.  (I wonder if Wood has read Beckett).

  There are glimpses of possible, future excellence but they flare all too briefly for certainty in a flash of rare wit or spark of rural dark.  Wood has held back too much here and – unlike her gushing jacket reviewers - seriously undersold. 

  Wood is, by her own account, attempting a novel.  I wish her luck and we now know the strengths she has to draw upon.  But I do hope, with the extra length afforded by the form, she makes us care about her characters and at least intimate before its end why they are doing what they do. 

                                                                                                             

A Brief Q & A with Mark Valentine and John Howard

This week, as a companion piece to my last entry, a brief Q & A with partnered authors of the uncanny, Mark Valentine and John Howard:

Mark Valentine’s first publication was The Garden of Ruin, god of the rain (1980) and his most recent, with John Howard, is the short story collection Secret Europe (Ex Occidente Press, 2012). He has written a biography of the Welsh author and mystic Arthur Machen (Seren, 1990) and Time, a Falconer (Tartarus Press, 2011), a study of the diplomat and fantasist ‘Sarban’. His tales of an aesthetical occult detective were recently brought together in The Collected Connoisseur (with John Howard, Tartarus Press, 2010) and he has published four other short story collections. He edits Wormwood, a journal of the literature of the fantastic, supernatural and decadent.

John Howard was born in London in 1961. He is the author of a collection of short stories, The Silver Voices, and a novella, The Defeat of Grief. His stories also have appeared in the anthologies Beneath the Ground, Cinnabar’s Gnosis, and Never Again. His collaborations with Mark Valentine have appeared in the collections Masques & Citadels, The Rite of Trebizond and Other Tales, and The Collected Connoisseur. He has published many articles on various aspects of the science fiction and horror fields, especially on the work of classic authors such as Fritz Leiber, Arthur Machen, August Derleth, M.R. James, and writers of the pulp era. 　

Why did you originally approach a Romanian publisher for this and previous projects?

MV: Originally, Ex Occidente Press approached us. Dan Ghetu, who runs the press, had enjoyed some of our earlier stories and asked us to produce a book for his new imprint.

JH: Dan was willing to publish more by us (separately and in collaboration) – which he did – and so it was natural for us to ‘pitch’ the ‘Secret Europe’ idea to him. Dan went along with the way the project developed, as well as requesting and/or making his own changes (such as not including any story notes).

What feedback, if any, have you so far received from British mainstream publishers from your work with Ex-Occidente?

MV: None. However, I’ve never tried to interest them in it.

JH: None – but I’ve never asked for any.
　
How and why did you both settle on the theme of dissent for many of the tales in this book?

MV: We didn’t discuss this as a theme. Our stories were drawn to it independently.

JH: I didn’t consciously settle on this theme. As many of my stories in SECRET EUROPE are set during times of upheaval (or worse) or impending change, the theme of ‘dissent’ clearly turned out to be relevant and so found its way into the stories through the various characters in their different – or not so very different after all – situations. It often takes an outsider looking in to discern themes.

Another example is in Des Lewis’ real-time reviews, where he (correctly) points out the times I’ve used ‘high places’ – balconies, terraces, towers, hills, etc – in my work. I never realised how often I did it until he mentioned it.

Did either of you ever consider it an issue placing the 'uncanny' tales next to the more political ones?

MV: No. I didn’t think about it. I just wrote the stories that the place or characters seemed to suggest.

JH: I never gave any thought to the arrangement of the individual stories in the book, or of attempting to co-ordinate the order of my stories with Mark’s. We were happy to leave this to the skill and judgement of the publisher. And I think this has worked out well!

As a writing partnership, how do you avoid conflicts? Do you both instinctively write to your own strengths or is it always something that has to be long planned and negotiated?

MV: We have known each other for almost 30 years so probably have a good idea of each other’s interests. For this collection, all we did was to divide Europe up between us, so we didn’t write about the same places. So, yes, the writing is mostly instinctive.

JH: When we’ve collaborated, we’ve avoided conflicts because Mark always has the last word! I’ve been happy with this because the impetus and main ideas have nearly always come from him. This was certainly the case for our six collaborations involving The Connoisseur. He was Mark’s character and Mark knows more about him than I do (although in my time with him I think he’s picked up a few things from me).

I think Mark and I always write to our strengths – many of which we share, and others of which are complementary. I think we largely write instinctively – and more often than not we’ve turned out to have shared those instincts, or they’ve led us in the same direction.

Which stories from SECRET EUROPE do you both consider the most successful at achieving what you'd planned for the book as a whole?

MV: I hope they all work together as a set. While we didn’t have a definite plan for the book, we knew that most of the stories would be set in interwar Europe and in places and situations that might not be all that well known. The interest for me was in trying to imagine the atmosphere of each setting and the preoccupations of the characters.

JH: I’m not sure we really planned anything for SECRET EUROPE as a whole, except to cover as much of Europe geographically as seemed feasible.  I don’t think I started writing my stories to a plan, except that once I’d decided to use a setting (or create a fictional one) I wanted to make it as alive as possible, and hopefully to leave the reader with a sense of having been somewhere in ‘secret Europe’ – even if only for a very brief time, and perhaps with the relief of having got away.

As well as wanting to use places I’d had the chance to visit, I also wanted to write about times and events in recent history that have interested me for years, but which might not be well-known today: for example the brief but bloody civil war in Austria in 1934.

Mark and I divided Europe between us, rather in the manner of Molotov and Ribbentrop; so we never trespassed on each other’s territory, even when we ended up setting stories in the same areas, because of shared interests in them – for example, the Baltic countries.

I don’t think I can answer the question by choosing a story: that’s up to the reader!
　
My thanks to Mark Valentine and John Howard for giving of their time. I very much look forward to their next releases - both together and apart.　
　
　

Secret Europe by John Howard & Mark Valentine, Exposition Internationale, (Bucharest)

Like a Cold War-era directive, I received this – one of a limited edition of 222 - through the post from Romania. A smart, Art Deco retro cover, featuring a heraldic red flame upon matt-black boards, above the title - invitingly illicit - compounded the evocation. I was otherwise relieved that your language-illiterate reviewer discovered its contents reassuringly rendered in his own tongue.
  Over just 180 pages, a whole twenty-five tales feature. (Ten by Howard; fifteen by Valentine). But no imaginative deficit is the cause. Economy of language is more often a signifier of focused intent than any dearth of ideas, and I was pleased to uncover this fact through their reading.
  Collectively, the tales are set during the tide of social and political unrest sweeping across Eastern Europe before and between the Wars. Small but telling endeavours are used by its citizens to undermine the governing parties’ grips on power. Howard’s sense of place is confidently realised without dominating plot. (One unavoidable exception is ‘Westenstrand,’ but here the ever-shifting landscape is a character by itself). His best tales relate little telling revenges committed against the state by those who work under or within it – a very European topic. ‘The Silver Eagles’ finds citizen defiance expressed in the counterfeiting of coins, while ‘The White City’ sees comedic lampooning on official stamps.
  Valentine’s tales highlight a more psychological motivation, where we follow individuals’ affected internally by their environments. These, in particular, lard the book with traits of the uncanny. ‘The Other Salt’ harbours a neat twist on a traditional horror motif, while ‘A Lantern For Carpathia’ follows the trail of a lost brand of cigarette to their stoical guardian whose last outpost has one far more compelling story to tell. Together, all feel strangely prescient in our own time of peoples’ uprising against state control.
  Where a sole protagonist is concerned, a remote coolness and ambiguous intent, redolent of Robert Aickman, unites both writers. In Howard’s ‘Wandering Paths,’ a man who has lost his way and the chance to reconcile with his wife seems condemned to pursue his failing geographically; while Valentine’s ‘The Lion of Chaldea’ sees a young Iberian scholar posted by his institute on a goodwill mission to Cadiz and the company of his host; ‘original’ thinker, Dr. Ecquo. Considered a crank by the scholar’s employers, Ecquo claims the citizens of the city once known as Chaldea, "saw the stars very differently from us…where we see mythological figures, creatures, heroes, symbols, they saw – something else." We are asked to consider; is Ecquo truly a crank or, also, ‘something else’?
  The historical and geographical knowledge of their subject, allied to the cool competence and tight, economical use of language united in tales not a word longer than required, suggests this small press release may well be Howard’s and Valentine’s best work so far. I hope they are reissued in time, to be appreciated by a far wider audience.

The Suicide Club by Robert Louis Stevenson, Dover Thrift Edition.

Machen’s The Three Impostors – reviewed last month – led me to this; a linked three-story series from Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights collection that, in set-up and structure, was its inspiration.
  Prince Florizel of Bohemia, with his British aide Colonel Geraldine, don mutual disguises in a bid to thwart a Gentleman’s Club wherein its clientele play cards for the opportunity to be led by variously devised means to their own deaths. Across each tale, the Prince and the Colonel assist a vulnerable victim (is there any other kind?) as a means to corner and despatch the Club’s wicked President who may have had a hand in the fate of Geraldine’s brother and is, of course, only out for himself.
  To describe this book as merely dated is to underestimate the more honourable attempts of its contemporaries. The main problem – as so often is the case with Victorian melodrama – is what is the subtext; not only left unwritten by the author, but, seemingly, not even realised. Clear opportunities for contemporary satire are ignored:
  ‘There was little decency among the members of the club. Some boasted of the disgraceful actions, the consequences had reduced them to seek refuge in death; and the others listened without disapproval. There was a tacit understanding against moral judgments;…a third was for reading the mysteries of life in a future state; and a fourth professed that he would never have joined the club, if he had not been induced to believe in Mr. Darwin.
  "I could not bear," said this remarkable suicide, "to be descended from an ape."’ (p. 13).
  Such a quote, witty in itself, unfortunately leads nowhere, never being exploited in the narrative voice of its author. Neither is blatant gay iconography ever once even intimated. Florizel and Geraldine are, here, unquestioned male names, for crying out-loud, while the usual, distant ‘love interest’ is manifest in the mysterious fate of Geraldine’s brother.
  While what may have been mildly shocking subject matter in 1882 is positively Neanderthal in 2012. It also reads today as tactlessly presumptuous in assuming a single world-view against the subject of suicide. Can we blame Stevenson for this? Well, I would expect far more radical and revelatory use of the same material from contemporaries such as Chesterton, Belloc or, perhaps most intriguing, Ronald Firbank.
  This would have been far more successful as a satire of Wildean wit, but, in several bounds, Stevenson manages to free himself from all opportunity to portray it as such. Where the subject of suicide and the individual’s right to choose is hotly debated today, here, the view is strictly conservative and – despite the lame attempts at black humour – as socially unaware as Stevenson’s humourless kowtowing to its two Establishment ‘heroes.’
  Some books come into their own after years of unjust neglect. Others fall out and should be left where they land to die. The Suicide Club is one such. A pity – and such a great title.

The Short Story In Crisis?

Where is the short story heading? London publishers' agents are reluctant to touch them; the novel remaining their pre-eminent weapon of choice. First timer collections of yore no longer hold their niche in today's market. Here, film rights hold sway over what now, in effect, is a literary first draft script; one in waiting for an audience already exposed.
  Meanwhile, the Net exploding has triggered a universe of uncertainty. The old categories appear increasingly parochial, muddied and out of touch. This allows for experimentation, yes, a window of opportunity for new sub-genres, perhaps. It might also mean no individual writer, whomever he/she is, will any longer be able to follow and maintain a deserved career where their voice and standing now lasts only as long as current sales.
  New voices thus become fickle, ten-a-penny, interchangeable and easily lost in a 'market' that no longer exists as a separate entity, but transient and indistinguishable from the world it is in. Yet, writers new and old stubbornly continue to write them. Why? They are not in a vaccuum, of course - they must. How else can they exercise their talent and guage reader interest in their name? How else can they publicise their ability - if they have one - and swiftly define - through creative repitition - a public face? How, without recourse to a sole, perhaps overlong, tale that may be flawed in technique but brilliant in plot?  
  What should they do then? Simply write another? Don't be fooled by the high profiles of London's and New York's well-heeled literati. Most new writers barely scrape a living and certainly can't afford the luxury of sacrifice entailed by the time, financial loss and mental commitment incurred by the expenditure of this one hit.
  There are parallels to the rock music industry in the mid-Seventies. The large record labels, stuffed and complacent from years of sell-out gigs, overlong tracks too easily filling disc space and overpaid bands trading on past glories, lost touch with their market; the younger generation of music lovers following in their wake. This new generation rebelled, producing short DIY sounds and personal images that tapped into their audiences discontent.
  One difference to today is crucial. The competition then was bound by the media's relatively modest size. You pretty much knew what it was and could build your public image accordingly. The 'them' and 'us' scenario. This appears no longer possible. Now, as an artist, you encounter something knew and unforeseen at every click, defying such demarcation. The competition is vast, instantly international, and bound only by those as yet without the Net. In this situation, the writer must continue to network, yes, to occasionally write for free, perhaps. But he / she must also hold determinedly onto what is theirs by right; their own literary identity.

The Three Impostors by Arthur Machen, The Everyman Library edition.

Far more of a challenge than your typical novel, this is the story of three men too absorbed by their own literary interests to realise the truth, or otherwise, of the events unfolding around them. These are Dyson, in thrall to his own imagination, Phillipps, an adherent to science, and Russell, who simply considers himself a realist.
  Structurally based upon R. L. Stevenson’s ‘New Arabian Nights,’ thirteen chapters here act as anecdotal short stories, delivered to Dyson and Phillipps by supporting characters inveigling upon them their recent plights, and on whom we – and they – must trail to decide upon the truth of their motive and intent. If this sounds dry, it is only because to describe it effectively at all on one reading is in itself a challenge.
It’s necessary to place the work in the context of its time.
  First published in 1895, this era of supposed ‘decadence’ amongst the monied classes incrementally seeps through our consciousness. For though only sketched, Dyson, Phillipps and Russell still evoke the lazy wit, diffidence and nonchalance of stoned Sixties rock stars. They seem to live for kicks, their own amusement, and little else. They appear bored, dissolute and need adventure. Only, there is the growing, unnerving feeling in this reader that Dyson in particular cares only for the sating of this need over and above the fate of those who may require his help. Machen doesn’t force us to believe this; he simply plays it out. Such progress through the dark makes the work – if not entirely successful – the page-turner it needs to be.
  So, what’s interesting is what author Machen himself thinks of their status. Is he contemptuous of the three? - not obviously. Does he approve of their self-absorption? - it is never made clear. (As literary impostors, who are they pretending to be?) A clue might lay in the work he released in its wake. The novel ‘The Hill of Dreams’ (1897) may be the longest suicide note in history, in its part-autobiographical depiction of a failing writer whose talent and unique personal vision is overlooked to the point where madness fatally perverts whatever it was he’d earlier harboured. Here, the author seems to be predicting his own fate; what may – and may yet – happen to him if he listens to all those who think he should give up his art and get a ‘proper job.’
  Oh, how we can relate to it…
This was also, remember, the time of Chesterton’s sledgehammer metaphors in ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’ and ‘The Club of Queer Trades,’ and Belloc’s satirical sketches. So, it is possible Machen - to a certain extent – is satirising himself and his generation in the former book.
  Two anecdotal ‘stories’ in particular have co-existed in neat isolation from the rest of ‘The Three Impostors’ for at least the last seventy years. Both ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’ and ‘The Novel of the White Powder’ episodes have rightly made countless horror anthologies through the 20^{th Century and done so again in the imminent, and welcome, Penguin Classics reissue, ‘The White People & Other Weird Stories.’ With their contemporary themes of archaeological intrusion and unchallenged drug addiction resonating down the decades, Lovecraft, Howard and their offspring have been milking those particular seams ever since.}

The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, Wordsworth Editions

A marked modernity about this book strikes you on first reading. The voice throughout has a deprecating wit and a knowingness about male shortcomings; so much for our time and so little heard in her own. Read it without knowing the author, and you’d be forgiven for thinking this an unlikely post-modern take on the transatlantic Edwardian.
The veil drops on a little delving. Wharton was borne of such a privileged background, in New York one-hundred and fifty years ago, that it was her true family name that became synonymous with the phrase ‘keeping up with the Joneses.’ Family affluence assured she grew up wanting for nothing, which included early room-to-room electricity, the telephone and regular tourism. Fortunately, money hadn’t been bestowed upon a dullard, Wharton’s considerable talents encroaching into landscape art, interior design and related works of non-fiction, making her something of a forerunner to, say, Jocasta Innes.
Her wealth, allied to her work as something of an anti-Victorian Smart-Setter, reversed the usual life trajectory of struggling writers; being that she didn’t seriously turn to short fiction until she was almost forty, when she surely didn’t need to turn to it at all. After 1901, at the peak of her powers, having completed building of her own home, (in Lennox, Massachusetts), designed to her own specifications, she set to work on a couple of novels; ‘The House of Mirth’ hotly followed by ‘Ethan Frome.’ This strong, independent woman of means now reached a position where she could write because she wanted to, rather than out of grinding necessity. A position most women would rightly envy today.
David Stuart Davies’s Introduction to this addition to Wordsworth’s ever-lengthening Mystery & the Supernatural series relates the childhood terror she drew upon, after ‘a near fatal attack of typhoid fever at the age of nine.’ Brother and sister playmates gave her a book featuring the tale of a robber. Apparently, its effect actually caused a relapse in her condition. She awoke from it feeling haunted and troubled, unable to sleep alone nights. This, at least, connects her to most other writers, who, far from a subsequent life of self-denial, actually revel in, and utilise, such old fears for their work as a form of catharsis. A failed marriage to a less intellectual philanderer only appears to have emboldened her creatively, showing the extent a woman could achieve then, unencumbered by male society’s expectations.
Throughout, Wharton is exceptional at the suggestiveness of place to each character, (and so to us) and their reactions are never less than subtly authentic. It is clear she knows these people well; their witty, self-deprecating dialogue and half-spoken mutual understanding in conversation revealing the voices of the set she herself moved among early last century. Every tale here is a literary gem, but the second half contains ‘Bewitched,’ ‘Mr. Jones,’ ‘Pomegranate Seed’ and ‘All Souls,’’ that must be considered classics of the genre.