The Model - Robert Aickman

 

The Model is a novella, left by Aickman when he died in 1981 and published in 1988.  It is now a Faber Find and I got the ebook.  Aickman told a friend he thought it was his best work.  I wouldn't go that far but it is different and it is always great to see a dying man branching out into a new field.

What we have is a grim fairy tale, set in Tsarist Russia sometime in the second half of the Nineteenth Century.  Elena is a young girl who lives a very sheltered life in a remote town.  Her mother is an invalid, her father the local lawyer.  A visiting couple leave her a book about ballet which inspires Elena to build a model theatre.  A very strange man then pays a flying visit and gives her toy dancers.

Elena is on the verge of puberty and her parents start pressing her to look to the future.  Her mother wants her to become a nun which, she has been told by God Himself, will keep the mother alive a little longer.  Her father, however, wants Elena to become the 'companion' to the local nobleman's mysterious son and, all being well, to marry him.  But Elena is set on becoming a ballerina and takes herself off to the nearest town with an opera house.  She travels alone through the bleak Russian winter.  Along the way she meets a talking bear and a prince who wants to be a revolutionary.  She makes her debut her first night in town, but is taken in by a strange brown lady with simian servants, only to be rescued by a distant cousin of one of her friends back home - a young woman posing, for reasons vaguely connected to her university studies, as an officer in the hussars,

The Model is, in short, a triumph, very different to Aickman's other work (much of it reviewed elsewhere on this blog).  It is beautifully written, full of colour and imagination, and strongly recommended.

The Unsettled Dust - Robert Aickman

The third of the Faber Finds collection I bought earlier this year and which have informed my reading (and a good slice of my writing) ever since.  There is a fourth, traditionally published by Faber on the back of the Finds success, which I will be treating myself to as a reward for surviving Christmas.

Overall, I found The Unsettled Dust  most satisfying of the three collections.  "The Cicerones" is well known, following a TV adaptation a couple of years ago which did much to stimulate a new interest in Aickman, certainly in my case.  "The Unsettled Dust", "The House of the Russians" and "The Stains" are equally disturbing in a similar way - the unexplained, peripheral horror; an almost feral nastiness always waiting to pounce.

What will I do when I've read the fourth and final collection?  I shall have to seek out the stories that missed the cut.

The Wine Dark Sea - Robert Aickman

With Aickman, the great Faber Finds print on demand service comes into his own.  By issuing three of his strange story collections as Finds, Faber were able to build sufficient interest to republish another collection in traditional form.

I had heard of Aickman, who is popular with cult writers like Mark Gatiss and Jeremy Dyson, and who was the grandson of the great Victorian horror writer Richard Marsh (author of The Beetle, 1897), but whose books are very hard to come by. This seems to be because he was a truly awkward sod.  Then I walked into my local Oxfam and there, on the classics shelf, were all three Faber Find collections, which I am now working my way through.

First off, Aickman has a unique flavour.  His stories are long - 30 pages or more, perhaps best defined as mini novellas - and not especially horrific.  Instead they are strange, just like he said they were.  His characters tend to be loners, outsiders, and we see generally see the world through their eyes.  The locations are incredibly varied - Greek island, Venice, industrial Yorkshire, Sweden, and that's just in this volume. There is often a thread of present-versus-past in which the present tends to come off worst.

There are eight stories here.  The first is the title piece - a tourist goes to a Greek island despite being warned off by the locals and finds himself embroiled in elemental forces personified.  To me it was obvious, not sufficiently strange and certainly nowhere near adequately erotic, albeit we have to remember Aickman died in 1981, in his mid-sixties, so "Wine Dark Sea" might have been hot stuff in its day.  The next story, "The Trains", was my favourite - two postwar young women hiking in Yorkshire have to take refuge in an isolated house.  The twist with the butler was very strange indeed, and I loved that Aickman doesn't bother explaining it.  The butler is called Beech, a tribute to the butler of the same name in Wodehouse's Blandings series - the stories are dotted with such little touches, which only increase the enjoyment.

Then it's "Your Tiny Hand is Frozen" about lonely people and the telephone, followed by "Growing Boys", exactly what it says on the tin and hugely enjoyable.  "The Fetch" and "The Inner Room" both feature hopeless fathers, which seems to be another Aickman trope.  The latter didn't quite work for me, albeit I loved it right up to the point at which it was supposed to become disturbing.  On the other hand, the woman who turned out to be the titular fetch was deeply disturbing and lingered round the back of my mind for some days.

Finally 'Never Visit Venice' and 'Into the Woods' were both English-abroad stories in which the locations play a key role.  Venice has become too associated with weird goings-on since Aickman wrote his contribution, so it has lost some of its force.  Again, though, the writing is good and engrossing.  'Into the Woods' is extremely strange and unsettling.  Such an odd idea to begin with - an asylum for insomniacs - which Aickman then builds on with a masterly touch.

The introduction is by Peter Straub.  He was big news in 1988 when this edition was first published.  He isn't now, and the introduction isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

Guilty Men - Cato

A truly great reissue by Faber Finds (if only they'd use Royal Mail instead of that slipshod private delivery firm, they'd be the publisher of my dreams).  Originally issued by Gollancz and boycotted by all nice Tory bookseller chains like W H Smith, this was the underground bestseller of 1940, shifting 200,000 copies in six months.  Written in the immediate aftermath of the Dunkirk disaster, when people still remembered the appalling price paid by the 30th Infantry Brigade (almost total annihilation) in the pointless defence of Calais, diverting at least some of the triumphant Germans in order to buy time for the armada of small boats to get the routed BEF off the beaches, it points the finger squarely at the men responsible - the laissez-faire Tories of Baldwin and Chamberlain who did absolutely nothing for an entire decade, whilst unemployment ballooned, Hitler did exactly what he felt like doing regardless of British foreign policy pledges and commitments to his victims which the Fuhrer well knew, having met them, Chamberlain and his cabinet of spineless sycophants would never honour.  Not all the Tories were to blame, of course; Churchill and his supporters, several Liberals and the leading lights of Labour all lambasted the government for letting Britain fall behind in the arms race - but, of course, Baldwin and Chamberlain could always rely on that unpardonable Labour turncoat Ramsay Macdonald and the more reactionary trade unions.

The most astonishing thing - the aspect which is so hard for hindsight to deal with - is that Chamberlain continued to beam complacently right up to the Nazi invasion of Norway (which he was telling the House would never happen when somebody slipped him a note saying it just had) and continued to serve in Churchill's cabinet as Lord President of the Council.

'Cato' was the collective pseudonym of three Beaverbrook journalists, Peter Howard, Frank Owen and Michael Foot, a future Labour leader with considerably more backbone than Macdonald.  Foot provides a preface to this edition which is considerably better than the longer and slightly tedious by John Stevenson, which covers much of the ground dealt with, with more style and venom, in the original text.

A book that names and shames - a book which caught and encapsulated the mood of its moment - a political book that is not afraid to cross party lines and praise those of different allegiance who nevertheless do the right thing.  How we need something of the same today - it was after all, a coalition government that sent the British Expeditionary Force to Flanders with bayonets against tanks, heavy cannon against flying artillery.

Politicians of right and left always bang on about the need for schools to teach British history with more Churchill in it.  We'd do well to make Guilty Men a set text.