The Night Wire - (ed) Aaron Worth

 I have long been a devotee of these British Library anthologies of forgotten writing of the weird.   Many of them are reviewed elsewhere on this blog.   They are always a mixed bag and one cannot expect to find them all of equal standard.   The Night Wire, which on the face of it should be exactly my milieu being focused on weird media (cameras, telegraphy, radio and television, all of them my specialty) sad;y turned out to be the exception.   A couple of them caught my attention.   Unfortunately none thrilled me in any way or sparked my imagination.   Even Rudyard Kipling, describing the early experiments of Marconi and possible contact with the Other Side, turned out to be a beautifully written dud.   Sorry, just not up to the usual standard.

The Platform Edge - Mike Ashley (ed)

 From the British Library series 'Tales of the Weird, comes this collection of neglected ghost stories set on the rail system.   Mike Ashley always tries to avoid the well-known regulars, thus there is no 'The Signalman' by Dickens.

There is, however, 'A Short Trip Home' by, of all people, F Scott Fitzgerald, which turns out to be startlingly effective.   Of the Victorian entries I liked 'Railhead' by Perceval Landon, of whom I had never heard but who turns out to have been a friend of Kipling (he lived in a cottage at Batemans) and the author of 'Thurnley Abbey', a ghost story which M R James considered 'almost too horrid.'  I must look it out.

Of the more modern ones, I am always intrigued byR Chetwynd-Hayes, represented here by 'The Underground'.   Of those inbetween, I really liked 'A Subway Named Mobius' which, according to editor Mike Ashley, is the only short story by American astronomer A J Deutsch.

A good collection, then, casting light on several intriguing writers.

The Call of the Wild - Jack London

What exactly is The Call of the Wild? Well, for a start it's not a novel. It's a novella, barely half the length of a full-length novel. Is it a book for a children like, say, Black Beauty? I don't believe so. The wild element is just too gruesome. Like Black Beauty, though, it is anthropomorphic - our protagonist is the dog Buck, who reacts to things as we think a dog might. That said, London goes much further than Sewell and Kipling. His dog hero is also aware of his ancient bloodline, all the way back to a common ancestor with the wolves and back to the first co-operation with man - startlingly, a sub-human primitive, probably a Neanderthal.


Then there is the actual call. To start off with Buck is a family pet in the Southland. Then he is stolen and sold because the Klondike Gold Rush at its frenzied height and there is serious money to be had for a dog as big and strong and buck. He is brutally broken by a man in a red shirt. Once above the snowline, it is the other sled dogs who teach him his craft. They too have personalities - the evil Spitz, lazy Pike, and so on. There comes a time when Buck knows it is kill or be killed with Spitz, so they fight a bloody battle and Buck becomes lead dog. He is sold on again and ends up with an ill-fated threesome who have no idea what they are doing. Fortune takes him into the camp of John Thornton, the perfect owner. Yet Buck cannot settle. He literally hears the call of the wild - a wolf howling at the moon - and before long he is the leader of the wolf pack, totally at home in the ancestral life of a wild dog.


I really loved The Call of the Wild. Handily this Vintage edition comes with White Fang, so I'll be onto that within a week or so. If it is half as good as The Call of the Wild it will be very good indeed.

Late Victorian Gothic Tales

It's a great idea to anthologise the late Victorian Gothic. This, after all, is the Gothic everyone knows today, the Gothic of Dracula and the Mummy as opposed to the original Gothic of Otranto and Vathek. Inevitably, though, you are going to end up with a mixed bag.

The first story, for example, is 'Dionea' by Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). 'Dionea' is very much in the neo-baroque mode of Walpole and Mrs Radcliffe. It is nevertheless very effective. 'Lord Arthur Savile's Crime' on the other hand is a spoof, clever enough but not especially funny and I'm afraid I long since tired of Wilde's juvenile precocity.  'Sir Edward Orme' by Henry James is beautifully written but not in any way disturbing. We then come to Kipling's 'The Mark of the Beast' which is both exquisitely written and profoundly disturbing. 'The Dak Bungalow at Dakor', by Kipling's fellow Raj writer Mrs Croker, is sludge not worth anthologising.


Then we have two stories by Conan Doyle at the height of his Sherlock Holmes success - 'Lot No 249', a mummy story, perhaps even the first mummy story, in which the characterisation of the mummy's owner is far more creepy than the mummy itself, and 'The Case of Lady Sannox', which so affected me that I am currently writing a direct follow-up for my own amusement. The thing with 'Lady Sannox' is Doyle's extreme contempt for the titular woman. Is this misogyny or puritanism? The mutilation inflicted on her reminded me strongly of Freud and Fliess's treatment of Emma Eckstein's nose, which has always seemed to me to be more about their sexual fetishes than hers.


Grant Allen's 'Pallinghurst Barrow' has a powerful theme but is poorly written. Two brief contes cruelles by Jean Lorrain have the opposite problem, strong and effective writing about nothing very much. 'The Great God Pan' by Arthur Machen is really a novella, an important distinction in that the fractured narrative he uses would not be practicable in a short story. It is one of Machen's better known works and the first I have read. I like it very much. I especially enjoy the way the horror is suggested and then cut away from, leaving it to the reader's worst imaginings. This of course is the technique later used to great effect by Val Lewton in his 1942 movie Cat People.


The final offering, M P Shiel's 'Viala', is another novella first published, like 'Pan', in The Bodley Head's notorious Keynotes series. Shiel is another pioneer of the macabre who I have heard about but never previously read. He is another I will have to pursue further, albeit he is totally different to Machen. Where Machen goes for subtlety and suggestion, Shiel is anything but. He is so wild and extravagant that often his language cannot keep up. His Viala is the Castle of Otranto remodelled by Vathek and transplanted to the Far North. Significantly for me, as a researcher into William Hope Hodgson, I'm pretty sure I now know where the idea of The House on the Borderland came from. As Roger Luckhurst notes in his introduction, 'Viala' is 'genuinely unhinged' - and that, it turns out, is by no means a bad thing.


To end with the Introduction... It will not be news to regular visitors to this blog, that I tend not to be a fan of the form in general. I have just bought a collection of ghost stories with an introduction of no more than 500 feeble words by some non-entity that made me want to get my money back. In this case, however, the Introduction and Notes are essential and add hugely to the experience of reading the book. Luckhurst knows whereof he speaks and can be trusted as a source for others. Well done to him and to Oxford World's Classics for producing this gem.

The Strangler Vine - M J Carter

The Strangler Vine is the first novel by Miranda Carter, biographer of Anthony Blunt and author of The Three Emperors, an account of Queen Victoria's grandsons and how their relationships contributed to World War I.

For a first novel The Strangler Vine is an astonishing achievement.  Carter says she knew nothing about India in the 19th Century before starting the project.  By the end, clearly, she knew more or less everything.  The level of detail is just right.  We never get any sense of contrivance, avoidance or - just as fatal in a novel - showing off.

The story inevitably has hints of Kipling and John Buchan.  The blurbs cite Sherlock Holmes but it is much better than that (Conan Doyle is a martyr to contrivance and bodge).  The year is 1837 and young William Avery, a neophyte and impoverished officer in the private army of the East India Company, is paired up with lapsed agent Jem Blake to go in search of Xavier Mountstuart, the Byrom of India.  Avery is a huge fan of Mountstuart, whose work inspired him to seek his fortune in India.  Blake was Mountstuart's protege back in the days before he trading spying for literature.

The quest is multi-layered.  Nothing is as it first seems as Blake and Avery probe to the black heart of corruption in the Company.  The revelations keep on coming, alongside rip-roaring adventure and a sensitive portrait of India clinging to its last vestiges of independence.

I can't wait to lay hands on the second Blake and Avery, The Infidel Strain.

The Best Short Stories - Rudyard Kipling

Kipling is such a difficult writer to pin down.  He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but wrote only one novel; he celebrated British Imperialism but was in no sense blind to the squalor in which so many of its citizens lived; he often seems misogynistic yet in so many of his stories he celebrates strong, capable women; he is at home in a very personal brand of mysticism yet is utterly fascinated by the latest technology of his day; he is best known for his anthropomorphic tales (Jungle Book etc,) but can also produce a piece as startlingly and subtly original as any post-modernist.

Now, I hated two of the anthropomorphic tales here - "The Ship that Found Herself" and (ugh!) "Below the Mill Dam", which was so cloyingly twee, I couldn't force myself to the end. "The Maltese Cat", on the other hand, I found tolerable in that at least it was about an animal, which we can all accept has a certain level of thought process and, furthermore, it was set in India, which Kipling knew so well.  There are naturally several Indian tales here.  For me the best was "At the End of the Passage", which is about the downside of working in colonial service.

There are tales of the macabre, notably "Wireless", which exemplifies Kipling's blend of mysticism and modernity, with the titular wireless somehow channeling the spirit of the poet Keats (who was a qualified apothecary) into the soul of an Edwardian pharmacist and fellow consumptive.  'They' was profoundly affecting - a ghost story in which the presence of dead children is a cause for celebration.  Again, it is the narrator's up-to-the-minute motor car which attracts the inquisitive spirits.  'They' really is a beautiful piece of work.

The two best stories, though, are "The Finest Story in the World" and "Mrs Bathurst".  I think most Kipling readers would agree on the merits of the latter.  The former is still very clever and layered - a wannabe writer tells a more experienced hand about his idea for a story.  The narrator, recognising the potential of the idea, buys the rights for a pittance.  But the youth falls in love with a shop girl and cannot remember how the story ends.  The misogyny and the snobbery implicit in the device is, I accept, a major flaw.  It's ironic, given that the next story in this collection, "The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot" is a slice of life at its rawest, set in the London slums, in which Badalia is strong, honest and honourable, despite her circumstances.

As for "Mrs Bathurst" - what a marvel it is.  Mrs B is a widow based in New Zealand whose fame has spread through the Empire.  She is indirectly recalled by an ill-assorted group of men who happen to come together in South Africa.  She herself only appears in an early cinema film of people getting off a train in London - a moment of sheer genius on Kipling's part, again showing his fondness for the latest gadgetry. The end is both startling - two unidentifiable human figures reduced to charcoal by lightning - and inconclusive.  There is nothing to say if either victim is the lady in question or her apparently final lover.  The story's power lies in its elusiveness.  And its power is extraordinary.  I cannot stop thinking about it, three days after reading it.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am not a fan of introductions to books.  I make an exception for that of Cedric Watts in this instance.  He is especially useful on "Mrs Bathurst".  I read his comments both before and after reading the story itself.

Kipling Sahib - Charles Allen

Anglo-Indian like his subject, Allen's subtitle says it all.  Kipling was born in India, returned there as a cub reporter and became a sensational prodigy there.  Having survived a life-threatening illness and the death of his firstborn, Kipling worked with his father on his sole significant novel Kim, and then to all intents and purposes ceased to develop at the age of 34, slightly less than halfway through his life.  He never wrote nothing important or new thereafter because, Allen maintains, Kim said all he had to say about India and his own dual sensibilities.

Kipling Sahib is, in short, a brilliant book.  Allen wears his knowledge lightly, which he can do because it's real personal knowledge, not academic learning focused through a westernized, post-modern filter.  Kipling is hopelessly old-fashioned - his attitudes to imperialism can sometimes offend contemporary ears - but they are the attitudes of his time, attitudes he in many ways created and it is important to differentiate between his early, pre-1900 writing and that of the long decline that followed.  He began as a critic and ended as a bombastic bore.

Allen tackles the man, his mind and his work in a seamless narrative.  The works are discussed with an assuredness that comes of long familiarity.  His examination of Kim itself, as an envoi to the closed narrative, is masterly and insightful.

If anyone had suggested, a year ago, that I would even open a work by or about Rudyard Kipling (known as 'Ruddy' in the family) I would have laughed in their face.  Yet Kim was one of the first books I read in 2013, and Kipling Sahib almost the last.  Kim is my book of the year, with Kipling Sahib a close second.  There is no bronze medallist.  Nothing else I have read comes close.

Kim - Rudyard Kipling

I encountered Kipling as a child, which was clearly a great mistake.  I didn't get it.  I hated it.  Thick end of half a century later this amazing cover image stared at me out of the library window.  I considered overnight whether I should risk associating myself with a work of Kipling. Thought what the hey, borrowed it, and had my eyes well and truly opened.

There is a view that for Kim, and for Kim alone, Kipling won the 1907 Nobel Prize, this of course being before Baden Powell fetishized the Jungle Books.  I can well believe it.  Kim is an astonishing tour de force, literature which transcends mere narrative.  There's something of the Pilgrim's Progress at work here, but with a total immersion in the multi-coloured world of Raj India.  Kim is only a child but he has two distinct identities, Sahib and native guttersnipe, which he switches between at will.  For this reason he is subsumed into the Great Game (British Intelligence) whilst at the same time being the devoted chela of the Tishoo Lama.  How any novelist can make an interesting character out of a lama with no personal identity, engaged on a hopeless quest, beats me.  That Kipling can make him so attractive and compelling defies belief.  The other characters likewise: the Afghan horse dealer Mahbub Ali, the healer of pearls Lurgan Sahib, the garrulous widow, the all-powerful Woman of Srinagar, and the Babu doctor - a magnificent gallery, all richly realised, several without even a name to distinguish them.

Apart from the cover, this Penguin classic is a horrible edition.  There are far too many endnotes, sometimes three or four a line, which interferes with reading pleasure.  It would have been much better to include an appendix dealing with Kipling's use of local colour.  To my mind, he uses Indian names like a conjurer uses abracadabra - it really doesn't matter what they mean, they are there to add zing to the experience.  The introduction by Edward W Said is unforgiveable.  Why commission a critic who doesn't like Kipling?

For one thing, it is far too long.  Introduce it, for Pete's sake, don't append a scholarly paper.  As a piece of criticism it is very old fashioned, the sort of stuff that was de rigeur in the seventies and eighties but has long since passed its sell-by date.  Said seems to have convinced himself that Kipling is a racist.  Nonsense, as all those wonderful characters I have just listed demonstrate.  Kipling is not patronising his Indians, he clearly adores them.  Kipling evidently considered the Raj to be a good thing, but that doesn't make him racist, it makes him imperialist - a man of his era.

Said is a Conrad specialist, so he compares Conrad and Kipling.  There is no connection or parallel.  Conrad was a Pole who turned himself into an Englishman.  Kipling was an Englishman born and raised in India.  Conrad was pretty much a nobody when he arrived in England; Kipling couldn't have been more Establishment - he was Stanley Baldwin's cousin for one thing.  If the Conrad comparison is not sufficiently spurious, Said goes on to compare Kipling's Kim with Thomas Hardy's Jude.  Why?  Again, no sensible comparison is either possible or conceivable.  Kim is a happy-go-lucky youth devoid of all ties, Jude a depressive stonemason weighed down by family. Ridiculous.

Back to the main issue, though.  This is a staggeringly brilliant novel.  Read it - re-read it if need be.  But skip the intro and don't waste time on the notes.