The Great God Pan

As Halloween approaches, I thought I'd go vaguely thematic and expand my reading within the classic horror canon. Something that shouldn't take too long, as a lot of the new collection I have since acquired clocks in at well under 100 pages - including Arthur Machen's 1894 novella The Great God Pan. And as Stephen King has described it as "maybe the best horror story in the English language", the top of the pile seemed like a good place to start.

Machen wrote the story in parts through the 1890s, which perhaps explains its rather disjointed structure - jumping forward years at a time following a brilliant opening scene where an eccentric - dare I say it, mad - gentleman scientist performs an experiment on one of his servants that allows her to witness the spirit world before rendering her insensible. This first chapter sold the book to me with its melodramatic gothic tone; which is a shame because the rest of the novella, written after the opening had already been published, didn't really follow on. Instead we are treated to a series of episodes, firstly detailing the scientist's companion Clarke's obsession with the Devil, then a meeting between Clarke's friend Villiers and an old acquaintance who has been ruined by a marriage to a woman who he claims destroyed his soul. It is this latter thread that fills the remainder of the 70-odd pages, as it emerges that this woman has made quite an impression on everyone who has met her. Then, as various young aristocrats are found dead by their own hand, Clarke and Villiers start to join the dots and realise that this woman may not even be a woman at all...

The ending does do a reasonable job of rounding everything up, and I found Machen's writing style extremely entertaining: overflowing with Victorian poeticism without tipping over into the hyperbole that makes the likes of Dickens such a chore to read for me, and ultimately bordering on genius after the state of The '86 Fix. But overall I felt The Great God Pan had too much of a tendency to drift from the points it was trying to make, falling for the classic horror writing trap of "this thing was so horrific words cannot describe it" but then knocking down even the idea of this otherness with a pair of omnipotent protagonists who deduce and then solve all the problems presented to them without a second thought.

All in all, though, this was a fun little book that delved into some genuinely esoteric themes. And most of all I found it an almost comforting throwback to a bygone age, of a London society where everyone knew each other's affairs and where the biggest fear really was the Devil and his ability to tempt the innocent. A very English Devil too - as per the Bible, but with his roots much further back in the pagan tradition. No jump scares or gore, but The Great God Pan did manage to deliver the chills in its own way.

4/5

This caused just as much of a stir in the late 1800s, and for much the same reasons.

The '86 Fix

I had been feeling as though my reading was getting a bit serious lately, so decided to dive as far down the intellectual spectrum as my collection allowed. But I went too far, much too far...

Keith A. Pearson's The '86 Fix is, on paper, exactly my kind of book - a sci-fi comedy escapade in which a middle aged man is transported back in time to his teenage years and is given 48 hours to preemptively-with-hindsight right the mistakes he made at the time and hopefully end up much happier and more successful in future - distancing himself from the school bully who is about to fire him, preventing an unhappy marriage and perhaps even saving lives. And yes, it is all of the above things, but Pearson manages to obscure what should be an interesting (if not hugely original) concept behind walls of atrocious writing.

Maybe I'm elitist, maybe I'm spoiled by having had the opportunity to read a lot of classic literature, maybe I should have tried harder to put the issue to one side, but this is a relentlessly badly-written book. The protagonist, Craig Pelling, sees fit to spell out his every thought and emotion, relevant or not, explains his life in painstaking detail and describes his teenage mistakes to the extent that the solutions he eventually comes up with - and it's not until a ludicrous 50% of the way through the book that he actually travels back in time - are predictable long before they happen. What should be easy prose drags drearily on (at one point we are treated to a description of putting on trousers that essentially amounts to "I put my right leg in one hole. Then I put my left leg in the other hole."), there isn't a single likeable character to be found, and while the action taking place in the past is slightly more compelling, Pearson fills the second half with further events that hadn't even been hinted at before, leading to a cut-and-shut plot that then comes abruptly to a halt in a somewhat rushed manner. All in all, it made the likes of Nick Spalding read like Oscar Wilde - low-rent, easy-reading comedy can be done well in the right hands.

Couple that with endless forced references to '80s Britain - it's set 5 years before I was born and I've never heard of the likes of Texas Bars or Quarto soft drink, so they can't have left that much of a mark on the nation - and The '86 Fix was a book that I just couldn't get on with. And yet I finished it, so have to give Pearson some credit in terms of just about keeping the action rolling along. There was the occasional humorous moment or memorable one-liner, and Pearson does do a good job of portraying a character who knows his flaws and can't help but dwell on them. I hate to admit it, but the ending did leave me wanting closure, so I will probably slog through the sequel at some point in future.

1.5/5

So. Many. References.

Nocturnes

As much as I enjoyed Blood Meridian, I felt the need to follow it with something slightly less heart-stoppingly brutal. Kazuo Ishiguro's short(ish) story collection Nocturnes seemed just right - selling itself as "five stories of music and nightfall" it sounded about as relaxing as reading gets.

I should have known better. I read Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go a while back and found it a hugely uncomfortable experience - a truly insidious exercise in drip-feeding the reader with information and implications about the disturbing world its characters live in, and the realisation that they know something is wrong with it but don't know why, and choose to accept it anyway.

While Nocturnes is much more grounded in reality, all of these things are still present. The five stories are really variations on a theme, all dealing with potential unfulfilled, opportunities missed and marriages falling apart. Ishiguro again leads the reader into his situations slowly, which of course makes things worse - it's much more painful to have things torn apart bit by bit than to see them shattered. The result is a thought-provoking but ultimately melancholy set of stories, and things aren't helped by the fact that all of them are left largely unresolved.

But that's not to say that there's nothing to enjoy here - as both a music lover and a musician I appreciated the way in which Ishiguro fixated on the release that music can provide, as well as how it can easily become an obsession for those who see it as the only thing for them. And of course it's well written, with the occasional touch of gentle humour and the feeling that, for all misfortune that befalls his characters, the author does feel some empathy towards them.

Time to read something more fun, though.

3.5/5

Nocturnes don't get much better than this: