British culture frequently exhibits and even celebrates a desire to focus on the historical essence of place, and screen out modernist intrusions; or to envision buried spirits of a place bursting into the present. Alongside this runs the pervasive mystique of the pastoral, the push and pull between nostalgia and progress, the socio-political tension between country and city. [....]
These tendencies have been exhibited ever since the great Edwardian heyday of folk-song collecting: the mystic landscape painting tradition of Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious, Stanley Spencer et al; the 'Georgian poets' such as Rupert Brooke, Richard Aldington and Edward Thomas – or visionaries such as David Jones and Geoffrey Hill; novelists including Arthur Machen, John Cowper Powys and Alan Garner. The sense of the past lying just behind the present – "the pattern under the plough", as the folklorist George Ewart Evans put it – is a key feature of British, especially English, art of the past century. Let's call this tendency the 'antiquarian eye' [....]
The pattern under the plough: the 'old, weird Britain' on film by Rob Young (Sight and Sound, August 2010)
* * *
Readers unfamiliar with The Fig Garden And Other Stories by Mark Valentine may prefer to read these notes only after reading the collection
The Fig Garden and Other Stories by Mark Valentine (2022, Tartarus Press) has been a useful reminder to me of how rewarding horror fiction can be. Horror is not the exact term for what Valentine writes, of course; some of his fiction does portray events many readers might experience as horrific, but rarely do his characters take it that way.
The stories in The Fig Garden collection are suffused with an atmosphere of subtle uncanniness, strangeness, or weirdness. In a Valentine story, landscapes seem concrete, but then transform. His cities of steel and concrete are real until one turns the corner and discovers the map no longer applies. There is a pleasing terror to these readerly experiences that we share with Valentine's protagonists: Terror and the sense of the sublime as described by the eighteenth century aestheticians.
Valentine's chief skill, which he shares with many fellow Tartarus Press authors, is in his use of ostranenie: his ability to make-strange story material generally dismissed today as cliché. He accomplishes this with unique perspectives, strange contexts, and various rhetorical peripeteias.
I hope my notes below on specific stories from The Fig Garden and Other Stories will demonstrate these strengths. They are worth celebrating.
* * *
Except Seven
"Except Seven" features half a dozen twenty-somethings pursuing their interests in an isolated Welsh valley. Michael Melchior seems to have a family heritage related to the graal; his friend Stephen Verrall is an antiquarian working of a book about the physical survivals of the Devil's impedimenta; local vicar The Reverend Mr Nightcap is preparing an exhaustive exegesis of the first ten words of the Book of Genesis: 'It says: "Ever Beginning, Elohim's Creation of the Heavens and Earth"'; and Miriam Vayle, prompted to move to Micklechurch to understand and replicate the region's unique Romano-British pottery. Rachel West, worshiper at a pool in an underground church sepulcher, and Lucia, a "reader of books," join the four initial cadres.
This assortment is brought together that same evening for a bilingual public reading of Taliesin's "The Spoils of Annwn" by Rachel and Michael.
Later:
''Do you know,' said Nightcap, quietly, 'I think the most important lines in that poem, where every line seems to have the breath of inspiration are those where the poet asks that rattle of three rhetorical questions or riddles. What was it: " Is there only one wind? Is there only one water? Is there only one fire?" Surely the answer in each case is that there is not: there are many winds, many waters, many fires. Perhaps, the poem implies, there are even winds and waters and fires different in kind to those we know. Do we not sometimes hear voices in the wind, see visions in the water, and shapes in the fire? But that may not be the only meaning of the three questions. Perhaps we are meant to infer that, just as these natural forces have many forms and voices, so do the Other People, and so might their caers, their castles, and all the places where they abide. Can we ever know where and when they are with us, or when we might be upon the brink of responding to them? You have all heard me say it, but I will say it again to you: Elohim is Ever Beginning. Creation did not end with one word alone. I think we have been given a glimpse of its constant metamorphosis. Though I do not know why, except for the power of the poem.'
'The power of the poem meeting other powers,' said Verrall, 'Archenfield has always been a place apart,' he added, 'and this little valley particularly. I think that glimpse came to us because of what was assembled here. Forgive me, my friend,' he glanced at me, with a gentle smile, 'but I must say it: it was the "inheri " of Michael Melchior; the recitation of the Spoils; and the "crossroads" at the place of the altar.'
Rachel West stared at him. 'You have it there, I think. There is one very cryptic, and only half-preserved, ancient triad, which I have tried to reconstruct in my work. It is unusual because it is a double list of three. It seems to read something like this: "Three things that were better not brought together: the door, the lineage, and the utterance. Three things that were better not said: the door, the lineage, and the utterance." Surely we have found here its full and dreadful meaning.'
* * *
Seaweed Tea
' "The tides that come in here, you see, are not simply sea-tides. There are—other surges."
' "Other? What do you mean?"
' "Other. But why should I tell you more of them? What is it to you?" 'It was not an unreasonable question. But it made me cross.
' "Important enough," I riposted, "to notice the table was—odd—to seek out the publisher—" (not quite true, as I had found them by chance, but still)—"to ask about who wrote that table, and to come all the way out here to find them."
'He nodded, and looked at me with that black gaze, stark in the pale flesh.
' "And having found me—?"
' "To ask—ask what it means." 'He sighed. The little low whistle echoed in his breath again. ' "What it means. Do you know, I put that table in because I half-hoped someone might notice? It has been very lonely, keeping the—the matter to myself. It was a gesture, I suppose."
' "Well, I saw it. What does it mean?" I asked again.
' "The tides that come in here, you see, are not simply sea-tides. There are—other surges."
' "Other? What do you mean?"
We are deep here in the Secret/Inner Europe of strange frontiers and gazetteers found in old bookseller catalogs. Our narrator discovers a book of tidal statistics that emphasize the liminal character of natural forces that frequently put human activity in check.
' "It wants us. And there is this crucial difference, my dear friend, between all the other tides in the old Canute , and this one. The sea that we see—" He paused, seeming to like the phrase, and repeated it: "The sea that we see only comes in so far, and then recedes. Its moon-chased tides withdraw at a certain point. We may note and mark where the high water reaches. This we witness. But this other tide only draws back in order to lunge further next time: with each black surge, I am sure, it passes further up the shore, across the marsh, and then beyond. Its darkness is pushing on and on."
' "These black stones," he went on, "hold the secret, you see, of the other tide, the dark tide. We can't see it, but they can. It comes upon the shore just as surely as the sea's waves, and it shows on their faces. It is lapping over the land. It is, I say, a tide of dark waves, invisible to us, but recorded in the stones, only just some glimpses of what it is. What it means; what it wants. I have looked inside the stones, and I know."
* * *
Character
Successful M. R. James continuators are worth celebrating. Stories like "Between Four Yews" (2012) by Reggie Oliver are ever hard-work's gold.
Mark Valentine's nearly mirthful continuation of James' "Rats" is another noteworthy example. "Rats" itself, like "A Vignette," seems to be a late-career example of elements readers appreciate in most MRJ stories: character elements pertaining to richly imagined coastal landscapes and their lore, of locked rooms/gates and strange hints.
In "Character" Valentine begins audaciously and does not let up. As Mr. and Mrs. Betts sell their Inn to young Magnus Byfield, and discuss the inn's permanent guest, I quickly imagined Byfield curing his financial ailments in the old approved Eurpean manner: murdering guests. Alternatively, Mr Byfield might discover evidence that the Betts' had been doing the same.
Valentine has no interest in potboilers: they are not "characteristic." Instead, he introduces a fellow student of Mr Byfield: Ivar Ogilvy, who spends his life in the country almost making a living in carved walking sticks. He joins Byfield for the soft-opening.
He also ponders his writing project: Tree Companions:
There was an opening chapter dealing with ancient staffs, croziers, rods, wands, and suchlike, to show how old were wooden comrades to man....
Ivar helped the potman with the few midday visitors, but after he had left and the inn was once more enveloped in a cool silence, he tried to settle to his manuscript again, but found that he only fidgeted at it. He gazed from his window to the far blue of the sea, and out across the smeared indigo of the moor. He let his thoughts wander back to the ages he loved, when the freebooting Scandinavians had come here, at first to plunder, but then to farm and settle, and came themselves to value the land, and know its springs, its groves and roads, and worship there the strange old gods of the hearth and the hall. It was his belief, or hope, that this pagan sorcery had not quite gone, as he hoped to outline in his book, if the rather staid publisher would let him.
He shook himself from this reverie. He thought he might as well get to know the rest of the inn, where he hoped he might often stay, and went across to the room opposite. It was pleasantly appointed, and quite spruce, in contrast to the empty one he had seen last night: perhaps that was only used for lumber; but even so, it ought to be better kept. Two other rooms, on the same side as his, were equally commodious. There was not much to examine, so Ogilvy, always an active sort of youth, and beginning to feel restless, decided it would be best to take a walk. He went to fetch his stick.
As he reached the head of the stair, a qualm of guilt rose up. Here was he, enjoying his friend's hospitality, and about to frolic in the sun, while he, poor old Byfield, was being grilled by beady-eyed worthies. The least he could do was help out a bit more. He might give that dusty room a quick brush. He went to the door of the room, but then remembered there was no key. For a moment, his good intentions subsided, and he might have gone off into the sunlight after all, but a certain obstinate sense of duty made him try each of the keys of the other rooms, which were in their locks. He dimly registered a creaking noise, though he had not noticed the inn sign swaying before. The third key, after a certain amount of jiggling, clicked, and Ogilvy flung open the door with conscientious zest.
The gust from the ingiving of the door must have caused the dust he had seen the night before to rise up, because at first all he could see was a grey cloud. But yet this seemed to hang in the air longer than it should....
As Mrs. Betts cautioned her husband earlier in the story:
'We know there was no highwayman's friend, we know that. But what if we made something else, eh? I don't like to think upon it, that I don't.'
* * *
The Pale Sentinels of Asphodel
"The Pale Sentinels of Asphodel'' is a charming story. The narrator finds affordable rooms in a marginal area of the city, a pleasaunce of not-so-genteel somnolence: 23, Khartoum Terrace. He befriends frail fellow lodger and gardener R. K. Leys, a man of eccentric scholarly interests.
[....] He was always intending to write up his notes but seldom did so, since he was always diverted by some oblique new question, but the very few papers that he did draw together and let me see were on such questions as 'the herbs of Shakespeare', 'the last truffle gatherer in England', 'the plant of immortality in the Epic of Gilgamesh' and 'oils and incenses in the Greek Magical Papyri'.
Then Leys dies:
I have said that he left me two things. The other was the only possession of his, aside from his work, which could be regarded as having any obvious material value. It was a silver potpourri holder in the shape of a boat, like the crescent of the waning moon. I had always thought it a curiously finicky thing for him to have, who was otherwise so severely practical, even austere, and I had indeed chaffed him about it on occasions, always prompting however only a small smile. I asked how he had come by it, and he replied lightly that he had had it made for him, by Comyns, in the days of prosperity, when a publisher's cheque had come in. Every man should have one luxury, he said, to help him dream. This choice object could be held by two hawk's-head handles, and sometimes, when I visited him in his rooms, he would lift it up from its elegant pedestal and tilt it to the light. Sharp glinting rays gleamed from its burnished surface, and from within deep scents were stirred to rise up from the hold through the delicately pierced deck. Their breath was like no other I ever knew, and always afterwards I associated it with his bare room, the glimmering craft, and his upturned face with its gently amused look....
* * *
For She Will Have Her Harvest
The story title "For She Will Have Her Harvest" certainly promises menace. The opening lines suggest pleasing terror:
The moon hung like a white mask over the fields, which had been stripped to hollow stalks. The pale wheat stood now in long columns like a procession of the dead from the church to the sea: and the light of the moon fell full upon it, so that each strand seemed an acolyte arrayed in radiance, accompanied by stark shadows....
Holdenby has come to a village, hunting the life and remains of the last graveyard poet, Henry Kirke White.
[....] If you wanted to find out more, Holdenby had noted, you could not easily do so. There was no study or anthology readily to be had, even second hand. You might suppose there would be interest in a collection of their work, suitably embellished with owls, bats, tombstones and so on, even if that interest would wane quite a lot once the obscure language of the book was perused....
Holdenby is convinced there is a book to be made: Kirke White went from butcher's boy to Cambridge student to the grave in a very few years. The young scholar's earlier school years seem staid:
[....] one day, sheltering under a tree from a storm, the students idly scratched at the mud with their walking sticks and uncovered the signs of a Roman pavement, subsequently found to be devoted to Ceres, goddess of the harvest....
[....] What had happened to change all that, to unsettle his wits, to whiten his face and wrack his limbs? Overwork, yes, they had said that: and certain maladies that may take the young.
Holdenby comes to hesitate looking up at the night sky:
[....] The sky was like the walls of a great cave in blue marble, and the white mask of the moon was stark against them. And as he stared, he thought he saw shapes in the pallor of the mask; the coilings of figures, the slow fateful sifting of shadows. He felt a silver quiver run through him: it was like a cold and subtle poison in his veins.
* * *
Candle Land
"Candle Land" is the type of story I am always happy to find.
The story elements have a warm grandeur: February, a piece of wild land near a tiny farming village. The story orbits around an auction for a seven year lease on the piece of land. Local farmers gather for the auction at the inn. The vicar, who ponders the ritual's perennial mystery, leads the auction along with the squire, a young man without money or prospects.
The arrival of a young artist, who makes a last-minute winning bid, stirs things up and forces the vicar and the squire to think afresh about the ceremony.
The vicar:
[....] I think there was originally some deeper ceremony there, and there was a reason that the land was kept apart. Perhaps there is a lost ancient chapel or shrine of the Graal Mysteries? Or even some Dark Age or even Iron Age temple? Or further back into prehistory, an ancient stone monument whose meaning we may never know? Dear me, I must not let my fancy run on. But if so, or something of the sort, then over time the knowledge of it and the meaning of it became lost, a often happens with old customs.
[....] we do our best with it and honour it as we may. Yes: I should like to think that even we, in our way, partake of the Graal Feast.'
Valentine's skill as a stylist is such that, before we reach these words that end the vicar's peroration, we (along with the painter and the squire) have already experienced the signs he only "fancies."
A superb story.
* * *
The Veiled Republics
This is a detective story done right.
Our unnamed narrator is a highly respected investigator with the local "Warden of Alms," facilitating resolutions for private foundations, clubs, and charities that have outlived their trustees or missions.
His new case involves finding the last member or officer of a group called ''The Original History Society".
'You have doubtless wondered,' she resumed, 'about the meaning of the term "Original History". It contains the nub of the matter. This epoch we are in is not the true history. It is a vast mistake, an aberration, the consequence of a foolish experiment. In the correct history—our original history— [....]
The narrator makes his way through several levels of bureaucracy in local authorities, banks, and Cambridge University as he tracks down The Original History Society's final member. Quirky characters and plot points come up as he makes his way, but there is no getting lost in the tall grass of first person detective narration.
"The Veiled Republics" grapples elegantly with a perennial theme of both detective and horror fiction: "Things have a habit of resurfacing."
Such things in "The Veiled Republics'' are not the worst. The story carries its humor gracefully through each turning point. And in a happy end, the remainder of The Original History Society's treasurey goes to a goat sanctuary.
* * *
The Forwarding Agent
"The Forwarding Agent" is an exercise in the liminal-strange to a fare-thee-well.
Our fussy narrator, a collector of admission tickets, seems somehow to still be a bachelor:
[....] I liked being on the motorway, alone. I never wanted passengers. They talk in all the wrong places, when you're passing through beautiful lonely country and want to enjoy the silence. They want to put the radio on to listen to chatter or inane music. Usually they can't or won't read maps and they're always wanting to stop for sweets or drinks. It's better to have things just how you want them.
Sadly, his trip to a hole-in-the-wall Roman remains exhibit at a singularly Ballardian industrial park does not meet that standard.
The park lies:
[....] Somewhere just to the edge of a well-known region. People don't often visit there, they just pass through. One of the oldest roads in the country, a prehistoric track, follows a ridge through more or less the whole length of the county. Two great north-south railway lines ride through it, and a canal too. Five rivers have their source here and begin to broaden out on their first stretches towards the sea. It's as if this particular part of the land is just one great crossing-place and nothing more.
The location recalls the fog-bound, miasmal shopping mall in Ramsey Campbell's The Overnight.
After visiting the Roman display, and an abandoned village the next day, the narrator begins to suspect he is bringing something back as he drives down on the highway.
[....] I looked in my mirrors but there was now just a dim smudge on the bridge. The watcher who had waved seemed quite still, like a black statue. I thought about them as I drove on, and the bridge quickly passed beyond view. I knew almost at once what I was going to do, and so I didn't surprise myself at all when I turned aside at the next exit and began to retrace the route to the bridge.
* * *
The Witch Heath
Where is the "blasted heath" in Shakespeare's Scottish play? In "The Witch Heath" our narrator finds it is not on any map.
[....] I had just about made up my mind that I really must retreat now. But then I could not quite take myself away. And in that moment it was as if I had made a certain choice. I took a few more faltering steps forward into the dim. Old Thomas Hardy once, you know, was found by a friend consulting a dictionary to see if he could use the word 'dim' as a noun, as a thing. I don't know what that told him, but I do know now that 'the dim' does exist, and that it descends at dusk.
I know because I was there within it. Where once had been simply a fading of the day's light, there was now an active principle, a clinging, clustering, formless yet felt thing. If you could imagine a snowstorm where all the flakes were grey and the crystals within were black, well, it was like that. Like a blizzard of ash. Whether I stopped altogether in my trail over the heath, or whether I moved haltingly to one side or another, it was all the same.
* * *
Red Lion Rising
A humorous story in which Unicorn Pursuivant, employee at the College of Heralds, aids authorities with a mounting political crisis and as a consequence discovers the ancient origins of Red Lion pubs.
* * *
The Fig Garden
'We know that there are other realities and that some times they overlap with where we are here. We don't know and can't understand why they do this. But one thing seems fairly clear. Potentially every single thing we do here has a resonance some where else, in ways we simply cannot grasp. And it isn't necessarily anything to do with whatever is considered virtuous here, or the reverse. We just don't know the rules. Awful really, isn't it?'
The novella "The Fig Garden" is steeped in longing for a lost pre-adulthood world where each nuance and proportion of everyday life seemed preordained and perfect.
As he interacts with others as an adult, the narrator comes to understand the fig garden where he and friends played in youth not as normality, but as an asomatous realm. Adulthood and a career with the Monuments Commission offers, after years of dismissing the missed time, an orientation within which the numinous might again be seen and reinhabited.
* * *
Jay
15 November 2022
