In M R James’s universe everyone who matters is fluent in Latin. It’s not so for the modern reader – or at least this modern reader – and there’s an interesting gap left between the Latin that he so liberally scatters throughout his stories, and the translations we read.

The Treasure of Abbot Thomas begins with some big chunks of Latin, which our antiquarian protagonist – Mr Somerton – gets straight down to translating. What he ends up with isn’t immediately clear to him, either, but he follows up the clues within and is lured into a hunt for buried treasure, departing to parts foreign, and for now out of our sight.

Some interpretation – if not translation – is also needed for the missive that opens part two of the story; Mr Somerton, away on the continent, has gotten himself into a pickle, and his manservant writes to the rector for help. The grammar, spelling and punctuation of this letter are very much at odds with the careful and precise language elsewhere in the story; it jars. (I think there’s plenty of scope for looking at how servants’ speech stands out like a sore thumb in these stories, but that’s for another time.) The rector makes quick sense of the letter, hops on the next boat out, and arrives to find his antiquarian friend enfeebled and in fear of some yet nameless horror. Recounting the events that have so rattled him are beyond him, and he begs the rector to first carry out a task – kept hidden from the reader. That accomplished, he settles down to tell his tale.

What a romp of buried treasure it is! Coded messages in stained glass windows, and ciphers to be puzzled out, lead us at last to treasure buried down a well. Mr Somerton’s curiosity, and maybe a touch of avarice, ensnares him. He cannot resist it – who could? – and follows the trail to its moonlight conclusion, where at last we’re introduced to the villain and the monster of this tale. The treasure is guarded by a some supernatural creature. It slips its tentacled arms around the neck of our poor antiquarian, just as he’s reaching for his haul, driving him nearly insane with the cthulhuesque horror of it all.

The rector and the servant are dispatched to replace the treasure in the well. It’s back where it was, hidden behind a slab of stone and covered over with mud. The demon can cease to hound Mr Somerton.  All is well.

Or is it? The very ending of the story is in Latin, and leaves us straddling one of those little gaps of comprehension. The rector mentions – just mentions – that Somerton must have missed an inscription above the treasure-hole.

It was a horrid, grotesque shape — perhaps more like a toad than anything else, and there was a label by it inscribed with the two words, “Depositum custodi.”

And here it ends. The footnote, upon which my ignorant self depends for on-the-fly interpretations, translates Depositum custodi as Keep that which is committed to thee. How ambigious is that! What’s committed? To whom? Is the treasure committed to the tentacled, slithery guardian, and will it sleep easy now they’re walled up again? Or is that creature now committed to our unfortunate Mr Somerton. It – or something – has already been rattling the doors at night, and causing unpleasant dreams. Will there be easier sleep after the story concludes, or does the haunting continue after the book’s been closed?

The placing of this phrase at the end of the tale seems incredibly open-ended to me. I’m a dweller in the world of sequels, and of hydra-like monsters who rise again for one last attack just as the heroes have relaxed and turned their backs (walking away to wipe up the blood, patch themselves up). No twenty first century demon would let itself be walled up without a confrontation. But I think I’m reading too much into such a woolly translation of just two words. I do a quick trawl of a handful of online Latin dictionaries – and quiz a friend on what they remember of their long-ago GCSE Latin – and it seems to be that a clearer translation would be ‘Guard this thing I’ve left in your keeping’. That’s far less ambiguous. The demon’s the guardian of the treasure, and the treasure’s sealed up whwere it should be. The demon can kick back, relax, and get back to doing whatever it is demons like to do in dark dank holes.

Here monsters stay dispatched or dismissed, and if you’re alive at the end of the story – not everyone is – you’ve probably lived to tell the tale (from a roaring fireside, with a comforting glass of brandy to hand, on a dark and stormy winters’ night, no doubt). Mr Somerton might prefer to leave the stained glass windows for a while, and focus on pews, or baptismal fonts, or some other aspect of ecclesiastical architecture . I doubt he’ll sleep all too well for the next few months, but it won’t be supernatural scratchings that keep him awake. This tale ends here. There’s just the slightest whisper of sequel potential. The antique books and stained glass windows still exist, and the demon is back with the treasure, ready to wind its hideous tentacles around the neck of the next hapless treasure hunter.

“Oh Whistle” has the reputation of being one of MR James’ most chilling and effective stories. It’s also – not coincidentally – one of his funniest. He’d already mastered the techniques of hiding secrets in a half-sentence, and covering his tracks and clues with a layer or two of ornamental description. Now he applied that fully to the social life of the English don – as full of ritual and unburied grudge as any of the dark histories he’d conjured.

The results are a restrained delight. The finickity Professor Parsons is a familiar Jamesian hero, a caricature almost in his prissy suspicion of ghosts and his complete lack of self-awareness. His early antagonist, Rogers, only seems to share this lack: really he’s just manipulative and thick-skinned and his first appearance in the story is mostly to draw our sympathy to Parsons by being still more annoying than he. The Colonel, meanwhile, Parsons’ foe-turned-saviour, is initially painted in very broad strokes indeed, and the golfing scenes between the two (with the narrator as golf-hating third party) are some of James’ most amusing.

Together Rogers and the Colonel are a set of trials for Parsons even before his helpful excavations create still more problems. There have been flashes of humour in all the stories we’ve seen, but the interactions in “Oh Whistle” are played more than ever for laughs. Why in this story, though? James admits his reasons and his misdirection quite openly when, at the end of “Oh Whistle”, he lets his characters speculate that the linen-ghost could have done no real harm, and that its only power (though quite a power!) was to frighten its victims to death.*

The reader of a ghost story has one great advantage over its protagonist: she comes to the tale expecting to be frightened, which makes fright a great deal harder to achieve. Part of what might induce fear in the reader is the horrible consequences of disturbing a fiend or ghost, and the sense of trap-like inevitability with which those consequences play out. But if, as in “Oh Whistle”, the consequences are mortal fright, it sets the story writer a significant challenge. The reader comes warned and ready for fear, but somehow the writer must make him feel some of what the protagonist feels – sheer uncomfortable terror, rather than horror at an expected outcome. Terror so great, in fact, that it might actually kill – a state of mind hard to imagine when you’re curled up in front of a pre-Christmas fire reading stories.

One route would be to up the stakes on the fear – to stress it, place it in cosmic proportions, amplify it by sheer force of language. But James prefers to go down the road of contrast, making the background as cosy and entertaining as possible so that its disruption disturbs reader as well as character. So this I think is the reason “Oh Whistle” is funny – this particular style of humour gives the tale a clubbable feel, and the ghostly elements seem more than usually intrusive (just as they feel to the uncomprehending Parsons).

The story is driven by other such contrasts – the compulsive orderliness of Parsons and the messiness of his hauntings; the regularity of inn and links and the wildness of the East Anglian landscape beyond them. James’ descriptions of this bleak, ancient coastline are particularly fine: anyone familiar with it will recognise how its flatness tricks your perceptions of distance, an effect that makes Parsons’ first encounter with the supernatural still creepier. But the key to “Oh Whistle”’s success is the way James paces his wit just right. He lets it work on you to the point that he can scare you with what is, after all, his most caricature ghost of all: an animated sheet!

*Are they right? This is a bit of an open question: Parson’s dream-sequence, where the raised spirit sniffs then pounces Nazgul-style on his terrified victim, at least hints at a more grisly outcome.

The next story up for consideration is The Treasure of Abbot Thomas

The two words “Star” and “Wars” are however only ever mentioned once, in the context of Ronald Reagan really liking the film..

Bearing in mind that it is Ewan MacGregor doing almost fifty percent of the saying of the word Jedi, there is clearly the most obvious of injokes going on here. But even in a film as often ridiculous as The Men Who Stare At Goats, the New Earth Battalion never, ever has the temerity to start talking about midichlorians. Which makes it at least better than any of the Star Wars prequels, and possibly almost as good as the Ewok Adventure (better than Caravan of Courage). And George Clooney finally brings in a comic performance which, whilst ticking and goggling like an old ham, actually feels in character and importantly funny.

c.s.lewis had a fear of female sexuality: I’m sorry the more telling psychological evidence says otherwise…

<— The Old Narnians, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905)

The Dictionary of Drink

The failure to list all the ingredients in Um Bongo was forgivable but a much worse crime had been committed on one of the simplest of all cocktails:

Whaaaaa? Had they just not heard of tonic water? Apparently not as the mixer has its own entry. The error left us dumbstruck and wondering if some powerful soda lobby had bribed the publishers.

It’s still an entertaining read, especially if you enjoy boggling at glaring mistakes, but as a reference work you’re better off with Wikipedia.

i: Old Testament Legends:being stories out of some of the less-known apochryphal books of the old testament, by montague rhodes james, which i bought a facsimile copy of about six weeks ago and now it has rather sinisterly VANISHED oo er — illustrations by the great h.j.ford (see left, “solomon summons a demon”)
ii: the new testament vol.1, edited by m. j. james, assisted by delia lyttelton, engravings by eric gill, which i just gathered in from the room-full of books my aunt c is about to give to charity
iii: a copy (from same source) of w.h.ainsworth’s “old st pauls: a tale of the plague and the fire“, a 19th-century novel about treasurehunting and urban conflagration in the 17th century, very briefly mentioned in “canon alberic”

more on these when i find where i put i and have time to read ii and iii

A couple of people were excluded for not fitting any reasonable definition of intellectual, and a couple more were excluded for being dead (also, if I’d put Ayn Rand in it would have been a one-horse race). Otherwise what you see is everyone nominated. So: VOTE! (For up to three people)

His most famous novel is Solaris, made into a great film (the Tarkovsky version is my favourite science fiction movie) and later a decent one. It concerns a first contact with aliens: the distinct idea behind most of Lem’s several approaches to this standard SF trope is that Lem believed communication with an alien mind, or comprehension of it, would be all but impossible. (I imagine Tarkovsky felt the same, as he also adapted the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic as Stalker, and that expressed a similar position.)

Lem was also, extraordinarily in this genre, something of a luddite: he regarded many scientific advances, real ones and those portrayed in his fiction, as a bad thing, as a move away from and enemy of the better human traits. He wrote little SF later in his life, instead pronouncing on technology and the future – he was very against the internet, for example.

This all makes him sound grim and po-faced, and some of these works are indeed among the most demanding SF ever written. However, he also wrote some extremely funny stories, generally about a robot civilization. The Cyberiad is hugely imaginative and varied, and often hilarious. There’s a brilliant story about a poetry machine that must have been one of the hardest things ever to translate, this side of Georges Perec.

There is other work worth reading too: collections of reviews of or introductions to nonexistent books, for instance. His essays on SF and science are very astute too – he was writing about the human implications of things like virtual reality and nanotechnology over 50 years ago.

He’s well worth trying, but you might want to choose carefully, as I suspect different works will appeal to different readers.

You may have seen one or two films of his work: The Grifters was a fine adaptation of one of his last really strong works (his great years run from the start of the ’50s to the mid-’60s), whereas both versions of The Getaway graft on a lame happy ending. The actual ending is the most scary and depressing piece of writing I’ve ever read, creating a caged existence of constant terror.

I think he was the first crime writer to regularly use unreliable narrators. The sheriff in the brilliant The Killer Inside Me gradually reveals himself as an extraordinary character completely at odds to his presentation and a reader’s early impression. In other books, he reflects characters’ growing madness in the writing, for example splitting the book into chapters based on the narrator’s fantasy, again utterly different from the reality we are seeing.

He’s worth reading for the pulpy thrill-power of the stories, his terrifying grasp and representation of psychopaths and other monsters, and the daring in his approach to writing. The work isn’t often easily found, and like most writers for markets where speed and schedule was valued more than excellence, the quality is uneven. Frankly, given how hard the best stuff can be to find, the chances of coming across the sloppier works is remote. I particularly recommend The Killer Inside Me and The Getaway, but almost all of them need a strong stomach.

A good example of the early SF might be Babel-17 (1966), a novel where the threat from alien invaders is not in any sense physical: it’s their language. It changes the minds of anyone that it touches. We get spacecrafts and their crews, but these are not at all military or heroic in style – the characters are outsiders and poets and the like. The effect of the language embodies the Sapir-Whorf theory of linguistics, that language affects our perception and interpretation of the world, and a reaction against Chomsky’s ideas (much the more favoured at this time) that language is functional and natural. This approach to SF was new.

Some years later (1975) he wrote a book called Dhalgren, which has long been my favourite novel. It is sort of SF: a guy with memory loss wanders into a city that has been largely abandoned since some undefined ecological disaster left it blanketed in fog. He wanders around a bit and hangs out with people and stuff. It’s almost 900 pages, and parts are highly experimental, fragmented and unsequenced. I’ve read quite a few books twice, one three times, and this seven times.

His most interesting SF or fantasy, more or less, since then is the four Neveryon books, containing eleven stories of widely varying length. These are set in some fictional past word undergoing many transitions at once: the coming of writing, money instead of barter, rural to town living. It’s about language and narrative – the first story, over 70 pages long, is repeated as the last story, and of course by that point it reads very differently and carries new meanings.

Since then he has written some extreme hardcore literary porn: avoid most of this unless you have an extraordinarily strong stomach, though the early Tides of Lust, sort of a porn response to Ulysses, is far less unpalatable. I am not joking about avoiding these. Unless you want to read about disabled children being raped and lots of eating shit, these are not sexy.

I do recommend everything else (if you want straightish SF, as well as Babel-17 I recommend The Einstein Intersection and Nova, and any of the SF story collections), and his first book of autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water, is wonderful. As well as his polymath brilliance, his experience of being a black man who has at times ‘passed’ as white, and a mostly-gay man who has lived as straight (he was married for a while) give him a rare perspective on prejudice.

Matthew Scudder (16 novels) is a private eye in NYC, whose best friend is a hardened criminal. The novels vary in tone and story, some tough to the point of brutality, but morality is always complex, and Scudder being a recovering alcoholic plays a big part. These are worth reading in order, mostly, because the character does develop (including getting married, eventually).

Bernie Rhodenbarr (10 novels) is a professional burglar who also runs a bookshop. There is a formula here: Bernie commits a burglary in his usual skilled and careful manner, but finds himself prime suspect in a murder. The rest of the novel sees him evading the police while trying to solve the crime, ending with a traditional “I expect you’re wondering why I’ve called you here today” scene. The pattern means I wouldn’t recommend reading a bunch close together, but they are always highly entertaining.

Evan Tanner (8 novels) is an outrageous character, a kind of freelance international spy and adventurer. He never sleeps (shrapnel in the brain from Korea) and uses his time to write doctoral theses on any subject commissioned, and to support any and every bonkers lost-cause society. An interesting twist was when Block revived Tanner (from suspended animation!) 20 years later, to find that many of the apparently hopeless European independence movements had finally won through. These books are wildly over the top in what Tanner achieves, and may not be to everyone’s tastes.

Chip Harrison (4 novels): these start as coming-of-age novels, then Chip becomes the assistant of an eccentric but brilliant detective who never leaves his home (an homage to Nero Wolfe). These are the only ones that absolutely need to be read in order, as a tetralogy.

Keller (4 books): these are less novels than collections of episodes in the life of this professional hitman, often given complicated jobs, more often complicating them himself by identifying with his targets and their lives.

There are others: I particularly like Martin Ehrengraf (a bunch of short stories), a lawyer with a perfect record of getting off those accused of murder. It’s never stated outright, but it’s unmistakeable that his main technique is committing more murders with an identical M.O. or to frame someone else – the most casually immoral protagonist I’ve ever seen in a series.

There are of course also non-series books and stories. I’ve never read a poor Block (I’ve read over 50), perhaps because he is a consummate craftsman, whether being hardboiled or funny. He’s written I believe four books on writing. I recommend him very highly – I’d suggest starting with a Scudder, unless one of those other descriptions especially appeal.

“See that space between the panels? That’s what comics aficionados have named “The Gutter!” And despite its unceremonious title, the gutter plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics! Here in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea.”

– Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

A ghost story about a picture that comes to life might or might not be frightening. “The Mezzotint” isn’t one. It’s a ghost story about a picture that turns into a comic strip, and as McCloud says, it draws its fear from what’s happening – or what might be happening – from one frame to the next. Comics artists refer to this skill – the manipulation of the time and space in a story via jumps between frame – as ‘storytelling’, and the protagonist in “The Mezzotint” finds himself in the uncomfortable situation of being told a story involuntarily.

Except it’s not being told just to him. The story – expressly framed as a companion to “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook” (which IS about a picture coming to life, kind of) – establishes its rules and sticks to them: once the mezzotint sequence is initiated*, it changes whenever anyone looks at it – doesn’t have to be the same person.

So the story derives a lot of its effects from who is seeing the picture, and who is describing what they see when. Some gutters turn out to be a lot nastier than others. Let’s go through, frame by frame:

Frame 1: Seen by Williams, described in the narration. This is the Mezzotint’s initial state, where it appears an ordinary and indifferent piece. Nobody else sees this.

Frame 2: Seen by Bings and Williams, described by Bings and in the narration. A hint of a figure appears at the edge of the picture, and moonlight is discernable (we learn later this was not the case in F1). At this point the reader is likely to work out what’s going on.

Frame 3: Seen only by Garwood, described by Garwood at the time and then in more detail after F5 has appeared. The figure is crawling towards the house.

Frame 4: Seen by Williams, described in the narration. The figure is still crawling towards the house – it is apparent it has a cross on its back.

Frame 5: Seen by Nisbet, described by Nisbet. No figure, moon on the wane (it has taken it a while to cross the lawn), open window.

At this point the story starts to revolve around Williams and company’s attempts to work out the rules of the picture and document it. They do this with admirable presence of mind, considering (at no point do they seem to feel that they are in danger from the picture). But here is where something interesting happens. The next frame that Williams sees and describes has the figure scuttling across the lawn with a small bundle. But this is not the sixth frame.

Frame 6: Seen by Filcher, described by Filcher, but not in detail. We know only that he looks at the picture with entranced, “undisguised horror”, and that he sees a “skelinton” carrying a baby.

Frame 7: Seen by Williams and company. The figure is towards the edge of the picture, only its head and legs are visible, and the bundle it carries can be “dimly…identified” as a child.

How can I be sure that Frames 6 and 7 are different? All through the story, James is careful to document who is looking at the picture and where they are. None of Williams’ friends can see what Filcher sees, and Filcher himself leaves before they take a look. This suggests to me that the picture has reset again, and Filcher got a much clearer view of the creature than Williams ever did.

Frame 8 is the house, inert once more, and that’s the end of the strip.

The Mezzotint is a meta-story. Williams and friends are being told a ghost story – in comic strip fashion – by the creator of the Mezzotint (who died immediately after its completion – one of the nasty and quite unresolved mysteries in the tale**). So they’re aware they’re in a ghost story, and as such make efforts to game it, by photographing and monitoring events. But the story gets the better of them – its most horrid revelation remains unseen by them, and by us: the typically Jamesian comical servant acts as a smokescreen for it, and the worst of the story remains where it’s most powerful, in the gutters.

*the whys of this are extremely cryptic – the motives of the antiquarian who sells it on to Mr Williams are unclear: we can’t be sure, though we might suspect, that he knows something’s up (he denies it).

**another is how many Mezzotints there are: “impressions of which are of considerable rarity”. A mezzotint is a print, and a very physically arduous print to produce at that. Do all impressions of this one have its jack-in-the-box properties?

Next week: The Ash-Tree

There are two points to make about this. Firstly, unlike almost any other writer before the New wave, Sturgeon’s interest is in mind, in how we think, rather than in futuristic tech and aliens and so on – this is what made him a key figure to the New Wave, why we get a blurb on the back cover by Samuel Delany saying his work “is the single most important body of science fiction by an American to date”.

But beyond that, his approach is different. Chapters tracking the angry bum first infected by the alien consciousness, his moves towards conquering the world, are interleaved with chapters that seem like little vignettes centring on a wide variety of humans – these are a little like reading some kind of anthology of modern short stories, perhaps Carver-influenced Dirty Realism, even. The characters in these play their part in the climax, when the entity succeeds in “re”uniting the human mind, but they stand alone as small character pieces, and many have only the tiniest role beyond this.

One of my early and surviving favourite novels within SF was his More Than Human, which has a fair amount in common with The Cosmic Rape: in MTH, a bunch of humans come together to form what is a kind of gestalt consciousness. I really felt that it opened up new conceptual vistas in my teenage understanding of the mind, science fictional as the story is, and I am still moved by his compassion and breadth of thought. This is also on show in many of his superb short stories, addressing sometimes difficult issues in smart and open-minded ways. ‘If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?’ talks about incest, while the inspired ‘Mr Costello, Hero’, is a brilliant attack on McCarthyism.

I respect some writers more than I love them – someone like Cormac McCarthy is a great and powerful novelist, but too aggressively demanding to really be fond of. I wouldn’t wish to imply that Sturgeon doesn’t deserve plenty of respect for his originality, craft and willingness to think beyond easy answers for a lot of fascinating and important questions, but really he has a special place in my heart for the heart he shows, the passionate interest in a diverse humanity, in a genre dominated by lovers of machinery.

Particularly recommended: More Than Human, The Dreaming Jewels and any short story collection.

He’s best known for his 87th Precinct stories, 57 books spanning almost 50 years, though Detective Steve Carella and his fellow detectives in an analogue of NYC don’t age at that pace. These defined the police procedural, and are the model for most modern police TV shows, to one degree or another. They are short on heroics and car chases and genius detectives, long on professional cops doing their jobs, interviewing and following up leads. They are elevated well above the routine by his superb use of and descriptions of weather, and crackling and convincing dialogue, vital in the long interviews. He also reproduces documentation regularly.

His other lengthy series centres on Florida lawyer Matthew Hope: there are thirteen of these. To be honest, they are pretty much private eye novels, as there is very little in the way of courtroom action and legal manoeuvring. I like these a little less, though I have still read, I think, all of them.

His Evan Hunter books are often more mainline fiction – The Blackboard Jungle is the most famous. Since they generally aren’t crime books, they are rather outside this. I recommend the McBains, and I’d say start with an early 87th Precinct or two – the later ones, from the ’80s or so, get longer, and there isn’t always the extra content to justify that; he also starts including more sex, and I don’t care for how he handles that. It seems sort of sleazy and unpleasant. The early novels are very easy reading and consistently entertaining, and I think most readers develop a quick attachment to them and the characters.

An elderly man takes in his orphaned young cousin. It is surprising, given that the man is known as something of a recluse, a retiring academic type – specialist in the later pagans and their mystical beliefs – seemingly more comfortable with books than persons. Or maybe it is not surprising for a man to take an interest in the welfare of a young relative, if interest of a distant kind. He asks the boy’s age, and such, and sends him off to be looked after by the housekeeper; and the housekeeper tells him, one day, of her master’s kindness, that he has taken in children before, a little gipsyish girl and a little foreign boy, although being gipsyish the little girl ran off after a few weeks, and being a foreign ragamuffin and naturally unruly so too did the boy.

Strange dreams this young cousin has, of a thin thin body lying moaning, hands pressed to its heart; and he sleepwalks at night at times; and there are rats in the house too, huge ones they must be, for there are scorings on the young boy’s door and even scratches on his nightgown, all down the left side of his chest, after he has spent another night in a dream he cannot quite remember; and it might be rats or the wind in the cellars at night but the butler will not go down to fetch the wine once dark has fallen, for in that dark such scuttlings and sighings have a sound uncommonly like speech.

And, now the boy is eleven and a half, something dreadfully exciting is to happen: for his uncle has asked him to sit up until quite eleven o’clock, and to come and visit in his study.

***

M.R. James’ first collection is called Ghost Stories of an Antiquary: they are the ghost stories of someone who collects antiquities, and also ghost stories about the collector of antiquities, the various forms that the antiquary takes. Most of James’ antiquaries arrive at houses, or villages, or hotels, and there their curiosity brings some historical horror to light. “Lost Hearts” focuses on one such antiquary: but his research has not brought some horror to light so much as made himself the horror.

In “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook”, the antiquary Denistoun discovers the scrapbook of a past antiquary – an unprincipled one, he decides, who must have plundered his library in order to make his scrapbook. Alberic’s moral failure to respect the intact books of his library creates an object of curiosity and desire for the future Denistoun; Alberic’s failure to control his rapaciousness creates the “night monster” that terrorises him to his death, and lives on after in the book he created.

It was asked: Shall I find it?
Answer: Thou shalt.
Shall I become rich?
Thou wilt.
Shall I live an object of envy?
Thou wilt.
Shall I die in my bed?
Thou wilt.

Denistoun mistakes this for a “treasure-hunter’s record”: wrapped up in an antiquary’s concerns, it is hard to tell intellectual curiosity from a Faustian bargain.

Mr Abney, the antiquary of “Lost Hearts”, lives retired from society, “a man wrapped up in his books”, with a library full of works on the mysticism of the Late Classical period. He is a writer of articles, recognised by academics for his learning. And within him the pursuit of knowledge has warped into something terrible. Immersed in the world of the mystics, he has lost his moral sense– or at least put it aside. What is this thing he plans to do? He writes of “enacting certain processes”, “absorbing the personalities”, “removal”. Oh, it may seem barbaric to the modern mind, but he, a man of philosophic temperament, is merely engaging in experiment, testing the truth of an old receipt of Hermes Trismegistus’: that one may attain the powers known to Simon Magus by a simple method, “by the absorption of the hearts of not less than three human beings below the age of twenty-one years.” The best method is to cut out the living heart, reduce it to ashes, and drink it down in some port; the psychic portion of the souls thus absorbed may be an annoyance for a while, but can be disregarded.

Of course the ghosts get him.

The bit about the antiquary forgetting his ethics in his pursuit of knowledge isn’t exactly spooky, though there’s a delicious richness to the passage from Mr Abney’s papers where (of course!) he lays out his plans, his reasons and his self-justification. That passage comes right at the end, and the story’s short enough that you can nip back to the beginning and start again, with new knowledge of the details. Abney isn’t brought down by any exterior moral force. It’s his arrogance that gets him, his assumption that he is psychically strong enough to ignore the ghosts of the children he kills. But those ghosts aren’t all that scary – the girl some kind of sad proto-pre-raphaelite figure, lying in the bath with her hands pressed to the place where her heart should be; the boy a conventional figure of vengeance, a rat in the cellar all “hunger and longing” and long long fingernails*, who first tries to steal the heart from Abney’s nephew and then moves on to Abney himself. So what is spooky, here? The housekeeper, that’s who: the one person who might have noticed something, a monster of absolute contentment, who knows the ins and outs of the district and yet cannot see the evil in her own house.

Next week: The Mezzotint.

* bonus spooooky fact: after you die, your fingertips shrink, making your fingernails look longer. this is the root of the superstition that demons’ fingernails keep growing after death: whichever reasonably un-decomposed corpse you dig up, their fingernails will appear to have grown horrifically.

I read a lot of so-called genre fiction, but I have never read many ghost stories. Even my brief dalliance with horror fiction tended to lurch towards scientific horrors rather than the supernatural. As a rationalist, I have little time for the spooky. And I expect to not be blown away, as a short ghost story has very little room to manoeuvre outside a straight up tale of the unexpected with or without twist. In our circles this is known as “there b’ain’t a signpost ‘ere for twenty year”. I am of the opinion that ghost stories don’t have a lot to throw at me that will shock, and thus scare me. That said, I like good cinematic ghost stories, The Orphanage last year was one of my favourite films. So perhaps I should just enjoy the sensation without holding on for the scare.

So this is my first proper M.R.James story. I approached Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook without a forensic eye, I wanted to be entertained and to see what a good short ghost story could do for me. So I racked up lots of spooky music (thanks Spotify for Spooky Tooth) and read. And quickly got the hang to what seemed to be M.R.James’s core trick: obsessive detail. James is marvellously specific with his times, place and reference. He manages in a few paragraphs to sum up this French village and this haunted verger (I prefer the term to sacristan). At the same time he starts to give the reader a bit too much information, a few too many options. The word ‘or’ is used excessively in the opening paragraph. Things are often described twice to different effect. The verger is either backed against a wall, or huddling under the pews. Deluded or guilty conscience or henpecked? All for atmosphere of course, our hero (lets call him Dennistoun – again a slippery non-specific technique around all this crystal clear description) needs to be seen to be rational and unfazed by what we can see miles off. Something is not quite right.

We are initially led to believe that the church will be the home of the horrors. It is described with creepy intensity, and has no end of creaks which seem to be putting the verger off. But again this is a red herring, as the real horror lays within the pages of a book. I have read some Lovecraft (and played some Call Of Cthulhu), and there is already a prefiguring of cthulhoid nonsense here. But first the scrapbook itself, and perhaps the story’s only gag is that the haunted book is described as a scrapbook. A seemingly harmless device, packed here with priceless ephemera, and a particularly nasty picture. And this is where our trust in James’s descriptive powers earned earlier in the story is paid off. Because he is essentially describing the indescribable, beyond the hair and the bogglly evil eyes of the creature in the picture, James can only describe an effect. The effect of dread, horror and fear cannot be gained just from the description. Instead the killer line makes it all real:

“One remark is universally made by those to whom I have shown the picture: ‘It was drawn from life’.”

From this point onwards its a breathless battle of the rational and the supernatural. The book is bought, Dennistoun takes it back to the inn and then is confronted by a spectre of the creature in the book. This second appearance is less effective than the first. Partially because its not unexpected but mainly because James has couched the whole affair after the effect, we know that Dennistoun survives to tell the tale, and return the book to Cambridge. So we know there is no death, no frightening to death and not even a Myskatonic style bout of madness. Instead James goes for a scholarly wrap up for his tale of apparitions, complete with handy plot rounding out footnotes.

So is it scary? Not really, though it does sum up a beautiful sense of place and time. Eerie is a better word, the scene the story sums up may only feel second hand to me because this is the setting for so many ghostly goings on in film. Old churches, graveyards, small villages, eccentric clergy and stubborn English academics. These probably all come from James, its why we’re reading him, and do him no favours. But it is interesting how he can be so specific about place and time, whilst also being so slippery. How the creature materialises to Dennistoun in the inn is possibly fluffed, does it come out of the book, is it built up from imagination? But that very vagueness is inherent in an apparition, and what impressed me the most is how James manages to sell the wispy hallucinations couched in his pinpoint descriptions. He is also not slow in picking out what we may already find frightning in a scenario like this small town. Poorly drawn religious pictures, which depict acts of great torture are all over churches, and have certainly made me feel uncomfortable in the past. Old Saint Sebastian and his spear, always a bit gung ho for my liking.

So that’s my first M.R.James, and I think I have a better handle on what to expect now. A Victorian version of The Ring, replace the VCR for a scrapbook and its almost identical. Nothing too surprising in the plot, on of the most interesting parts of this project will be discovering how many ways will there be to do ghosts? Perhaps what is more important is what the ghosts are and how they are sold to the reader. Here I think he overdoes it with the Latin and the footnotes, but again they serve to give a supernatural tale a sense of the academic, of the rational. All of which contrasts wonderfully with the title of the story. What was Canon Alberic doing with a scrapbook in the first place. And could anything in the story be any scarier than www.scrapbook.com.

Here’s a dramatic (perhaps overly so) reading of the last third of the story. Very fruity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfNE9ge11oc

The next story we’ll be reading is Lost Hearts

It’ll work in a kind of “book club” style – we all read the next story, one of us blogs about it (along whatever lines they see fit) and we all pile in in the comments box. You do too, since even if you’ve never read James before most of his stories are available online. (Or you could pick up the Wordsworth Books edition for a couple of quid.)

What do we hope to achieve? Diversion and entertainment, as usual, but also I expect we’ll think about ghosts, history, academia, dialect, what makes stories frightening, what makes them funny… we will approach the stories like Jamesian antiquaries ourselves, pottering around and following our noses – hopefully not awakening any restless spirits, but I guess there’s always a risk.

Join us next week to read Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook.

So there are realist elements of the grimmest sort, but the good guys edge towards the superheroic – it’s no wonder he tried his hand at a Batman novel. Burke’s best friend is the world’s greatest martial artist, a huge mute Tibetan, Silent Max; there’s also the Mole, a Jewish scientific genius living beneath a junkyard surrounded by a pack of vicious dogs, constantly working to catch or punish Nazis; and Prof, the midget who schooled Burke in his days in prison. We get exciting and dramatic adventure, and lots of strong characters, but he rarely neglects to give us villains we can really hate – almost too much to bear, at times.

The Burke series is fantastic, if tending to the repetitive if you read too many too quickly, but his short stories are often astonishingly biting, sharp and intense, especially some of the very, very short ones. He takes you inside the types of mind you don’t even want to know exist, let alone experience. He’s not an easy read, but he’s also like almost no one else I’ve read – I guess if I had to draw parallels, there is a little James Lee Burke in the scariness of some of his bad guys, some of Jim Thompson’s beyond-bleak view of humanity (he’s on my series list too), something of the reckless brutality of Pahlaniuk at his least civilised or TV prison drama Oz. Not someone you can read a lot of the time, and I understand if some wouldn’t even fancy sampling him, but I love him.

If I were looking to recommend one contemporary crime writer to someone who was only interested in mainstream literary values, I’d go for James Lee Burke. His descriptive prose is of the highest order – especially on the swamplands around New Orleans, the plants and water and animals and weather. He leans rather towards the pathetic fallacy at times, but that’s fine with me. He’s also one of the most serious crime writers ever in thematic terms: lots of unflinching and honest examination of good and evil, race, sex, money, power, politics, crime, law and so on. His sense of evil is particularly powerful, virtually Biblical in conception at times – he reminds me more of Cormac McCarthy than any other writer. Indeed, McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men has much in common with Burke’s novels, not least for the scariness of the central villain.

You don’t get great whodunnits and clever mysteries with Burke – the stories are much more about how the good guys are going to stop the bad ones, rather than who did what, and anyway a lot of the movers behind the killings or whatever get away with it by virtue of wealth and political connections. I suspect this means that there are swathes of genre fans who find him uninteresting, but for a more general reader, I think he is the most powerful novelist ever to specialise in crime.

Recommended: any of his Dave Robicheaux novels, set in and around New Orleans – and there is some gain in reading them in order, as the character and his relationships do go through long-term changes, though this doesn’t mean they can’t stand up well in isolation. His other books are as good, but it’s the bayou descriptions that elevate these, for me.

To my great enjoyment, these included a couple of Swedish TV movies – with subtitles and everything! There was an ulterior motive, however. It was all a lead-in, a softening-up, to get me hooked on BBC One’s English adaptation of the books – starring Kenneth Branagh as the titular Swede.

But our Ken doesn’t really pull it off.

Branagh has always come across to me as something of a lightweight. This is curious because he aggressively pursues the meatiest, weightiest, manliest roles he can find: from Henry V to his surprise appearance at the end of the BBC’s 10 Days to War as a hardened American general who – hmm – shows up to deliver a rousing speech to his troops. Things seem to come too easily to him. Is it the blond hair? The puckish face which, despite its evidently increasing age, does not appear that ruffled by life’s slings and arrows? Whichever it is, Branagh suffers from the same curse of good looks as a host of other capable male leads. Which brings us to his new show, Wallander.

Wallander needs to be a bit ugly. Beset with diabetes, perpetually on the verge of 50, overweight, underexercised, and divorced, he’s a classic fictional detective – human in ways we can sympathize with but with a clarity of intuition that we all aspire to. In Sweden he has mainly been played by Rolf Lassgård, an authoritatively plump man who does share one distinctive feature with Brananagh, a total lack of lips. BBC Four, however, presented us with the new Swedish series, in which he’s played by Krister Henriksson*, who appears to have been following doctor’s orders. He’s slimmer now, but his pockmarked, rugged face and cavernous eye sockets tell you everything you need to know: this man has ghosts to chase away and his weapon of choice is probably whisky.

Branagh just doesn’t give you this – he scowls a lot and stomps around but underneath it there’s a fundamental cheeriness he just can’t shake.

In fact, the look of the show itself betrays an overweening concern for glossiness over the breezeblock reality of policing. It’s the first British programme to use the hot new camera “Red One” and if its light-metered-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life sheen is any indication the camera is no slouch at its job of taking pictures very fast. The police station looks like a Chanel advert, and the yellow rapeseed in the countryside practically blinded me. Everything looks lustrous and moody, including Wallander’s capacious flat, which is all thick blond planes of wood and free of clutter. A bit like Branagh himself.

* I have now read “One Step Behind”, and I was thinking of Henriksson on every page. He fits the part like a glove and I only hope that someone out there translates the Swedish films so I get a chance to watch the rest of them.

So I was in borders with a gift voucher, unsure of what to spend it on, when I remembered and picked it up, not quite out of duty, but frankly without any great expectation (not unlike when i got the new girls aloud alBUM).

It is ASTONISHING. I can’t remember the last time a book, a BOOK, has hit me like this, it might have been shampoo planet (yes, i read it before generation x, because waterstones in cheltenham didn’t have gen x) or My Idea of Fun, fifteen years ago. You might think “ah fanboy, bound to like it” but it’s so far away from his theatrical writing, and yet contains hints of all his beautiful little linguistic ticks that made me cheer inside when I spotted one.

Anyway, it may be the best novel yet written about blogging, the argot is so spot-on, the way the unnamed narrator, like all bloggers, moves away from the Proper Subject At Hand (a walkthrough of mindbogglingly complex computer game) to talk about himself, his friends (who are all referred to by their internet names throughout), his crappy job making Cooked Circular Food (a beautiful neologism that i intend to use at Every Appropriate Point) and everything else in his real life. There’s clearly a deep love for the subject matter, alienation and distance has always a key driver in forced ents work, but an embrace of distance, that it’s a good thing, and this links so strongly with how people immerse themselves in MMORPGs that it was kind of inevitable that Tim would see the potential in them.

Really, I can’t recommend it highly enough, and am worried that i’m doing a shocking job of describing how great this book is, but I HAD to tell you about it.

It’s still a very readable and interesting book – a thorough exploration of a relatively obscure period in European history, covering the time from the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 to the culmination of the First Crusade in 1099. Holland doesn’t dwell on either event, looking instead to less well-known – but more crucial – turning points: the victory of Otto over the Hungarians at the Battle of Lech; the rise to power of the Abbey of Cluny; the humbling of Emperor by Pope at the fortress of Canossa, which Holland contends represents the crucial division of Church and State on which Christendom was founded.

All this was new to me, all of it intriguing and well-told. Holland’s style is evocative, picaresque even: he likes to present his sources with their mentality intact, which means taking at face value stories of visions, dragons, portents and miraculous occasions. He’s sure-footed enough never to labour the doubtfulness of these tales, trusting the reader to pick out when the tellers believed their yarns and acted accordingly and when the convenience of the claims is a little too neat, as with the remarkable discovery by one abbey of the head of John The Baptist, helpfully encased completely within a stone pyramid.

On a broader level, though, Millennium doesn’t quite come together. The hook Holland has picked to hang his tales on is the millennial expectations of the era – the general conviction that “the world has grown old” and the last days of mankind were upon its inhabitants. The problem is that it’s quite hard to pinpoint this millenarianism as a motivating factor for most of the book’s action – certainly some individuals were driven by it, like the young Emperor Otto III, groomed by his religious mentor (and later Pope) to rekindle the Roman flame and bring on the End Times. But for most of Millennium’s cast of conniving nobles, Viking and Norman looters, monks and Patriarchs, the looming end of days is simply part of the mental scenery, and there’s scant evidence it affected the usual human pursuits of jockeying for status and money and worrying about one’s immediate future. Impending doom – as recent nuclear and current environmental crises testify – tends simply to be too big to affect individual behaviour much: saying a few more prayers was the 10th Century equivalent of recycling a few more papers, and probably not much less tangential to the daily grind. Especially as it was often outsourced to monks.

What’s frustrating about Millennium is that there are other, more gripping themes in the book. As the year 1000 passes without the world’s end, and the year 1033 likewise (dedicated Apocalypse watchers simply shifted expectation from the anniversary of birth to that of death), the tempo of the story hardly slackens. The real plot of Millennium is one of history driven by innovation – partly liturgical innovation, the monks at Cluny devising elaborate rituals*(and engineering political change) to turn their Abbey into a kind of continental salvation machine, protecting Europe with a forcefield of prayer and helping create an ideological unity across the region. But mostly technological innovation, particularly the rise of castle-building.

Castle-building in Millennium, and the development of mounted knights that accompanied it, was the innovation that turned medieval society even more radically asymmetric. Flung up with shock-and-awe speed across a conquered landscape, the castle – routinely described now as a defensive innovation – in fact worked as an offensive base, an HQ from which to mount oppressive raids across a territory and wipe out further resistance. The rise of castle walls was a source of extreme dread to local peasantry and the parasitic knight class a scourge which required monastic intercession to deal with. The newly authoritative monks saw the Knights as potential shock troops for Christendom, recognition of which would give said troops the moral authority to turn pillage into permanent settlement. This set in motion what must be one of the biggest bits of spin doctoring in history – the imaginative transformation of mounted thugs on the make into the noble and chivalrous orders of later renown.

This is a great story, and makes Millennium a better book than the slightly tenuous apocalyptic material would allow by itself. It also somewhat justifies the enormous digression on the Norman Conquest, a whole chapter spent on English domestic politics in a book whose more general thrust they have little to do with. Generally, though, I was left with a feeling that the sheer scope of the book – from the settlement of Iceland to the origins of Russia, from the imperial policy of Constantinople to the internal strife of the Caliphate in Spain – left it groping for unity. For instance, the evocative opening at Canossa, presented as a seismic development, later falls into place more as a skirmish – not the first, hardly the last – between Emperor and Pope, and the upper hand gained by the Papacy being far from decisive. This all results in Millennium ending up a fascinating but frustrating read – one that in some ways demands a slightly less neatly packaged sequel.

*someone wanting to write a Holland-esque history book that works as a nudge-wink towards our own times could do worse than look at the development of liturgical instruments, which took a simple principle – intercession against sin, or theological insurance – and gradually made it vastly more complex, until the guaranteeing of pardons against future sins had become a vast industry and a bedrock of the Church’s finances. The Reformation as a derivatives bubble? Could be a goer!

Produced by Elisha Sessions

Produced by Elisha Sessions