 |
The House on the Borderland and Other Novels:
Fantasy Masterworks 32
by William Hope Hodgson
(Gollancz, £6.99, 637 pages, paperback, this edition published
10 October 2002.)
This volume gathers together all four of William  Hope
Hodgson's novels of the fantastic published in his lifetime (1877-1918):
The Boats of the Glen Carrig, originally published
in 1907; The House on the Borderland (1908); The Ghost Pirates
(1909) and The Night Land (1912). It's in the usual attractive
Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks package, with a very enthusiastic introduction
from China Miéville. The back cover mangles a quotation from
H.P. Lovecraft; what he actually said, with respect to The House
on the Borderland, was "But for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality
this book would be a classic of the first water" and it is rather cheeky
of Gollancz to use only the last six words.
Though Lovecraft was being a bit unfair. The House on the Borderland
certainly is a classic, and though it is the shortest of the four
novels it is far and away the best. The plot is very simple: Hodgson
presents himself as the editor of a manuscript found by two friends
camping in the ruins of an old house in a remote spot in the west of
Ireland, supposedly forty miles from the nearest railway station (an
impossible feat in the well-networked Ireland of 1877, I should think).
The manuscript descibes the experiences of the previous owner of the
house; he is attacked by pig-creatures from a pit in the grounds which
apparently leads to another dimension, and then experiences a rapid
fast-forward through the heat death of the universe. The writing is
vivid and at the same time surreal. There is no apparent causal relationship
between the events and no explanation. But it stays with you, and was
clearly an inspiration for Lovecraft despite his begrudging comment.
Lovecraft is not the only one. This story forms part of the hinterland
of many genre works, most explicitly in Roger Zelazny's The Changing
Land, where the House on the Borderland, renamed the Castle Timeless,
is recognisably at the centre of a wizardly contest, one of the wizards
bearing the name of Hodgson; at the end of the book, he looks out the
castle window "across a very green land towards the misty mountains".
Brian Stableford rescues the historical Hodgson from his historical
death in the trenches to send him back to Ireland in The Gateway
of Eternity, and Ian Sinclair's Radon Daughters revolves
around a contemporary quest for Hodgson's manuscript of the sequel to
The House on the Borderland. No doubt there are others I have
missed.
According to leading Hodgsonologists, the two sea stories in this
collection, The Boats of the Glen Carrig and The Ghost Pirates,
may actually have been the last two written (though the first and third
published) as their author realised that there was more of a market
for nautical novels with a fantastic twist than simply novels of the
fantastic. They therefore represent an attempt by the author to get
in on the market for boys' adverntures opened up in the late nineteenth
century by Robert Louis Stevenson, R.M. Ballantyne, G.A. Henty, Captain
Marryat and the like. But both stories involve bizarre encounters with
the supernatural on the high seas, and are written far more intensely
than their Victorian precursors could have imagined. Together with The
House on the Borderland, they make up a very good package, excellent
value (especially when one considers that some publishers are marketing
single novellas for twice the price of this 630-page volume).
But wait, there's more. Oh dear. Over half of this volume is taken
up by The Night Land, the last published (though, according to
some, the first written) of the four novels; it is hundreds of pages
of pure awfulness. China Miéville disarmingly admits in his introduction
that its faults are "manifold and obvious", adds that it "stretches
mercilessly" and speculates that "If a committee had been set up to
design an unreadable book, they'd probably have come up with The
Night Land." He then tries to persuade us to read it anyway. I simply
couldn't. The style of The Night Land is so abysmal - an attempt
to do Samuel Pepys in telegraphic mode, perhaps - that I found it, once
put down, impossible to pick up again. Never mind, there are three excellent
novels here, each of which has three times the quality of many Big Commercial
Fantasies of the same size. Recommended.
Review by Nicholas Whyte.
|
|
