books, page 27 of 134

Fellstones, a village “up near the lakes” named for the seven stones standing in its green, is where Michael Dunstan spent most of his childhood, living with his adoptive parents, music teachers Rafe and Winifred Staveley, and their (unmusical) daughter Adele. Michael was adopted by the couple when, at the age of five, his parents were killed in a car accident — an accident he has felt guilty about ever since, as they were coming to collect him (from the Staveleys) at the time. The couple, though, were only too glad to take him in, because Michael is a musical prodigy, with a pitch-perfect singing voice and a flawless memory for music. But Michael never liked the performance aspect of his gift, and came to resent the pressure from his adoptive parents to devote himself entirely to music. After getting into university to study English (rather than the College of Music the Staveleys expected him to go to), he cut himself off from them altogether, reverting his name to Paul Dunstan (Paul being his middle name), to avoid their finding him.

As Ramsey Campbell’s latest novel opens, Paul is running the music department at a branch of the chain bookshop Texts, and in a relationship with a fellow employee, Caren. It’s here Adele approaches him suddenly one day, asking him to put differences aside and visit the Staveleys once more. They’re getting old, and (she implies) perhaps haven’t much longer to live — but of course, when he gets there they’re in perfect health. It was a subtle ruse, the first of many to draw him back to Fellstones.

The Staveleys want him to attend the Fellstones festival, an event he doesn’t recall from the time he grew up there. The festival, though, was never an annual event — it aligns with a somewhat more obscure cycle — and, the Staveleys tell him, the festival did occur in his childhood. Or, rather, it almost did. It was due to occur, but his refusal to sing in it meant, for some reason, it had to be cancelled. It was shortly after this his parents died.

Paul (whom the Staveleys continue to call “Michael”, meaning the novel is shot through with a subtle tug-of-war over his identity) allows himself to be persuaded — first out of politeness, but increasingly because of a series of events that conspire to keep him in, or returning to, Fellstones as the day of the festival approaches. Meanwhile, he comes to learn about the nearby ruin of Starward Hall, and the 17th century magus Bartholomew Kingseen who once lived there, and who dreamed of using a power from the darker reaches of the heavens to grant himself immortality.

Family, in both its positive and negative aspects, has always been one of Campbell’s most enduring themes, as has that teetering point between longing to be part of something and fear of the loss of one’s individuality. That latter theme is often presented, in Campbell’s fiction, in terms of the draw of some personality-absorbing supernatural entity (in the concluding volume of his Three Births of Daoloth trilogy, for instance) or a cult (as in his early novel The Nameless), but here cult and family are at their most indistinguishable. The techniques the Staveleys use to bring Paul back into the fold — a combination of lovebombing and guilt-tripping — are straight out of the cult recruitment playbook, as is their need to cut him off from all other relationships, such as with his girlfriend Caren. All done subtly, of course.

Subtly, so Paul won’t just walk away. But the question of why he doesn’t consider walking away — at least until it’s too late for him to do so — remains a bit of a puzzle. Although he is the only point-of-view character, we never really get a glimpse of how he feels about the situation of reuniting with his adoptive parents — who, we know, he left because they “were too determined to turn me into one of them… Too much like them and not enough like me.” But there isn’t really much of that “enough like me” in Paul’s current life to enable him to resist them. His job at Texts (which verges, really, on another sort of cult, with its morning sales mantras of “Boost your books… Books must boom… Goods are good”) is clearly a battle to retain some sort of self-expression in a world of commercialised dumbing-down, while his relationship with Caren is far too easily relinquished for it ever to have meant anything. (Underlined by her complete lack of understanding for what Paul must be going through when his adoptive family make contact with him again after many years.)

It’s only near the end, I think, that (in a moment that relies on context, so hopefully this isn’t a spoiler) we get a glimpse of the deeper reaches of Paul’s inner life and why he has allowed himself to be so easily taken in again:

“How could he be any more powerless? All his life since early childhood has led here; it’s what he has always been for.”

And this, for me, is the height of horror in a novel that certainly has its fair share of the cosmic weird — Adele’s tales of “Mr Jellyfingers” and his friends not least among them.

Music as a source of contact with the supernatural has featured in Campbell’s work before (in one of my favourite of his short stories, “Never to be Heard”), as well as in works of the classic writers of the genre, such as Algernon Blackwood’s The Human Chord. The mix of Michael/Paul’s being adopted, alongside an air of folk horror about this novel, chimes in with Campbell’s The Kind Folk, while the theme of loss of identity, and in particular having one’s creative talent taken over by forces from one’s past, was a significant element in Campbell’s 2021 novel, the non-supernatural, dark anxiety-comedy Somebody’s Voice.

But, I have to say, the one cultural connection that kept popping into my head throughout the novel was my favourite line from (in my opinion) Christopher Guest’s best mockumentary, A Mighty Wind:

“I have come to understand as an adult… that there had been abuse in my family. But it was mostly musical in nature.”

Although The Travelling Grave was first published by Arkham House in 1948, most of the stories it collects had already appeared in LP Hartley’s British collections Night Fears (1924) and The Killing Bottle and Other Stories (1932). It was reviewed (if that’s the right word for a piece in the publisher’s own magazine) in the Arkham Sampler for Spring 1924:

“Mr. Hartley’s book can be recommended especially to those readers who like to be led casually into a setting and story and brought up short, face to face with terror and horror. Mr Hartley succeeds in doing this time after time, and doing it so well that I cannot offhand think of any other contemporary writer who managed this effect quite so memorably.”

I came to The Travelling Grave thinking of it as a collection of ghost stories, but they’re not ghost stories — even those with ghosts in them (or, really, walking corpses) — so much as contes cruels, whose focus is on the method of delivering each tale’s particular moment of comeuppance or revelation. Hartley plays an artful game of laying out everything a reader needs to anticipate what’s coming — all, that is, but the final detail, the who-it-happens-to, or how-it-happens.

The perfect example is the lead tale, “The Travelling Grave”, which introduces what I like to think of as a literal plot device, in the shape of a mobile, mechanical coffin that is not only self-burying, but will also gather up and kill — snatch and despatch — its occupant. As its owner Munt, a collector of unusual coffins, says:

“But it’s very quick, and it has that funny gift of anticipation. If it got a fellow up against a wall, I don’t think he’d stand much chance. I didn’t show you here, because I value my floors, but it can bury itself in wood in three minutes and in newly turned earth, say a flower-bed, in one.”

The tale begins by introducing us to Hugh Curtis — “a vague man with an unretentive mind”, making him sound like perfect victim material — who’s persuaded by an acquaintance to spend the weekend at Munt’s house. When Munt realises Curtis hasn’t told anyone else he’s come, and is unlikely to be missed for some time if he disappears, it of course sets this collector thinking about fully testing this latest addition to his collection. But, of course, things don’t quite work out the way Munt — or the reader — expects.

Those tales that do have ghosts — and the supernatural impinges on the majority of these tales — don’t look too deeply into the nature of the supernatural. Hartley’s walking corpses are there to exact retribution, sometimes deserved — as in “A Visitor from Down Under”, whose protagonist learns you can’t escape a crime committed on the other side of the world, especially if your revenger is (a) dead and (b) capable of using public transport — sometimes not deserved — as in “Feet Foremost”, where the new owners of an old haunted house inadvertently re-activate its ghost (despite the house having been redesigned long ago to prevent such an occurrence) simply because they neglected to inform the servants — but don’t really betray much of the metaphysical workings behind these revenants’ ability to linger beyond death as they do.

Hartley’s tales can’t help sounding comical in summary, but this, and the humour evident in this stories — he’s a witty stylist — do nothing to ameliorate their horror. As Jack Sullivan in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural says: “humour in Hartley’s work is not so much a relief from horror as another dimension of it.” And the humour (like the horror) is there at the verbal level, too, in Hartley’s way with macabre word-play. To give an example, the speaker here is one of his revenants, a masked walking corpse who (the reader will have already guessed) only a short time before put a bullet through his brain:

“I was always an empty-headed fellow,” he went on, tapping the waxed covering with his gloved forefinger, so that it gave out a wooden hollow sound — “there’s nothing much behind this. No brains to speak of, I mean. Less than I used to have, in fact.”

This mix of humour and terror — in particular, the way it’s both at once — and the way such double meanings create an air of intense anxiety in the very substance of the narrative, reminds me most of all of Ramsey Campbell. Both writers use language to create an all-pervading sense of unreliability in the world around their protagonists, creating an air of anything — and most likely any scary thing — being about to happen.

The thing that most stood out for me, in fact, is Hartley’s inventiveness at revealing the inner state of his (often highly anxious, though just about managing to keep it contained) protagonist’s psyches. In “A Change of Ownership”, for instance, Ernest, approaching his own house in the dark, starts imagining all sorts of inventive situations, conversations and meetings, all of them fanciful and designed to distract him from his fear of entering this empty house, but all of them somehow working their way round to latch onto the reasons for that fear. It’s Ernest’s effort not to think about what scares him that lays it bare.

Early on in another tale, “The Cotillon”, we learn that the protagonist, Marion Lane, is preoccupied by guilt about a recent relationship she only pretended to take seriously. Rather than simply saying she feels guilty, Hartley gives us this:

“She extinguished the light, but the gramophone within her went on more persistently than ever. It was a familiar record; she knew every word of it: it might have been called The Witness for the Defence.”

It might seem a commonplace nowadays to liken worrying thoughts to having a record playing in one’s head, but I can’t help feeling it was new when Hartley wrote it, and its inventiveness brings home both the force of Marion’s worry, and the very modern (when Hartley was writing it) world in which this scary story is about to play out.

I note this aspect of modernity because Julia Briggs, in her history of the ghost story, Night Visitors, criticises Hartley for this very reason:

“Hartley showed courage in introducing motor cars, a radio broadcast and a plane crash into his ghost stores, but they also created further problems for him.”

But, to me, Hartley’s use of the (to him) modern world just highlights the unfairness, cruelty, and horror of the horrors, when they turn up. Everyone else in, for instance, “The Cotillon” with its “brightly-lit modern urban scene” (as Briggs puts it), is having fun at a masked ball, and this just isolates Marion all the more, as well as making Hartley’s skill at introducing his walking corpse all the more notable, for it’s against this air of fun and modernity that things come to seem so very unfunny.

But the modernity of the “internal gramophone” idea also brings home Marion’s very real worries. This isn’t a distanced character like, say, Professor Parkins in M R James’s “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come To You”; this is someone I, at least, can relate to. And I suspect Hartley’s ability to evoke characters with obsessive anxious worries is too widespread in his stories — and too inventively and effectively evoked — not to have been based on his own inner life. Time and again we get characters struggling with worries before the supernatural element even hints at turning up. Henry Greenstream in “The Thought”, for instance, begins his tale with a habit of counting the number of times his latest worry intrudes into his thoughts when he goes for a daily walk. Jack Sullivan, again from his entry on Hartley in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror, notes that “The technique here of intensifying fears into actual supernatural visitations became, in later stories like ‘The Thought’ and ‘A Change of Ownership’, a Hartley trademark.”

Before reading The Travelling Grave, I mostly knew Hartley from the 1971 film (by Joseph Losey, who also did The Damned) of his most well-known novel, The Go-Between, and as a respected reviewer who was thoroughly capable of intelligently reviewing both the literary and the fantastic (writing positively on Stapledon’s Star Maker, for instance, and an insightful and mostly positive review of Lindsay’s Devil’s Tor). But I’d been meaning to read him for a while, and I’m glad I finally did.

Assassin’s Quest, published in 1997, is the third book of Hobb’s Farseer trilogy and, as so often with fantasy trilogies, is by far the longest of the three. By far, far, far the longest. And it felt… so much longer.

The story starts with Fitz having just escaped death at King Regal’s hands by, well, dying — just not, it turns out, irreversibly. Having a Wit-bonded wolf helps in this sort of situation. As a result, Fitz finds himself free, but believed dead by pretty much everyone: enemies, allies, friends and the woman he loves. But, after complaining that formerly he’d been forced into the life of a royal assassin with no say in the matter (“I killed people as a boy. It didn’t make me a man.”), what does he do with his freedom?

“Free to do the only thing I had the heart or the courage left to do, the only thing I could do to lay my old life to rest behind me. I would kill Regal.”

…He becomes an assassin. Not a good enough one to see his task through, though, so that when he fails, and is at the mercy of Regal’s coterie of mental-powered Skill-users, Fitz is saved by his Skill-connection to distant (and also assumed-dead) King Verity. (So that’s twice Fitz has been saved from death by a magical connection to another person.) Verity had gone off in search of the Elderlings, a mythical race of powerful beings who once, long ago, saved the Six Duchies, and is, like Fitz, lost and presumed dead. Now, it turns out, he needs Fitz’s help in raising the Elderlings’ power to save the kingdom again, and he implants an unbreakable command, forcing Fitz to come to him.

It’s a long journey to reach Verity. A long, long, long journey. And it felt… so much longer.

Reading Assassin’s Quest was a strange experience. Something just made it excruciatingly hard work to get through, yet at the same time I could never quite convince myself to give up on it. Part of what made me finish the book, in fact, was an attempt to understand why it was so difficult to get through. Another part was sheer stubbornness: I’d got through two books of the trilogy and had enjoyed them well enough, and knew if I didn’t finish the third it would nag me. Then I’d slog my way through a chapter, and realise there were forty one of these things in all. I gave up for a bit, then decided to try to read a chapter a week for a while, just so I was making some progress (and so I could get on with other books I wanted to read in the meantime). Then, once I’d finally got near enough to the end that I could push through with some sense I was finally getting somewhere, I finished it off. And when I did, I checked the date I’d started, and it was just over a year to the day…

The sheer stasis of the narrative, which had been frustrating in the previous book, but which there had at least served as a build-up towards an explosive finale, here had no excuse. Fitz was no longer stuck in Buck Keep with its mounting political tensions. He was now out and about, free, and on a quest. Things could happen. Things could be accomplished. But instead, chapter by chapter passed and I began to feel I was being forced to chew something that not only took a lot of chewing, but when it went down left me no less hungry. On a sentence-by-sentence level, it wasn’t at all badly written — which was part of the trouble, because it made it harder to see the problem. The problem, though, was that nothing was happening — nothing of any significance to the story, anyway, nothing that had real meaning. The narrative, and Fitz’s feelings about his life, just went over the same ground again and again and again. Characters had conversations, but it was only afterwards that I realised nothing had been said. There were endless descriptions of the minutiae of setting up camp, making meals, and characters being brittle with one another in the same way, day after day, or mulling endlessly over their regrets, losses and failures. Fitz started going through this cycle where, one chapter he’d be captured and beaten up within an inch of his life, then he’d escape, then he’d realise he’d been taken off his route and so would have to spend another chapter, beaten and bruised as he was, struggling to catch up. If this had just happened one or two times it might have been interpreted as demonstrating how hard Fitz’s quest was (and quests are supposed to be hard). But it just happened again and again and again. I ceased to care how difficult Fitz’s quest was.

And this was perhaps the key thing. After a first book, Assassin’s Apprentice, that had been all about building up character, with Assassin’s Quest it became obvious that Fitz, as a character, had reached his limit. He’d stopped giving anything to me as a reader. He became a one-note placeholder for a human being, and the single note he sounded was failure:

“An overwhelming dreariness rose up in me and I longed simply to lie down where I was and die. I tried to tell myself it was the elfbark. It felt more like the after-effects of near-constant failure.”

This next passage is from Fitz’s narrative, but could easily be describing my feelings of reading my way through the middle section of this book:

“I dreamed a dream at once vivid and stultifying. I chipped black stone. That was the entire dream, but it was endless in its monotony. I was using my dagger as a chisel and a rock as a hammer. My fingers were scabbed and swollen from the many times my grip had slipped and I’d struck them instead of the dagger hilt. But it didn’t stop me. I chipped black stone.”

(And one of the frustrations of this book was how full Fitz’s narrative was of fever dreams like that — which, yes, were relevant, because his ability with the Skill was giving him glimpses of other characters — but it just added to that fever dream air of the narrative as whole: being trapped in some endlessly repetitive and often meaningless task, unable to escape or make sense of it, rising out of it occasionally only to fall back into it again.)

But anyway, I finished. One reason I finished, aside from simply not wanting to leave things unfinished, was I wanted an answer to the one thing that had intrigued me at the start of the series: the Red Ship Raiders. What was it they were doing when they turned up at coastal towns and “Forged” their inhabitants, turning them into, essentially, brutal psychopaths, people who could “no longer sense or feel emotions from others”, nor recall any bonds from before they were Forged. As Fitz points out:

“Their tactics were peculiar. They made no effort to seize towns or conquer the folk. They were solely intent on destruction.”

Whatever they were doing, I felt, would go to the heart of Hobb’s world and its themes, but I needed at least the hint of an answer before I could start to digest it. But no hint was forthcoming, even this far into the series. There are, though, other examples of dehumanisation in Assassin’s Quest. King Regal, for instance, is described as having “thrown humanity aside, to embrace something darker”:

“He pleasures his body with drugs and deadens his soul with his savage amusements. Aye, and spreads the disease to those around him… The very coinage of life becomes debased. Slavery spreads, for if it is accepted to take a man’s life for amusement, then how much wiser to take it for profit?”

Regal uses his coterie of Skill-users as tools he can do what he likes with — sacrifice on a whim, if he wants. In his view, and under his influence, human beings become less than human. Meanwhile, we learn that the essence of the power held by the Elderlings is also rooted in dehumanisation of a sort, or at least that they need the lives of others to give themselves life and power, which is, again, a debasement and devaluation of human beings. There’s a third form of dehumanisation, though, which is perhaps the most hard to spot, but is the most pervasive for Fitz:

“So quickly it was done. Vengeance. I stood looking down at him, waiting to feel triumph or relief, or satisfaction. Instead I felt nothing, felt as lost to all life as he was.”

As the saying goes, if you seek revenge, dig two graves. In this case, though, the second grave needn’t be dug, because that other death — the death of the avenger — can be a living one. I might charitably say the dullness and drudgery of finishing this third book of the trilogy, and the way Fitz’s character became so monotonous, might be a clever device on Hobb’s part, showing how he’d been hollowed out by his focus on revenge. But if so, it was taken, perhaps, to too great a length.

The Farseer trilogy has a lot in common, in some ways, with George R R Martin’s Game of Thrones, whose first volume was published around the same time. Both were presenting a very gritty, more “realistic” version of fantasy, minimising the magic (and making what magic there is very costly and dangerous), while undermining all ideas of heroes, noble quests and the like. (Though I have to say, Hobb lacks Martin’s dark humour and sword-and-sorcery vitality, both of which are necessary to offset the sheer grimness.) It’s as though fantasy, at that time, were trying to get as far from the fairy-tale fulfilment of the likes of David Eddings’s Belgariad as it could. I don’t see this as a necessary corrective, just the other side of the coin. Eddings’s fairy-tale air may be unrealistic, but it comes with a lot of hope and wonder. Hobb brings a darker edge, but also a much drearier and un-wondrous air.

But that’s just my feeling. Hobb’s books have been very successful, so much so she’s gone on to write three or four more trilogies set in the same world, and the Folio Society has brought out this first trilogy in luxury hardback form, putting her alongside Tolkien, Le Guin, and George R R Martin in their catalogue.

I haven’t read much — if any, now I think about it — modern fantasy, and it was perhaps at the point where I first read Hobb, back in the mid-1990s, that I stopped engaging with the genre as a going concern, and perhaps it was the feeling I got from her — of a grimness without a balancing wonder — that helped put me off. Assassin’s Quest does end with a rip-roaring final chapter, but only after forty or so preceding ones that were very much not in the same vein. And I did finally get my answer to what the Red Ship Raiders were doing and why, but it was zipped by in two or three sentences delivered in one of the italicised passages that started each chapter, commentaries by Fitz on some aspect of the world, not parts of the narrative itself. This was perhaps my second big disappointment with this book — the one thing about this world I’d been intrigued by was dealt with too quickly, with no attempt at digesting its many implications within the narrative itself. It was almost a throwaway I might have missed.