books, page 3 of 121

Hodgson’s The Night Land is perhaps the most abridged/reworked of 20th century fantasies. First published in 1912, it was immediately and severely cut by Hodgson himself into The Dream of X, so as to secure US copyright; in 2011, James Stoddard produced The Night Land: A Story Retold; and in 2023 an abridged edition was issued as part of the MIT Press’s “Radium Age” series of proto-SF classics. All this is perhaps an expression of what many critics and readers seem to feel, that Hodgson’s novel is a mix of great elements and the not-so-great, and might be fixed with a little tinkering. It was hearing about the Radium Age abridgement that prompted me to re-read The Night Land — but I went back to the original, knowing otherwise I’d spend my reading time wondering what they’d left out.

Although it was the last of Hodgson’s novels to be published, I like the idea put forward in Sam Gafford’s “Writing Backwards: The Novels of William Hope Hodgson” that it was the first to be actually written. It certainly has the feel of a first novel, compared to, say, The House on the Borderland. The Night Land has more rough edges, along with that rawness of sentiment that can come through in a first novel (particularly, perhaps, a fantasy one), before publication makes a writer self-conscious of what he’s doing.

The plot, for such a long book, has a fairy-tale-like simplicity. After a framing story where we learn this is a manuscript produced in the 17th century by a man recording his dreams/visions of a far-future self, we’re projected into the Earth’s end days. The sun has died and humanity has retreated to the Great Redoubt, a massive, multi-city pyramid surrounded by a barrier of protective Earth Current. Beyond the barrier is the bleak and terrifying Night Land, a region of darkness populated by monsters and even more perilous Forces of Evil. The narrator’s strong telepathic abilities allow him to pick up a distant voice from a previously forgotten Lesser Redoubt — and what’s more, the woman he’s in contact with uses a name that makes him believe she may be the reincarnation of the lady his 17th century self loved and lost. When he then receives a communication that the Lesser Redoubt has fallen, he sets out on a lone quest to find her, and bring her to the safety of the Great Redoubt.

Critics of the novel, while almost always praising its originality and vision, tend to raise two key complaints about The Night Land. The first is about its style. C S Lewis, for instance, says it has “a foolish, and flat archaism of style”; Lovecraft calls its “attempt at archaic language… grotesque and absurd”; and among contemporary reviews, the Dublin Daily Express (9th May 1912), said “people who look to find pleasure in a book do not care to be engaged in a constant struggle with a repellent style.” But the book also has its defenders on this count. Michael Moorcock, in his often vituperative Wizardry and Wild Romance, says “This is archaism used to much livelier effect than [William] Morris’s.” And, back among the contemporary reviews, the Morning Leader (19th April 1912) brought in literary precedent, saying the book’s manner is “a mixture of Pepys, Meredith, [historical novelist] Mr. [Maurice] Hewlett, Defoe, Mr. Kipling, and the Bible”, before adding: “The book is so unusual, so great a tour de force, that we really are uncertain whether it is magnificent or silly—or neither: it is certainly impressive, but not at all convincing.”

For me, I have no problem with the style, which seems natural to both the strange world and the archetypal story Hodgson is telling. He does occasionally come up with a clunker:

“And mayhaps your sympathy shall tell you just how I to feel in the heart.”

But more often he uses the artificiality of the style to evocative, even occasionally playful, effect, as in this description of one of the Night Land’s small fire pits:

“And the noise that it sent out was strange and slow, and it did seem to gruntle gently unto itself in that lonesome hollow, as that it had made a long and quiet grumbling there, through Eternity. And oft was it still, and made no sound; and again would give an odd bubbling in the quietness, and send off, as it did seem, a little smoke of sulphur, and afterward fall once more upon a quiet.”

If I have any complaint about the style — and this is the first thing I’d cut if I were doing an abridgement of the book — it’s the narrator’s frequent appeals to his reader for sympathy or understanding:

“And surely all this to be plain to you, and to be over-plain; for, in verity, I tell to you, and over-tell, until that I should be weary; and mayhap you to be the more so. And, indeed, I not to blame you; but only to hope that your understanding, which doth mean also in general your hearts, doth be with me all along my way. And, indeed, this my tale to be not easy told.”

But equally, Hodgson may be simply reminding his readers that, although this story is set in the far future and in a very strange environment, it’s still a tale about human beings, with the same basic human concerns we have today. If nothing else, it lends the narrator a hint of vulnerability, which ultimately has the sympathising effect he’s asking for.

The other major sticking point with critics is the love story. Lovecraft, of course, objects, saying the book is marred by “nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality” (a phrase which can’t help making me think of the number of sugars Lovecraft used to pile into his coffee). Fritz Leiber says the love story “mars rather than embellishes” the book, and C S Lewis, while praising The Night Land’s “unforgettable sombre splendour” of imagery, felt it was “disfigured by a sentimental and irrelevant erotic interest”. Interestingly, none of the contemporary reviews I’ve found make any objection on this point.

For myself, while it’s true that reading The Night Land can occasionally feel like you’re the awkward third with a couple who are goo-goo in love (“and I kist her, and I told her that I did be surely her Master, in verity, and she mine own Baby-Slave”), the book’s subtitle is “A Love Story”. The love story can’t be cut. And it’s not merely the spine of the tale, it’s the core of book’s meaning. Hodgson may, in The Night Land, be sentimental, but it is an honest sentimentality. The love story is not some sop to what a reading public wants, but the expression of something he deeply believes in.

After all, in the imaginative strangeness of the Night Land, Hodgson’s work is shot through with cosmic horror: with massive, unintelligible, anti-human forces just waiting to not only stamp out our hero, but inflict some deep spiritual harm to him (which has led it to become standard practice for people venturing into the Night Land to have a suicide capsule embedded in their wrist, so they can end their life rather than fall into the clutches of the Powers of Evil lurking out there). But Hodgson’s horrors aren’t entirely of the Lovecraftian sort — they’re not beings of such cosmic immensity that humankind are insects they crush without noticing. These things are drawn to humanity. They cluster around the Great Redoubt, wanting to get at the people inside. Human beings, then, have value in Hodgson’s cosmos. And that value, at least in the mind of Hodgson’s narrator, is typified by love, “for our love did make all the world holy”. The Night Land, meanwhile, is characterised by its loneliness (“and everywhere there was abundance of rock and lonesomeness”) and inhumanity. Its most fearsome element is the mysterious House of Silence — which could well be The House on the Borderland at some latter stage in its journey through the eons — but this, crucially, is balanced by the final words of the novel, used to describe the state of the narrator’s union with his beloved: “the House of Joy”.

There is, though, an element within the love story that raises stronger objections. This is the sadomasochistic strain that creeps in from soon after the narrator finds his Maid in the desolation of the Night Land. It starts with him giving her a smack on the hand for refusing to eat all the food he gives her (she’s trying to save it in case he needs it later). This leads to him later shaking her, then twice actually whipping her — the second time after violently baring her shoulders. There are hints she perhaps takes some enjoyment in this (the narrator catches her kissing the strap he used as a whip), but after the second time, she stops speaking to him, and makes exaggerated play of serving him as a slave (which only annoys him more). Hodgson has already established that his far future culture makes use of public punishment, where miscreants become “human signposts of pain for the benefit of others”. This may partially explain — along with the narrator’s youthfulness — why he lashes out when reasoned argument is all that’s required. (And the narrator certainly takes no account of how traumatised the Maid must be.)

But there is another element to the sadomasochism. We learn, early on, that the narrator prepared for his venture into the Night Land with unspecified privations, after which “yet was I sweeter in spirit because that I stood lean and pure, and much poor dross and littleness had been burned from me”. As part of this, he has “withholden from that which doth weaken and taint the spirit”, which can’t help sounding like a Victorian euphemism. Hodgson’s narrator is clearly invested in sexual abstinence — the Maid remains a maid throughout the journey — as in:

“And so I to think, and did presently ponder with a great and strange pity upon they that did not yet have met the Beloved, and they mayhap not to have kept all for the Beloved; but to have been light with that which doth be the Treasure…”

The sadomasochistic element in their relationship bubbles over in that portion of the journey where the couple are least in danger, and so when their youthful energies aren’t entirely taken up with simply surviving. It doesn’t exactly take a Freudian to argue it might just be sexual tension between the two of them, finding the only outlet it can, in their prurient world. It ends, though, when they’re faced with a genuine threat once more, in a spectacular eruption of sword & sorcery levels of violence, with an attack by twenty of the bestial “Humpt Men” who haunt those parts. It’s a sequence that seems straight out of a Frazetta painting, and proves the Maid to be no wilting and helpless child. After that genuinely threatening violence, the pair thankfully seem to have got all that whipping and slave-play out of their system.

Those two elements — the archaic style and the love story — aside, all but the most fantasy-averse critics agree The Night Land is wildly impressive for the sheer weird inventiveness of its landscape, and the strange beings that inhabit it. If its primal horror derives from anything, it’s Bosch’s fire-pit-studded hells and Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son”.

One of the most effective things about the Night Land itself is that, dark as it is, it’s alive with sounds: screams, cries, shouts, a constant hint of movement. A giant man or a pig-tusked thing might suddenly appear, rushing by while the narrator hides, then is gone. And there are the stranger beings and Evil Powers, too: the hooded Silent Ones, who only kill those who walk on their road, or the mysterious and enormous Watchers (“mountains of living watchfulness and hideous and steadfast intelligence”), or the terrifying Night Hounds. One Force of Evil the narrator encounters is accompanied by a whirring sound and seems to resemble “the trunk of a great tree, that did show in the glowing”: utterly abstract, and all the more frightening for it. Moorcock & Cawthorn in Fantasy: The 100 Best Books best sum up this menagerie of cosmic horrors:

“They are creatures of the unconscious, vast dim forms from the nightmare-spawning shadows beyond the lamps of Reason, their powers and purposes never clearly delineated. Only the lesser and purely physical menaces can be met with muscle and the biting fires of [the narrator’s weapon] the Diskos.”

Starting out on this re-read of The Night Land brought back to me the feeling from my first read, of how vulnerable and imperilled the narrator was in his journey into that vast and monster-haunted darkness. This time I also felt there were moments of distinct resonance with Tolkien: Frodo and Sam’s venturing onto the road before Minas Morgul (there’s a road and a city in the Night Land, too, though we never see the city up close), and even more, the Two Watchers that Sam has to face outside the Tower of Cirith Ungol. (Douglas A. Anderson says, in Tales Before Tolkien, that Tolkien likely read The Night Land in the 1930s, so this may have been a genuine point of influence.)

For Lovecraft “The last quarter of the book drags woefully”, but for me the last two chapters have a sustained tension and almost symphonic grandeur. The ending works so well precisely because Hodgson has earned the right to lean so heavily on what is, by this point in his epic narrative, no longer sentiment but archetypal human emotion, raised to the nth power. Perhaps all that silly love-talk and the endless descriptions of the Maid kissing the food tablets before she hands them to the narrator pay off, in some way, as long as you’re willing to let them.

The Night Land is one of those early masterpieces of fantasy which is so powerful simply because it has so little precedent, because it was written before any conventions existed. Hodgson pulled this thing out of his imagination wholesale, like some lone Ahab beaching the White Whale with a fishing rod.

As to abridgement… I can certainly see parts I’d have cut. The narrator never fails to tell us how many hours he walked each day, at which points he sat down to eat and drink (and to justify himself every time he eats more than the amount he rationed himself), as well as how he searched for a place to sleep, and whether he washed, and how long he slept, and how he ate when he woke, and so on. It all seems rather mechanical, not to mention a little boring, in the face of the visionary weirdness of the Night Land itself. But perhaps that’s the point: Hodgson is making his narrative real, by placing such humdrum details in contrast to his cosmic horrors. And perhaps the very length of the text itself adds to the feeling that, having read it, you’ve witnessed — even been a part of — this immense fairy-tale journey.

Published in 2009, Avilion is the last in Holdstock’s Mythago Wood series, coming out twenty five years after the book that started it all. Yet it’s the most direct sequel to Mythago Wood so far, with a return to the story of that novel’s protagonists Steven and Guiwenneth. Its focus, though, is on the couple’s children, Jack and Yssobel.

At the end of Mythago Wood, Steven settled in a valley near the heart of the forest, awaiting Guiwenneth’s return. Now we find him still there, living in the somewhat-repaired ruins of a Roman villa with Guiwenneth, their two children, and a few others who have wandered by and ended up staying. Steven, of course, is human, while Guiwenneth is a mythago. Their children, then, are half-human, half-mythago — half of the strange, magical wood, half not. Both children are intensely aware of this. Yss calls them her “red” and “green” sides; Jack comes to think of them as the human and the “Haunter”. The “green side”, as Yss calls it, is “the side that calls the strongest; and when it calls, you have no resistance to it.” Both feel an obsessive draw, just as a mythago does to the story-pattern of its originating myth. Yss feels it for the centre of the wood, for the region of Lavondyss, which she has named Avilion; Jack, on the other hand, is drawn to the edge, to the world of humans, to Oak Lodge where his father grew up. Both also catch glimpses of family mythagos: Jack sees his grandfather George Huxley, whose scientific mind means he cannot help being aware that he is a mythago; Yss glimpses what she calls the “resurrected man”, whom she and Gwin come increasingly to realise is Steven’s brother Christian. Yss is intrigued by this figure, but Gwin is horrified. Christian is “The man who stole me! The man who raped me! The man who sent his guard to kill me!” When a small portion of the travelling mega-army Legion passes by, Gwin tags along, knowing this is how she’ll find Christian and get her revenge for what was done to her. Yss then leaves to find her mother, knowing she’ll do so in Avilion. Jack, who has ventured out to Oak Lodge, turns back to the woods, intent on bringing back his sister.

Holdstock, I think, also has his “red” and “green” sides. Mythago Wood was narrated by the “red” side, viewing Ryhope Wood’s strangeness from the perspective of Steven, who was having to learn how it all worked. Its plot was a quest plot, driven by love and revenge, and the narrative felt straightforward, following a relatively conventional story logic. Some of the later books, though, like The Hollowing or the novella The Bone Forest, seem more written by the “green” side, full of a constant stream of weird events, coming almost too fast to process them or find a stable narrative, so that it’s the onrush of strangeness and savagery that impresses, rather than narrative coherence. I think that, in Avilion, he’s found a more easily readable balance between these two sides. There’s still the strangeness, the wood-myth-logic of this unstable world, where the land can shift and a forest rise up from a lake, or an army emerge from the ground, but the narrative feels a bit more follow-able. There’s something a little calmer, less intensely “bosky” (to use the term for the wood-madness humans can suffer in The Hollowing) about the story, making it more digestible.

There’s still the same striking moments of invention. Here, for instance, we have a race of non-humans called the Amurngoth, a form of Iaelven (elf), though of a distinctly Holdstockian, woody type: these are “tall, lank-haired, cat-eyed creatures” who speak with a “whistling and clicking”, clad in leaves and furs. These are one of the many pillaging/collecting types in the Mythago books — something that has been present, to various degrees, from the start, from George Huxley’s collecting of arrowheads and other knickknacks recovered from the wood, to The Hollowing’s Jason, plundering the many mythic realms of all their treasures. The Amurngoth venture from the wood to abduct human children, leaving in their place “changes”, shaped pieces of wood that come to life in the manner of mythagos. The Amurngoth, however, believe that they created humans in the first place — whose name, in their tongue, means “violent children”, though the Amurngoth aren’t exactly peaceful themselves — but as another character points out, “There is no such thing as truth here. Whatever this monster believes is true, is its own truth, insofar as it’s true to itself.” The Amurngoth have their own myths. The practice of stealing human children, though, is part of their belief that “loss is necessary for understanding”, and loss is one of the themes, I think, of the Mythago Wood books.

Another theme, even in those that don’t feature the Huxleys, is family. In Mythago Wood we were presented with a quietly dysfunctional family: the obsessive, distant father George sacrificing all for his study of the wood, the isolated and eventually suicidal mother Jennifer. The tensions in this set-up played out in exaggerated form thanks to the mythogenic wood’s bringing out into reality the deepest parts of the unconscious, and so there we had the frightening Urscumug as an image of the darkest aspect of the domineering father, and Christian’s transformation from brother to grizzled, rapacious Outsider. In Avilion, the next Huxley generation is far more functional and loving of one another, but it is still dealing with the effects of the past. Gwin, certainly, is most affected, with her need for vengeance on Christian. Jack and Yss’s obsessions can be read as being down to their part-mythago nature, but also because they’re the children of traumatised parents, and a result of that invisible handing down of unresolved conflicts from one generation to the next. Certainly, Yss’s justifications for her need to enter the heart of the wood are vague, and speak to an incompleteness she oughtn’t to feel, with her loving, supportive upbringing:

“I want to go to the centre of the earth because I think I will find there who I am… Because I will find my way home there. I will find someone I care for.”

She and Jack are both (literally) haunted by family ghosts.

Avilion is the last of the Mythago Wood books. Sadly, Robert Holdstock died some months after its release. He’d already been working on other series, but to me it seems likely he might have returned to Ryhope Wood again, even if it was ten or twenty years down the line. But Avilion, as we have it, is a fine conclusion, feeling as though it resolves the story of George, Christian and Steven Huxley — and, though to a lesser extent, Guiwenneth — from that first book. (It’s only Jennifer, the mother, present mostly throughout the series by her absence, that never had her story properly told.) The unspoken, mostly suppressed, tensions in that initial family, made physically explicit by the mythogenic powers of Ryhope Wood, have played out, finding some resolution — as far as such things can resolve — in the next generation, a generation who are half of the human world, half of the wood.

I don’t think every book in the series is an essential read — it could even be reduced to Mythago Wood, Lavondyss, Avilion — but I can’t help feeling that, for Holdstock, every book was nevertheless an essential write, as he explored, and played with, this very strange, fruitful, and constantly-live idea of the forest that brings the archetypes of the collective and personal unconscious into a living reality. It’s been some years since I started reviewing the series on this blog (intending to read them through in one go — but they were just too intense for that), but now I’m tempted to return to that first book, and read it again, seeing how it feels now I know the whole saga…

Currently running at the British Library (until 25th February 2024), the Fantasy: Realms of Imagination exhibition manages to pack a lot into its four rooms. If one of its aims is to cover the breadth of fantasy as a mode of creative expression, they’ve certainly succeeded, as the exhibition covers books, film, TV, art, games (both digital and physical), as well as oddities such as Bernard Sleigh’s “Ancient Mappe of Fairyland” from 1918 (is it art, a story, a game?) which greets you as you enter.

The best thing, for me, was certainly the opportunity to see some original manuscripts. A page from Alan Garner’s Owl Service (written in red ink) was presented alongside an example of the Owl Service plate that inspired it; there was Michael Palin’s notebook in which he was working out the plot for Monty Python and the Holy Grail; and a page from C S Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe manuscript beginning: “This book is about four children whose names are Ann, Martin, Rose and Peter” (alongside Lewis’s own map of Narnia); as well as handwritten pages from Angela Carter, Diana Wynne Jones, and E. Nesbit, among others.

My favourites among the manuscripts, though, were the ones which featured drawings. (Do any but fantasy authors create drawings as they write?) I didn’t know, for instance, that Ursula Le Guin produced illustrations (for herself, I think, rather than publication) for the Earthsea books. Alongside her manuscript for A Wizard of Earthsea was a drawing of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, and a page (perhaps done in ink wash, and certainly easier to make out in a photograph) depicting Tenar’s first sight of Ged in The Tombs of Atuan.

I did know, on the other hand, that Mervyn Peake peppered his Titus Groan and Gormenghast notebooks with drawings, but it was wonderful to see them. The illustration of the Prunesquallors, for instance, was alongside a page on which Peake had written out the dialogue for a scene (with no he said/she saids). There was also a double-page drawing by G K Chesterton of characters from The Man Who Was Thursday (it turns out Chesterton can draw quite well), and Susanna Clarke’s plans of the house from Piranesi.

And speaking of Piranesi, as well as manuscripts, there were printed books on display, among the more impressive of which was an edition of Piranesi’s Carceri, which I was surprised to see showed one plate over a double page spread (I’d have thought they’d print one to a page, to avoid losing details in the fold); and a first edition of William Morris’s highly illuminated Story of the Glittering Plain.

The other thing I love to see up close are paintings, though there were only a few here. Few, but all good ones: for instance, Richard Dadd’s Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke (which reminds me, one aspect of fantasy the exhibition seemed to have missed out on was music — it would have been great to have had Queen’s “Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke” playing through one of the exhibit’s little hold-it-to-your-ear listening devices alongside the painting). What struck me about this painting, which for a long time I had as a poster on my wall, was that it was smaller than I expected — which made the level of detail all the more impressive.

Ditto for an Alan Lee original. In a display that included Gandalf’s staff from the Peter Jackson films and a page of notes from Tolkien commenting on a proposed BBC adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, there was an Alan Lee watercolour depicting the assault on Helm’s Deep. It was, perhaps, little larger than A3, but the level of detail was incredible. Distant figures — millimetres high — were tiny but sharply outlined, and my mind boggled at the level of hand-control Lee must have (as well as the fineness of his brushes).

There were also a couple of Brian Froud pieces from The Dark Crystal, alongside a display of props from the film: costumes worn by the gelflings, along with a shard of the Dark Crystal itself. (It didn’t glow as I approached, so I guess I’m not the chosen one. Or does it mean I’m not a Skeksis? Maybe I’m glad it didn’t glow…)

There were also film loops from Pan’s Labyrinth and Princess Mononoke playing on enormous screens. Also (for some reason on a tiny screen), a scene from Xena: Warrior Princess. The Xena screen, small as it was, was right next to what was surely the most unimpressive display in the exhibit, the case dedicated to sword & sorcery.

This contained three modern paperbacks. Just that. They looked like they were social distancing. This made me wonder if, alongside exploring the breadth of fantasy as a genre (in books, films, art, games, TV), there needed to be some exploration of its sometimes overwhelming mass. An exhibit like this, tastefully showcasing the manuscripts of great works, perhaps needed to switch tack when representing something like sword & sorcery, which, to my mind, needed a case stuffed with examples of trashy-covered paperbacks: so many you’d be overwhelmed. (But perhaps it was difficult, with sword & sorcery, to find covers that would keep the exhibit schoolchild friendly!)

Similarly, with the display of D&D rulebooks, I thought they looked a bit sparse and sterile on their own, and could have done with a few polyhedral dice, dungeon floor-plans, characters sheets, pencils and so on strewn about — an element of playfulness amongst the respectfulness.

I’ve probably missed out a lot in this run-through of the exhibition’s highlights. It seemed quite well-spaced when I was walking through, but now I realise how much it packed in. There was, in addition, an area mocked up like the Red Room from Twin Peaks, scenes from computer games (including one you could play, but I wasn’t about to show up my lack of skills), a Warhammer set-up, some pretty impressive LARP costumes, ballet costumes, and more.

I’ll end, though, with an echo of the last exhibition I covered on this blog, the Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth exhibit that was held at the Bodleian (five years ago, I’m shocked to see). There, I commented on the tiny-ness of some of the handwriting on display, which reached its apogee in a letter from Tolkien’s mother. That, though, is nothing compared to the tiny-ness of the Brönte siblings’ writing in their hand-made books detailing their imaginative world of Glass Town. One tiny, tiny book, filled with tiny, tiny writing defied my attempts to read it, so I have no idea how anyone actually wrote it: