David Lindsay, page 1 of 12

I came to this novel because a brief description I read somewhere reminded me of David Lindsay’s Devil’s Tor. Like it, First Light (1989) is set in the southwest of England (on the Devon/Dorset border), and deals with the uncovering of an ancient tomb somehow linked to the stars. The only other Ackroyd novel I’ve read is his first, Hawksmoor (1985), which I remember as being nightmarish (in the full dream-like sense), with a lot of impressionistic writing as it slips between two times. First Light is different. Its prose is clear, its tone often comic (or at least satirical), and it has a far larger cast of characters. Having read it, the comparison I’d make is not with Devil’s Tor, but another novel from that same decade and also set in the southwest, weaving mysticism with the misty English landscape: John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance.

First Light starts with the discovery of a seemingly unspoiled stone-age tumulus, surrounded by a wide stone circle in Pilgrin Valley, near the village of Colcorum. But although the gradual excavation of the tumulus over a period of several months provides a spine to the novel, its main focus is on a range of characters whose lives touch sometimes only slightly on the dig itself. At the same time as the dig is going on, for instance, astronomer Damian Fall (living in a cottage in Pilgrin Valley) is dealing with the realisation that he has long since ceased to feel the “exaltation” that drew him into the profession—he “once thought of the night sky as my home”, but now feels “like a priest who had lost his belief in God”. Meanwhile, a retired TV and music hall comedian, Joey Hanover, has come to the area, driven by the distant memory of a cottage where he spent his earliest years. Joey wants to find this cottage so he can learn who his parents were—a different and parallel sort of excavation of the past. And while the lead archaeologist, Mark Clare, deals with the dig, his wife, a “brooding, melancholy” young woman who wears a permanent brace on her leg, convinces her husband they should try to adopt a child, only to find that, as she’s registered disabled, it’s most likely she’ll be refused.

And there’s a range of characters who don’t have stories so much as a series of interactions, and form the more comic side of the novel. Foremost among these is Evangeline Tupper, whose position in the Department of the Environment has led to her being associated with the dig, despite her having no real feel for archaeology or, really, the environment. Outwardly overly enthusiastic about everything and everyone, she’s immediately viperish the moment anyone’s back is turned. She’s always commenting on how feminine her partner (always introduced as her “assistant”) Hermione is, but laconic Hermione is clearly not interested in being “feminine” at all. (It’s hard to tell if this is a joke the two share, or some barely-concealed sarcasm on Evangeline’s part.) Then there’s Julian Hill, the site’s environmentalist, full of theories about the significance of what they’re going to find at the dig (he has already written an article on how astronomers were “the leaders or at least the magi of late neolithic society”), and when this doesn’t prove immediately true, says his theory is right, it’s just the evidence that’s wrong.

Locals include Farmer Mint and his adult son, only ever called Boy. The Mints are the main local family, and Farmer Mint lives and works in Pilgrin Valley. Almost a caricature of the closemouthed but knowing local, he and his family turn out to have a knowledge of the tumulus and what it contains that they are not about to share. Then we have Brenda, secretary at the local observatory, who takes everything said to her as a suggestive remark; antiques shop owner and amateur actor Augustine Fraicheur, who camply proclaims the village to be utterly decadent compared to the “innocence” of London, and hints at dark goings-on; Lola Trout, an old woman whose dialogue is almost entirely comprised of profanity; and Michael, known as the Woodlander, a homeless man, intensely shy, who has taken it upon himself to be the guardian of the region’s flora and fauna.

While Powys’s tone and style in A Glastonbury Romance embrace every character and story, and pass effortlessly into his characters’ deepest thoughts and feelings, Ackroyd’s style in First Light seems to have two starkly different modes. He has a light, distant, satirical tone when dealing with this more comical characters, such as Evangeline, the Mints, Augustine and Brenda. But three of his characters—Mark, Kathleen, and Damian—are loaded with melancholy, and when we’re with them, it’s a heavy, elegiac tone that takes over. It’s as though the one genuine feeling of any depth Ackroyd is presenting us with is sadness; anything else is light and flighty and ironic. (Oddly, both tones work. The melancholy chapters can be genuinely moving, and the comic chapters can be amusing—I’d never say laugh-out-loud funny, but certainly amusing. It’s just odd to find these two tones, and nothing between, existing together in the same novel.)

There aren’t many moments when the two modes interact. When Brenda attempts her “Oh, you are awful!” style on deeply depressed Damian, it’s like water on an oilskin. The one exception, the character who seems able to exist in both worlds, is Joey Hanover. While he never plumbs the ultimately distressing depths of Damian and Kathleen, he at least has an inner need, presumably driven by some sort of unhappiness, to uncover the mystery of his birth. But, while Damian and Kathleen have no happy ending, Joey at least achieves his, and finds himself a new family in the process. He always has a song and a joke, whatever the situation, and I can’t help wondering if he’s Ackroyd’s example of a “survivor” character: just as ultra-cynical McReady is the perfect survivor for the environment of John Carpenter’s The Thing, so an ex-music hall comedian, armed with a stock of popular songs, is, somehow, the perfect survivor for the strange emotional environment of First Light, with its odd mix of human disconnection and distant yearning.

Mark, on the other hand, has the most hard-won story. At first craving some vision that will unveil the secrets of Pilgrin Valley’s ancient past, he’s later more desperately driven by the need to find some meaning in it all—not just the dig, but the tragedy that hits his life. Damian’s assistant Alec provides him with a clue, when talking about time and the patterns it makes: “I suppose that we could only see the pattern if we were outside it. And in that case we would have ceased to exist…” But Mark nevertheless manages to find some meaning in it all with the notion that we contain within ourselves the stuff of dead stars, linking each of us to the distant heavens, just as the dead within the tomb seem to be linked to distant Aldebaran. (The novel is all about striving to find meaningful, preferably human, connections: to other people, to the past, to the stars. It’s just that the failures to do so feel more profoundly felt than the few successes.)

It’s not as big or all-embracing a novel as A Glastonbury Romance, and I think there are hints that Ackroyd would never write such a book as Powys’s. While Powys brings in so many different characters, viewpoints, experiences and outlooks, and seems genuinely capable of grasping the whole of life in all its many facets, First Light is limited to those two tones, the satirical and the melancholy, and shows some repetition in its band of characters. Evangeline, as I’ve said, is overly enthusiastic but catty the moment anyone’s back is turned; so is the dig’s “finds” supervisor, Martha Wells, and so is Augustine Fraicheur. Either Ackroyd is trying to tell us something about how he believes people are, or he’s found a limit to his comic range.

Nevertheless, it’s an interesting novel, perhaps as much for its flaws as its many little moments of insight. It’s certainly not trying to say something as grand as either Devil’s Tor or A Glastonbury Romance, but is, I think, paddling in the shallows of the same great body of water those two plunge into: the matter of mystical Britain, and the broader, deeper stuff of human life.

A couple of years ago, I decided to write up the research I’d gathered about the life of David Lindsay, the author of A Voyage to Arcturus, into what I assumed would be a short booklet, an expanded version of the biographical essay I’d had on my website about Lindsay, The Violet Apple.org, for several years. This was basically because the main research resources I had at my disposal—family history records, newspaper archives, and so on—weren’t providing much in the way of new information, and I wanted to put a line under my biographical research and move onto something else. The result, though, was a modest book rather than a short booklet—60,000 words or so, plus footnotes, index, etc.—which I’ve finally got to the point of being able to publish, as I Dream With Open Eyes: The Life of David Lindsay, Author of A Voyage to Arcturus.

It was my brother’s extensive family history research that started me off. Demonstrating the sort of records you could find, he showed me the 1881 census record that included a five-year-old David Lindsay, living with his family (and one domestic servant), in Lewisham. Even though it was just a set of tabulated data, it felt like I was getting a time-travelling glimpse of the family, lifting the roof off their house and seeing them inside. At the time, due to a few errors in other books on Lindsay, there was a little ambiguity about his actual birth year and place (England, or Scotland?, 1876 or 1878?), so, when I ordered a copy of his birth certificate soon after, it felt good to be able to put on my website a definite date and place (3rd March 1876, in Blackheath, England) for his birth. After that, I started getting into doing my own research in online family history archives (with plenty of help from my brother, alerting me to other types of records, such as the Army Pension Record), the British Newspaper Archive, and so on.

My first aim on the BNA was to affix a definite date for the disappearance of David Lindsay’s father, Alexander, who walked out on the family without telling them (going to Canada, it turned out), with the result that for a while they weren’t sure what happened to him. When I found a newspaper notice relating to his disappearance, it was one of those rare events where the result gives much more information than you’re expecting (and also raises more questions). It came on about the thirtieth page of search results, after looking at every reference to “Lindsay” in their local paper, the Kentish Mercury. The odd thing is, once I found it, I found it in a load of other places, too, as the notice was reprinted throughout the country:

But this also points to a limitation of public research archives. There’s no way to know why this man disappeared (or even to be sure he went to Canada—he doesn’t seem to be listed on the available census records, but of course may have been using a different name).

Unlike H P Lovecraft, Lindsay didn’t write many letters, and didn’t reveal much about himself in the ones that have been published. There’s an awful lot that just will never be known about him. In a review of a previous book about Lindsay, Bernard Sellin’s Life & Works of David Lindsay (in which the life part is only one chapter), Gary K Wolfe noted that while “Readers of A Voyage to Arcturus are almost inevitably intrigued by the kind of man who could have produced such a strange book”, Sellin’s Life & Works doesn’t “do much to put our curiosity to rest… [or] substantially explain his fiction”. I don’t think anything’s going to come along to explain Lindsay’s fiction from a biographical perspective—the fiction has to be taken as an expression of his intense inner life, and all the evidence that we’re going to have of it—so I Dream With Open Eyes is basically an attempt to tie as many facts and figures to the man as I can, with no promise to “explain” the fiction. (Okay, I do make a few comments, but I really want to write something separate, and at length, on Lindsay’s fiction some day.) Perhaps someone with more resources can take things further. If so, I hope they’ll find the research I’ve done helpful.

That said, who knows what will turn up? Shortly after finishing the manuscript and preparing it for publication, Mark Valentine published a piece that revealed Lindsay had, in fact, written at least two novels before A Voyage to Arcturus, and attempted to place them with a publisher. (This came, ironically, a couple of weeks after R B Russell opened a post on the Tartarus Press blog—having recently published a biography of T Lobsang Rampa—with: “It is inevitable that the publication of a biography prompts new material to appear.”)

I Dream With Open Eyes strays a little bit from being merely a biography of David Lindsay. I take a good look at the reviews his books received in his lifetime (and I think these go to prove not that he was misunderstood in his day and we get him better now, but that he was always misunderstood, and sometimes hated, but he also always had people who liked what he did—he’s very much a Marmite kind of writer—and this is as true today as it was in 1920). I also devote a chapter to Lindsay’s brother Alexander, and a long chapter to the afterlife of Lindsay’s works in the century following his death. In that sense, this is as much a biography of Lindsay’s works as it is of the man himself.

I Dream With Open Eyes is available now as a hardback. I’ve also uploaded it to Archive.org, where it can be read online or referred to for free. I’ll probably follow it with paperback and ebook versions at some point.

Conceived of while writing his previous novel, Barker’s children’s fantasy The Thief of Always came out in 1992, a postprandial belch after the massive banquet that was Imajica. As this was in the days before the Potter-powered YA boom, and Barker was very much considered an adult author, he licensed the book to HarperCollins for a dollar (a silver dollar in one telling, half a sovereign in another); it not only sold well, but has been widely translated, and has several times been touted for a film adaptation, either animated or live action.

It starts with ten year old Harvey Swick bored in his bedroom, wishing away the dull month of February, when the grinning Rictus (with a smile “wide enough to shame a shark”) flies in through the window Peter Pan-style. He offers to take Harvey to the Holiday House, “where the days are always sunny… and the nights are full of wonders”. This House, hidden behind a magical wall of fog, offers its guests the best of each season every day: spring-like mornings, sunny summer afternoons, Halloween each evening, and Christmas every night, complete with the perfect gift (on his first night, Harvey gets the wooden toy ark his father made for him years ago, which was at some point lost). There are two other children there: Wendell, with whom Harvey spends his days making a treehouse, and the more retiring Lulu who, after she shows Harvey her dolls’ house populated with tiny lizards, seems to spend most of her time hanging around the gloomy lake at the back of the House, with its strange, darkness-dwelling fish.

There are a few hints that everything is not so perfect. The man behind all this, Mr Hood, is never seen, though Rictus and his colleagues (the jittery Jive, and the sluggish Marr), and the cook Mrs Griffin, often refer to him, making it clear he not only knows everything that goes on in the House, but “every dream in your head” too. And Mrs Griffin warns Harvey that Hood “doesn’t like inquisitive guests”. Rictus, on first flying through Harvey’s bedroom window, invited him to ask all the questions he wanted, but as soon as he did, accused him of being “too inquisitive for your own good”. “Questions rot the mind!”, he warned—a telling echo of The Prisoner’s “Questions are a burden on others.” Harvey, though, quite naturally wants to know all there is about this evidently magical place.

After Wendell plays a Halloween trick on him, Harvey is determined to get his own back, and with the help of Marr, who can change people’s shape, allows himself to be turned into a bat-winged vampire monster, to swoop down on Wendell and give him a real scare. Rictus and Marr egg him on, to turn it into a real attack; Harvey fights the temptation, but genuinely frightens the boy. The next day, Wendell tries to leave, but finds he can’t get through the wall of fog. Meanwhile, Lulu, who has been hiding away for some time, calls goodbye to Harvey from behind a tree, saying she doesn’t want him to look at her. He realises she has slowly been transforming into one of the fish that haunt that gloomy lake, and has now gone to join them. Is this the fate awaiting all of them—those, that is, who aren’t claimed by the fourth of Rictus’s colleagues, Carna, who seems to be quite capable of killing children who try too hard to leave the House?

The basic idea, of being in a place that seems like paradise but is in fact not just a trap, but a downhill slope to losing one’s humanity, is as old as the Lotos Eaters episode in The Odyssey—and is quite often paired, as here, with something of the Circe episode, too, as for instance when Pinocchio starts turning into a donkey on Pleasure Island, or Chihiro’s parents transform into pigs in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. It has always felt a familiar plot-line, but when I come to list examples, I usually can’t find as many as I’d expect. There’s elements of it in Ramsey Campbell’s Incarnate, and it’s the plot of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, but I always feel there’s some major examples out there I’m not thinking of. (And it would be quite instructive to compare Gaiman and Barker, though I’d consistently come out on the Barker side as a deeper and more artistically authentic creator.)

The uber-example, for me, though, is David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, and there are a few resonances between Lindsay’s Crystalman and Barker’s Mr Hood. Both, for example, are explicitly called thieves (Krag calls Crystalman “a common thief”, while Hood is the most obvious subject of the novel’s title), and both are seen at least once as enormous faces (Crystalman under one of his many aliases, Faceny, who is “all face”, Hood in the House’s attic), with an implication that this is because, like Hood, there is “a terrible emptiness inside” them, and the face is, ultimately, all there is. And Hood accuses Harvey of having “brought pain into my paradise”, just as the one fly in Crystalman’s ointment is the presence of pain, as embodied by Krag—the one reminder that pleasure is only a part of human experience, not the whole of it, and so anything that excludes pain must be a lie. Barker has expressed his admiration for A Voyage to Arcturus (calling it “a masterpiece… an extraordinary work, if deeply, deeply flawed”), and I was pleased to hear a perhaps unintentional Lindsay quote from him in an interview, where he says “The most important part of me [is] the part which dreams with his eyes open”—echoing the “I dream with open eyes” line from Arcturus.

The Thief of Always wasn’t Barker’s first foray into children’s literature. He’d actually made a couple of unpublished attempts before The Books of Blood (something called The Candle in the Cloud in 1971, and The Adventures of Mr Maximillian Bacchus and His Travelling Circus with some friends a few years later), and he’d written some plays for a youth theatre. Two of his inspirations were Peter Pan (which Barker has called “the book of my childhood”), and CS Lewis, but I was pleased to find that, unlike Lewis or, say, Roald Dahl, Barker doesn’t pick on one of his kids to be a moral lesson for the others, as with Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or the many sticky ends met with in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Wendell, who is evidently a little more greedy, gullible and cowardly than Harvey—though all within acceptable child limits—seems the perfect set-up for this, but Harvey and he turn out to be genuine friends, and there was no feeling from Barker of an adult tut-tutting when Wendell couldn’t quite see things through in the ultimate confrontation with Hood.

The Barkerian touch, here, is that Harvey wins in the end thanks not to his moral goodness, but because he’s found a little of Hood’s darkness within himself, and learns how to turn it on this “Vampire Lord” and his deceptive House. There are echoes of other Barker works here too, such as the overall feeling of a Faustian pact; the quartet of Rictus, Jive, Marr and Carna feeling a little like the four Cenobites (both are sets of unnaturally altered humans with supernatural powers, both are three men and a woman, and both feature one member with a ridiculously fixed grin); Rictus, in addition, has the salesman-like patter of Shadwell from Weaveworld; and Mr Hood is first met in a dusty attic, giving it the feel of the lurking supernatural presence of the resurrected Frank in Hellraiser. Barker himself has said that The Thief of Always has some of the same themes as Imajica: “The concerns about the darkness, the secret self; the ideas about some ultimate enemy who is in fact quite close to one’s self.” There’s no sense at all that, in writing for children, Barker is being less Barker.

(He was often, at this time, saying in interviews from Weaveworld on that he’d moved on from horror to fantasy, but there’s a lot of darkness in The Thief of Always, and I have to say it’s in the darker fantastic that his power as an imaginative writer lies.)

The risk with a children’s fantasy about the dangers of escapism is that it might turn into a critique of the genre it’s written in, but Barker, very much a pro-imagination writer—and also, as already said, not of the finger-wagging type—here presents a much more holistic view: “if we embrace Neverland too strongly, we are forever sucking our thumbs, but if we die without knowing Neverland, we’ve lost our power to dream…”, as he’s said in an interview. Harvey is an imaginative lad, and ultimately his imagination is part of the solution, not the problem. Being lured in by the apparent pleasures of the Holiday House is more like a refusal to grow up than a retreat into one’s inner world, and the best children’s literature is usually about learning to open up to the wider adult world. And Barker, a self-confessed “inclusionist” in all his writing, sees imagination, and darkness, as part of the wider, adult world, too.