Review of "Midnight Sun"
Mar. 15th, 2005 03:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joysilence posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
darkling_talesI recently finished Midnight Sun, a novel by the British author Ramsey Campbell. It tells the story of Ben Stirling, who has overcome a very unhappy childhood to become a successful children's author and father of a small, charming family. After the death of an Aunt, Ben is driven to move back to his birthplace in the moors above Leeds, along with his beloved wife and two well-behaved children. But once the family have settled into their new home in time for winter, certain dark forces reach out for Ben, who gradually discovers that his explorer great-grandfather Edward once brought something very unpleasant back from a journey to the frozen wastes of the Arctic...
I know that some of you here are less than fond of Ramsey Campbell, and I would be the last person to deny that his writing can be sloppy, especially when it comes to the novel format. I have read a few of his novels - The Influence, The House On Nazareth hill and The Hungry Moon spring to mind - but found them all rather hard to finish. The prose of Campbell's longer work can be rather flat and lacking in "personality", and he often seems to rely on endless repetitions and reworkings of a given theme to create a feeling of foreboding. In skilful hands, this can work, but in such cases there is a thin line between the menacing and the tedious which Campbell unfortunately crosses many times.
I also find Campbell has a tendency to "lay it on thick": in some of his novels, anxiety and nastiness are implied in every sentence through the careful use of words, until one almost feels as though one is choking. Now, this may sound like the hallmark of a good horror author, but you soon notice that such relentless references to the bad things in life become rather cloying - there is never, say, enough humour, or enough beauty, to clean the palate, so that by the time the real horrors kick in, the reader has become jaded.
However, I did rather enjoy Midnight Sun. It was published in 1990, and is less hampered by the faults mentioned above than his earlier works. Though there is a theme to the novel - snow, the eternal forest and the feeling of cold -
Campbell works it a whole lot better than usual, and his descriptions of the wintry moors, leaden skies and winding forest paths are not devoid of that beauty which is necessary for true "pagan horror" to succeed. And it makes a change from dirty canals and graffitti. Readers of Campbell's work may be more used to his urban horror, but here he shows considerable understanding of the wonders and terrors that lurk in Nature.
The novel's characters are also quite likeable. Ben's wife and children are appealing, but not too sugary. I tend to dislike young children per se, and the sweet-but-spunky kiddies of a King or a Koontz book always make me want to throw up, but even I found myself growing fond of Campbell's young creations! The tug-of-war between Ben's wife and kids on the one hand, and his grisly forebears on the other, is in fact central to the novel's power.
By and large, I found the novel pretty readable, and the dreamlike visions of horror that unfurl are, if not exactly terrifying, at least pretty unnerving. There are some good, original, strange scenes that I feel will remain in my mind for some time, which is the acid test of weird fiction. The reader is left unsure how much of the horror is a figment of Ben's mind, how much is group hysteria, and how much reality - the scene of mass "hallucination" (where the whole village sees snowflakes whirling in the night sky) outside the school is a particularly good illustration of this. It is not just a case of horror and cosy reality existing side by side, for contrast: it really becomes impossible to separate the two in this novel. If I wanted to introduce someone to Campbell's work, I'd still go for his shorter fiction, but this is definitely my favourite of his novels.
I know that some of you here are less than fond of Ramsey Campbell, and I would be the last person to deny that his writing can be sloppy, especially when it comes to the novel format. I have read a few of his novels - The Influence, The House On Nazareth hill and The Hungry Moon spring to mind - but found them all rather hard to finish. The prose of Campbell's longer work can be rather flat and lacking in "personality", and he often seems to rely on endless repetitions and reworkings of a given theme to create a feeling of foreboding. In skilful hands, this can work, but in such cases there is a thin line between the menacing and the tedious which Campbell unfortunately crosses many times.
I also find Campbell has a tendency to "lay it on thick": in some of his novels, anxiety and nastiness are implied in every sentence through the careful use of words, until one almost feels as though one is choking. Now, this may sound like the hallmark of a good horror author, but you soon notice that such relentless references to the bad things in life become rather cloying - there is never, say, enough humour, or enough beauty, to clean the palate, so that by the time the real horrors kick in, the reader has become jaded.
However, I did rather enjoy Midnight Sun. It was published in 1990, and is less hampered by the faults mentioned above than his earlier works. Though there is a theme to the novel - snow, the eternal forest and the feeling of cold -
Campbell works it a whole lot better than usual, and his descriptions of the wintry moors, leaden skies and winding forest paths are not devoid of that beauty which is necessary for true "pagan horror" to succeed. And it makes a change from dirty canals and graffitti. Readers of Campbell's work may be more used to his urban horror, but here he shows considerable understanding of the wonders and terrors that lurk in Nature.
The novel's characters are also quite likeable. Ben's wife and children are appealing, but not too sugary. I tend to dislike young children per se, and the sweet-but-spunky kiddies of a King or a Koontz book always make me want to throw up, but even I found myself growing fond of Campbell's young creations! The tug-of-war between Ben's wife and kids on the one hand, and his grisly forebears on the other, is in fact central to the novel's power.
By and large, I found the novel pretty readable, and the dreamlike visions of horror that unfurl are, if not exactly terrifying, at least pretty unnerving. There are some good, original, strange scenes that I feel will remain in my mind for some time, which is the acid test of weird fiction. The reader is left unsure how much of the horror is a figment of Ben's mind, how much is group hysteria, and how much reality - the scene of mass "hallucination" (where the whole village sees snowflakes whirling in the night sky) outside the school is a particularly good illustration of this. It is not just a case of horror and cosy reality existing side by side, for contrast: it really becomes impossible to separate the two in this novel. If I wanted to introduce someone to Campbell's work, I'd still go for his shorter fiction, but this is definitely my favourite of his novels.
