L P Hartley's "Complete Macabre Tales"
Oct. 5th, 2006 03:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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darkling_talesOver the past year I've enjoyed two Tartarus Press collections, The Complete Macabre Tales of L P Hartley and Tarnhelm - The Best Supernatural Stories of Hugh Walpole. Here are my thoughts on the Hartley anthology (a Walpole review will come later, as I don't want to bore you all with too much Tartarus pimping in one post...)
Although Hartley’s fame in the UK is due mainly to his novels of social observation with tints of modern gothic (“The Go-Between” being currently his best-known work), his whole writing life was punctuated by volumes of ghost stories; he was no mere dabbler in the genre, and some of these tales stand up besides the output of H Russell Wakefield or E F Benson. At his best he combines a razor-keen insight into the workings of English pre-war society with a gift for the outlandish and the horrific. Not all his stories involve the supernatural - in fact two of my favourites, “The Killing-Bottle” and “The Travelling Grave” feature no traditional phantoms - but they are a million miles away from banal, transporting the reader into worlds so bizarre that in retrospect you almost can’t believe that human evil , insanity and fate are the only dark forces involved! And indeed in those tales which do have recourse to the Other Side, the way the worlds of the dead and the living, the awake and the dreaming, dovetail seamlessly in a believable way is one of Hartley’s great strengths.
Generally speaking, Hartley’s world is that of country house parties where uninvited guests gatecrash bedrooms and dances, ornate topiary gardens where it is not wise to dally after sundown, and ancient Venetian palazzos where the whispers of the past mingle with the lapping of the canals to lull the unwary expatriate to a grim destiny. However, Hartley also handles less exalted milieus in stories touching on the quiet horrors of working- and middle-class lives, and his dissections of the human soul are too spot-on to allow the reader to lapse too far into cosy nostalgia, though his glimpses of a lost world of obsolete privileges and problems are undeniably charming at times. Indeed, I found that after reading four or five of his stories in a row the unrelenting savagery and dark humour of his world can become a little oppressive (one or two of the tales even struck me as being unduly sadistic - so much for the allegedly blasé attitude of the modern reader!)
Anyway, there are very few wrong notes in this fine collection, though some of the stories (mainly those concerning the neuroses of middle-aged bachelors) tend to blur into one another somewhat. There are on the other hand many real gems - “The Pampas-Clump”, “W.S.”, “The Two Vaynes” and “Podolo” ranking as my favourites, along with the two I mentioned above. All these stories have the striking imagery of nightmare combined with psychological realism and will stay in my mind for a long time. Add to this the production values for which Tartarus are renowned and you have a book well worth sticking on your Christmas list - though it would certainly be nice if a cheaper edition were available!
Although Hartley’s fame in the UK is due mainly to his novels of social observation with tints of modern gothic (“The Go-Between” being currently his best-known work), his whole writing life was punctuated by volumes of ghost stories; he was no mere dabbler in the genre, and some of these tales stand up besides the output of H Russell Wakefield or E F Benson. At his best he combines a razor-keen insight into the workings of English pre-war society with a gift for the outlandish and the horrific. Not all his stories involve the supernatural - in fact two of my favourites, “The Killing-Bottle” and “The Travelling Grave” feature no traditional phantoms - but they are a million miles away from banal, transporting the reader into worlds so bizarre that in retrospect you almost can’t believe that human evil , insanity and fate are the only dark forces involved! And indeed in those tales which do have recourse to the Other Side, the way the worlds of the dead and the living, the awake and the dreaming, dovetail seamlessly in a believable way is one of Hartley’s great strengths.
Generally speaking, Hartley’s world is that of country house parties where uninvited guests gatecrash bedrooms and dances, ornate topiary gardens where it is not wise to dally after sundown, and ancient Venetian palazzos where the whispers of the past mingle with the lapping of the canals to lull the unwary expatriate to a grim destiny. However, Hartley also handles less exalted milieus in stories touching on the quiet horrors of working- and middle-class lives, and his dissections of the human soul are too spot-on to allow the reader to lapse too far into cosy nostalgia, though his glimpses of a lost world of obsolete privileges and problems are undeniably charming at times. Indeed, I found that after reading four or five of his stories in a row the unrelenting savagery and dark humour of his world can become a little oppressive (one or two of the tales even struck me as being unduly sadistic - so much for the allegedly blasé attitude of the modern reader!)
Anyway, there are very few wrong notes in this fine collection, though some of the stories (mainly those concerning the neuroses of middle-aged bachelors) tend to blur into one another somewhat. There are on the other hand many real gems - “The Pampas-Clump”, “W.S.”, “The Two Vaynes” and “Podolo” ranking as my favourites, along with the two I mentioned above. All these stories have the striking imagery of nightmare combined with psychological realism and will stay in my mind for a long time. Add to this the production values for which Tartarus are renowned and you have a book well worth sticking on your Christmas list - though it would certainly be nice if a cheaper edition were available!
