"Our Lady Of Darkness" by Fritz Leiber
Mar. 2nd, 2007 02:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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darkling_talesI was recently lucky enough to bag a Fritz Leiber paperback from Purple Books (via Abebooks) - Our Lady Of Darkness. It's a strange tale (even by the standards of the genre) about a widower and recovering alcoholic, Franz Westen, who comes upon two odd books in a second-hand dealer's. One is a weird blend of the occult and science titled Megapolisomancy: A New Science Of Cities, written by a malevolent eccentric Thibaut de Castries, and the other appears to be an account of de Castries' bizarre practises and worsening temper, handwritten by no less a person than Clark Ashton Smith! Trying to soothe his mind after the tragic death of his wife Daisy, Franz dives into the works, only to find himself increasingly distracted by the antics of an indistinct creature atop Corona Heights, a hill he surveys from his San Francisco flat. He pops over to the Heights to investigate, which is when the trouble starts!
I think this is a pretty amazing book. The sheer diversity of the subject matter sets it apart from pretty much any other work in the genre that I've ever read. The imaginary topic of megapolisomancy is fascinating by itself - it's a cryptic 'neoPythagorean' science by which are measured and predicted the evil effects of the cities that cover the modern world in an 'electro-mephitic city-stuff' and seek to stamp out life, first on this planet ,then through the whole universe! But Leiber also weaves in a good deal about the benign power of music, its relation to mathematics, the curious cults and personalities of the 20s San Fran intelligentsia (which suffered from a peculiarly high suicide rate, for reasons which are explored in the book) and, perhaps most interestingly of all, the 'secret spaces' in old buildings 'that weren't really hidden but were never noticed'. The book's a Fortean paradise! (For a taste of the thematic scope, you just need to look at this set of annotations...)
It would be easy to lose sight of the plot in such a whirl of interconnecting ideas, but luckily Leiber keeps the reader hooked with a good, scary haunting that owes much to M R James (who is quoted by Franz on several occasions!) Rosemary Pardoe explores the James angle very well in her essay Our Lady Of Darkness: A Jamesian Classic (and while some have deplored the tendency of Ghosts and Scholars contributors to attribute too much influence to James, Pardoe is bang on the money here! Careful of the spoiler at the end though.) The flapping, bounding 'paramental' (a 'pale brown thing' that Westen glimpses from across the city and which looms ever larger in his life as the novel goes on) is also inspired by de Quincey's Lady Of Darkness, and this mix of influences - Jamesian tightness and restraint with decadent splendour and unease - gives the novel a unique flavour.
The novel does have its flaws: coming to it straight from a re-reading of some John Buchan and Aickman ghost stories, I was struck by the comparative clumsiness with which Leiber describes the streets of San Francisco. Some readers may also be irritated by the way he shoehorns so many real-life characters into the novel - not just Ashton Smith, but Dashiell Hammet, Ambrose Bierce and god knows how many other cameos. He doesn't really develop the characters either, and at times I felt like he was wheeling them onto the stage to wow the reader with famous names and to slap a cheap topcoat of realism onto the proceedings in a quick, lazy way. When things got particularly bad I had the horrible feeling Westen was paving the way for the soul-destroying hackwork of Neil Gaiman.
The thing that most spoilt my enjoyment of the novel was Leiber's trouble with sex. He often tries to write about it, and he rarely manages to do anything other than make the reader cringe - time has not been kind to his faintly embarrassing blend of would-be-urbanity (which just looks like prurience from where I'm sitting) and pre-war coyness. Despite having just started an affair with his downstairs neighbour, Westen has a creepy habit of arranging the books he's reading on his bed into the shape of a woman, which he jokingly calls his 'Scholar's Mistress' ; he caresses it and murmurs endearments to it throughout the novel. There is nothing to suggest the author finds this in any way dodgy, and I was reminded of Leiber's somewhat ambiguous take on women (he seems to appreciate women and support feminism, but doesn't quite get either, and his best-known novel Conjure Wife is reputed to be ruined by sexism.)
Things really slide downhill when he brings in as a secondary character a sensualist swinger called Byers, who lives in a place called Beaver Street with a - sigh - Oriental concubine. The fact that Westen finds Byers slightly ridiculous is not enough to prevent the whole Byers section of the novel from drowning in unintentional humour. And sadly, I found the novel's climax to hover dangerously at the edge of real silliness, and horribly reminiscent of Philip Caveney's rubbish shocker Bad To The Bone.
However, none of these drawbacks seriously detract from the book's impact - even the weak ending can't dwarf the power of Leiber's flood of ideas and the pure evil of his ghostly creations. Get hold of a copy if you can!
I'd also be interested to hear your views on Conjure Wife if any of you have read it :)
I think this is a pretty amazing book. The sheer diversity of the subject matter sets it apart from pretty much any other work in the genre that I've ever read. The imaginary topic of megapolisomancy is fascinating by itself - it's a cryptic 'neoPythagorean' science by which are measured and predicted the evil effects of the cities that cover the modern world in an 'electro-mephitic city-stuff' and seek to stamp out life, first on this planet ,then through the whole universe! But Leiber also weaves in a good deal about the benign power of music, its relation to mathematics, the curious cults and personalities of the 20s San Fran intelligentsia (which suffered from a peculiarly high suicide rate, for reasons which are explored in the book) and, perhaps most interestingly of all, the 'secret spaces' in old buildings 'that weren't really hidden but were never noticed'. The book's a Fortean paradise! (For a taste of the thematic scope, you just need to look at this set of annotations...)
It would be easy to lose sight of the plot in such a whirl of interconnecting ideas, but luckily Leiber keeps the reader hooked with a good, scary haunting that owes much to M R James (who is quoted by Franz on several occasions!) Rosemary Pardoe explores the James angle very well in her essay Our Lady Of Darkness: A Jamesian Classic (and while some have deplored the tendency of Ghosts and Scholars contributors to attribute too much influence to James, Pardoe is bang on the money here! Careful of the spoiler at the end though.) The flapping, bounding 'paramental' (a 'pale brown thing' that Westen glimpses from across the city and which looms ever larger in his life as the novel goes on) is also inspired by de Quincey's Lady Of Darkness, and this mix of influences - Jamesian tightness and restraint with decadent splendour and unease - gives the novel a unique flavour.
The novel does have its flaws: coming to it straight from a re-reading of some John Buchan and Aickman ghost stories, I was struck by the comparative clumsiness with which Leiber describes the streets of San Francisco. Some readers may also be irritated by the way he shoehorns so many real-life characters into the novel - not just Ashton Smith, but Dashiell Hammet, Ambrose Bierce and god knows how many other cameos. He doesn't really develop the characters either, and at times I felt like he was wheeling them onto the stage to wow the reader with famous names and to slap a cheap topcoat of realism onto the proceedings in a quick, lazy way. When things got particularly bad I had the horrible feeling Westen was paving the way for the soul-destroying hackwork of Neil Gaiman.
The thing that most spoilt my enjoyment of the novel was Leiber's trouble with sex. He often tries to write about it, and he rarely manages to do anything other than make the reader cringe - time has not been kind to his faintly embarrassing blend of would-be-urbanity (which just looks like prurience from where I'm sitting) and pre-war coyness. Despite having just started an affair with his downstairs neighbour, Westen has a creepy habit of arranging the books he's reading on his bed into the shape of a woman, which he jokingly calls his 'Scholar's Mistress' ; he caresses it and murmurs endearments to it throughout the novel. There is nothing to suggest the author finds this in any way dodgy, and I was reminded of Leiber's somewhat ambiguous take on women (he seems to appreciate women and support feminism, but doesn't quite get either, and his best-known novel Conjure Wife is reputed to be ruined by sexism.)
Things really slide downhill when he brings in as a secondary character a sensualist swinger called Byers, who lives in a place called Beaver Street with a - sigh - Oriental concubine. The fact that Westen finds Byers slightly ridiculous is not enough to prevent the whole Byers section of the novel from drowning in unintentional humour. And sadly, I found the novel's climax to hover dangerously at the edge of real silliness, and horribly reminiscent of Philip Caveney's rubbish shocker Bad To The Bone.
However, none of these drawbacks seriously detract from the book's impact - even the weak ending can't dwarf the power of Leiber's flood of ideas and the pure evil of his ghostly creations. Get hold of a copy if you can!
I'd also be interested to hear your views on Conjure Wife if any of you have read it :)
