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darkling_talesThis Christmas I was thrilled by my sister's present of the M John Harrison novel of supernatural horror and magic gone wrong, The Course Of The Heart. It's a reworking of the author's story The Great God Pan, which is named after the Machen tale, for reasons which soon become obvious, though it's by no means a rip-off! It deals with the travails of three people - a couple, Pam and Lucas, and the anonymous narrator - who as students took part in a magical ritual. Guided by an older man called Yaxley, they hoped to spend some quality time in the 'pleroma' (a sort of gnostic higher realm, the experience of which is normally denied to humans.) But the pleroma turned out to differ wildly from the students' expectations, and each returned to the real world carrying a different burden. These vary from the unnerving to the downright horrific, and the ways in which the three friends cope with them (and cope with each other) form the backbone of the novel.
Fans of the book warned me that I wasn't in for an easy ride, and they were right. Like the original short story, The Course... is almost unbearably bleak at times, with several of the characters appearing truly damned in a Gothic way that no longer seems to exist much in modern fiction. The apparitions that plague the unfortunate Pam and Lucas chill the reader in a number of ways - indirectly via the material and psychological damage they inflict, as glimpses in the corner of one's eye, or as in-yer-face fiends (and it's greatly to Harrison's credit that his creations are just as scary when standing right in front of you as when they are merely hinted at.) A sense of loneliness pervades the novel, as the three friends try to support each other in the face of repeated reminders that each is trapped in their own unique Hell. Yaxley - with whom the narrator is forced to liaise in an attempt to help Pam and Lucas - is despicable, with his bottomless contempt for the unfortunate trio and his refusal to show his whole hand of cards; he has no scruples about abusing people in frightful ways as part of the further rituals he carries out over the years.
That said, although the novel is unusually grim, it boasts many moments of loveliness - in particular the description of the narrator's holiday amid the Summer-lush moors and woodland of Cornwall - and the horror is leavened by frequent bursts of humour, albeit of a savage nature. I was also fascinated by the personal mythology of a lost city called the 'Coeur' which Pam and Lucas devise over many years to explain the inexplicable and provide themselves with a glimmer of hope; they originally started to believe in the mythos because they had to in order to remain sane, but have gradually come to view it as completely real. And not all the spirits are malevolent - the 'green woman' who appears to the likeable and generally 'normal' narrator periodically throughout his life is a beautiful creature, a true pagan goddess in the Machen mould.
This is not a book that you will necessarily 'get' on the first read, and its prose is both dense and at times infuriatingly cryptic. Pam and Lucas' talks about the Coeur are especially tough going as they involve leaps back and forth in history and stories within stories in ways that don't always add much to the book. Most of the time, however, the novel's complexity is not through any fault in Harrison's writing technique (he's a brilliant stylist) but simply because he's dealing with a strange world that only just overlaps with our own (in the conscious mind, that is - in reality the various layers of existence are entwined and inseparable.) The Course... is also free of the wishy-washy, insubstantial feel shared by many novels that deal with things ethereal - each time I began to lose myself in the airy, frustrating intangibles of mystical theory, I was brought sharply down to Earth by, for instance, the narrator's trip to WH Smith to buy stamps, or the pisspoor meals on offer at the roadside Happy Eater Yaxley has to visit as part of an evil scheme. All the characters struggle with their everyday life, and Yaxley's Crowleian power-tripping is described in a sardonic way that makes him a figure of fun who struggles to mask his own failures, while miraculously allowing him to remain threatening as all Hell.
Obviously, the novel has no tidy ending, and the loose ends can be quite maddening if you think about them for too long! The suspension of disbelief is almost total, partly because Harrison provides no glib answers, and for a while after finishing the book I felt that the foundations of my world had been unsettled. Many horror novelists nowadays deal in the dreamlike and the logic of nightmare, but very few manage to create such an air of mystery while keeping the novel anchored firmly in a believable modern world. China Mieville says it all when he writes 'That M John harrison is not a Nobel Laureate proves the bankruptcy of the literary establishment.'
If you want to know more, check out this Emerald City review! I also enjoyed the Infinity Plus interview with the author (which also contains links to some of his online fiction.)
Fans of the book warned me that I wasn't in for an easy ride, and they were right. Like the original short story, The Course... is almost unbearably bleak at times, with several of the characters appearing truly damned in a Gothic way that no longer seems to exist much in modern fiction. The apparitions that plague the unfortunate Pam and Lucas chill the reader in a number of ways - indirectly via the material and psychological damage they inflict, as glimpses in the corner of one's eye, or as in-yer-face fiends (and it's greatly to Harrison's credit that his creations are just as scary when standing right in front of you as when they are merely hinted at.) A sense of loneliness pervades the novel, as the three friends try to support each other in the face of repeated reminders that each is trapped in their own unique Hell. Yaxley - with whom the narrator is forced to liaise in an attempt to help Pam and Lucas - is despicable, with his bottomless contempt for the unfortunate trio and his refusal to show his whole hand of cards; he has no scruples about abusing people in frightful ways as part of the further rituals he carries out over the years.
That said, although the novel is unusually grim, it boasts many moments of loveliness - in particular the description of the narrator's holiday amid the Summer-lush moors and woodland of Cornwall - and the horror is leavened by frequent bursts of humour, albeit of a savage nature. I was also fascinated by the personal mythology of a lost city called the 'Coeur' which Pam and Lucas devise over many years to explain the inexplicable and provide themselves with a glimmer of hope; they originally started to believe in the mythos because they had to in order to remain sane, but have gradually come to view it as completely real. And not all the spirits are malevolent - the 'green woman' who appears to the likeable and generally 'normal' narrator periodically throughout his life is a beautiful creature, a true pagan goddess in the Machen mould.
This is not a book that you will necessarily 'get' on the first read, and its prose is both dense and at times infuriatingly cryptic. Pam and Lucas' talks about the Coeur are especially tough going as they involve leaps back and forth in history and stories within stories in ways that don't always add much to the book. Most of the time, however, the novel's complexity is not through any fault in Harrison's writing technique (he's a brilliant stylist) but simply because he's dealing with a strange world that only just overlaps with our own (in the conscious mind, that is - in reality the various layers of existence are entwined and inseparable.) The Course... is also free of the wishy-washy, insubstantial feel shared by many novels that deal with things ethereal - each time I began to lose myself in the airy, frustrating intangibles of mystical theory, I was brought sharply down to Earth by, for instance, the narrator's trip to WH Smith to buy stamps, or the pisspoor meals on offer at the roadside Happy Eater Yaxley has to visit as part of an evil scheme. All the characters struggle with their everyday life, and Yaxley's Crowleian power-tripping is described in a sardonic way that makes him a figure of fun who struggles to mask his own failures, while miraculously allowing him to remain threatening as all Hell.
Obviously, the novel has no tidy ending, and the loose ends can be quite maddening if you think about them for too long! The suspension of disbelief is almost total, partly because Harrison provides no glib answers, and for a while after finishing the book I felt that the foundations of my world had been unsettled. Many horror novelists nowadays deal in the dreamlike and the logic of nightmare, but very few manage to create such an air of mystery while keeping the novel anchored firmly in a believable modern world. China Mieville says it all when he writes 'That M John harrison is not a Nobel Laureate proves the bankruptcy of the literary establishment.'
If you want to know more, check out this Emerald City review! I also enjoyed the Infinity Plus interview with the author (which also contains links to some of his online fiction.)
