'Between the Minute and the Hour'
May. 30th, 2009 03:38 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_talesTo me, A.M. Burrage is one of the all-time great ghost story authors. And fans of A. M. Burrage (or 'Ex-Private X', depending on the tale) are often forced to put rather a lot of money where their mouth is. Most of the short story collections he published in the inter-war years are impossible to find nowadays, with the exception of the occasional hardback appearing on the internet, usually priced at over £100. I can't put up that kind of money just now, but I did recently come upon a first edition of the 1967 anthology of his work, Between The Minute And The Hour, for a 'mere' £30. The dust-jacket is in tatters, so it has no re-sale value, but I enjoyed the book too much to even think of selling it any time soon!
I love Burrage so much because he writes in a clean, elegant, understated style common to many pre-war practitioners of the weird tale. His narrators are often raconteurs, relating a terrifying past experience to a group of Society guests in some 20s or 30s house-party, and many decades later his modern, urbane but gentlemanly tone still puts you at ease. Most of his heroes (and the occasional heroine) seem like amiable sorts, and in supernatural fiction nothing works better than unleashing dreadful entities onto really nice people. I suppose E F Benson would be the closet literary cousin to Burrage, but he also reminds me not a little of Edith Nesbit as he has a strong romantic, almost melodramatic, streak that's all the more effective for being expressed in restrained language. He excels in the creation of atmosphere and can conjure up a chill in any room in a few short lines. He knows a lot about human psychology and his best ghosts all share a terrible hunger, be that for love, possession, revenge, or whatever.
As I mentioned, Burrage also wrote tales under a natty pseudonym, and about a third of the tales in this collection come from the pen of the Ex-Private, including Burrage's most famous story, the brilliant 'Smee' and several other crackers like 'The Oak Saplings' (a vicious tale of sylvan revenge) and 'One Who Saw' (a skilful blend of pathos and raving horror.) In fact, I found that most of my favourite tales in the book come from Ex-Private X. The straight Burrage stories collected here tend to be more gentle, and rarely feature outright death and dismemberment, even touching on cheering themes of redemption and exorcism. That said, I haven't really read enough of the Private X tales to make a proper comparison, and stylistically I didn't detect much difference between the two avatars. In fact I'm rather surprised Burrage even bothered with the extra identity myself. I know the name was invented so he could publish his devastating WW1 war memoirs War is War in suitable anonymity, but why keep it for half the ghost stories after he'd already started using his real name Burrage again? If any of you happen to know why he was so keen on the idea, I'd love to know. Maybe it was a tax dodge.
It sometimes happens that these old stories set in country seats, lush gardens and picturesque holiday locations become a little too 'cosy' to really thrill modern readers. They can seem like a travel brochure for the upper-class past. However, Burrage never lets that happen. All his work is underpinned by a clear sense of good and evil, and the evil is very evil indeed, and the comparative luxury of the characters' surroundings can't cushion them from the nasty side of life. And, of course, Burrage was only writing about what was contemporary to him at the time. All in all I would recommend this collection; it features about a half of the stories Burrage/X wrote (unless you count the recently discovered batch unearthed by Jack Adrian) and gives a good overview of a remarkable talent. A couple of the stories fall short of the straight scare, but other than that I have nothing to grouse about!
I love Burrage so much because he writes in a clean, elegant, understated style common to many pre-war practitioners of the weird tale. His narrators are often raconteurs, relating a terrifying past experience to a group of Society guests in some 20s or 30s house-party, and many decades later his modern, urbane but gentlemanly tone still puts you at ease. Most of his heroes (and the occasional heroine) seem like amiable sorts, and in supernatural fiction nothing works better than unleashing dreadful entities onto really nice people. I suppose E F Benson would be the closet literary cousin to Burrage, but he also reminds me not a little of Edith Nesbit as he has a strong romantic, almost melodramatic, streak that's all the more effective for being expressed in restrained language. He excels in the creation of atmosphere and can conjure up a chill in any room in a few short lines. He knows a lot about human psychology and his best ghosts all share a terrible hunger, be that for love, possession, revenge, or whatever.
As I mentioned, Burrage also wrote tales under a natty pseudonym, and about a third of the tales in this collection come from the pen of the Ex-Private, including Burrage's most famous story, the brilliant 'Smee' and several other crackers like 'The Oak Saplings' (a vicious tale of sylvan revenge) and 'One Who Saw' (a skilful blend of pathos and raving horror.) In fact, I found that most of my favourite tales in the book come from Ex-Private X. The straight Burrage stories collected here tend to be more gentle, and rarely feature outright death and dismemberment, even touching on cheering themes of redemption and exorcism. That said, I haven't really read enough of the Private X tales to make a proper comparison, and stylistically I didn't detect much difference between the two avatars. In fact I'm rather surprised Burrage even bothered with the extra identity myself. I know the name was invented so he could publish his devastating WW1 war memoirs War is War in suitable anonymity, but why keep it for half the ghost stories after he'd already started using his real name Burrage again? If any of you happen to know why he was so keen on the idea, I'd love to know. Maybe it was a tax dodge.
It sometimes happens that these old stories set in country seats, lush gardens and picturesque holiday locations become a little too 'cosy' to really thrill modern readers. They can seem like a travel brochure for the upper-class past. However, Burrage never lets that happen. All his work is underpinned by a clear sense of good and evil, and the evil is very evil indeed, and the comparative luxury of the characters' surroundings can't cushion them from the nasty side of life. And, of course, Burrage was only writing about what was contemporary to him at the time. All in all I would recommend this collection; it features about a half of the stories Burrage/X wrote (unless you count the recently discovered batch unearthed by Jack Adrian) and gives a good overview of a remarkable talent. A couple of the stories fall short of the straight scare, but other than that I have nothing to grouse about!
