John Gaskin
Nov. 11th, 2009 03:36 am![[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_talesAs I enjoyed John Gaskin's 2001 collection The Dark Companion, I recently decided to treat myself to his second collection of ghost stories, The Long Retreating Day (Tartarus Press, 2006.) Having read two very favourable reviews (one at Highlandersbooks and one from Mario Guslandi) I came to the book with high hopes. The fact that this edition benefits from one of Tartarus' most successful examples of jacket design didn't hurt either! However, while I enjoyed the book, I'm afraid my admiration for Gaskin's work is a bit more qualified than that of the above gentlemen. It's short collection - only ten stories - so I'm going to be lazy and just write mini-reviews of each one!
Things get off to a cracking start with 'The Conceit of the Dancing Man', about a bet made between two students, one of whom challenges the other to spend the night in a deserted church. Praised as a rightful successor to M R James, Gaskin's debt to old Monty is probably at its most obvious here, with all the cosy trappings of 50s university life and a lot of detail about church architecture (albeit updated to include a particularly horrific example of post-war wood carving!) However, the narrator (a Jew who attends university in Britain straight after the second world war) is a more complex, well-rounded character than anyone James created, and the subtle references to such modern topics as closet homosexuality and racism prevent the reader from becoming too comfortable.
Next comes 'Tapiola', a fine (if depressing) example of 'pagan horror' reminiscent of Algernon Blackwood's masterpiece 'The Willows'. Though I must say, on reading this story of two young hikers lost in the Scandinavian wilderness the first thing it reminded me of was The Blair Witch Project! The ending is a bit duff, consisting of a single paragraph set in the Future, when it seems people have phased out the use of the letter 'c', among other things, but that does nothing to detract from the power of the story. Gaskin's use of sound (the crunching of pine needles underfoot, a mysterious whispering etc.) is especially good.
'St. John's Wood', on the other hand, left me feeling a bit short-changed. It's a relatively long story which in my opinion could have done with a bit of trimming, and Gaskin's attempts to recreate the atmosphere of a good old-fashioned bird slaughter (sorry, 'hunt') in a Scottish wood falls a bit flat. The problem with any story set in the Scottish landscape is that it invites comparison - usually unfavourably - with the works of John Buchan, a truly awe-inpiring author of pagan horror. So perhaps I'm being a bit harsh on Gaskin! Less easy to forgive is his tendency to use fogeyish narrators who seem to be forever moaning about the vicissitudes of modern life - the sort of people who complain about 'political correctness gone mad' every time poor people ask for the right to vote, or whatever. In context, its understandable that wealthy landowners should harbour ultra-Conservative views, but as the collection progresses, showcasing the thoughts of one ageing reactionary after another, the reader is left with the unpleasant sensation that Gaskin is using his narrators as a political mouthpiece.
'The High-Stepping Man', a tale of bureaucracy and crime in the confines of a sub-Oxbridge University, is likewise marred by the narrator's opinions on the state of modern higher education which, even when they do coincide with fact, are delivered in such a stuffy tone that it's hard to access the narrator's more human side. This is the least successful story of the collection as far as 'frighteners' go, and though it has a couple of eerie images it's probably best enjoyed as an astute, chilling portrayal of deviant psychology and the way sociopathic people succeed in creeping into the higher echelons of society.
But it is the title story 'The Long Retreating Day' that suffers the most from what seems like a genuine fear of modern life and progress. It could've been an affecting story, since it deals with a handful of men enjoying a privileged life in the 'Golden Afternoon of England' who become gradually aware that their little world is about to be blown apart by war. I don't know how to describe this without giving away the central conceit of the story - so you'd best look away now to avoid 'spoilers'! - but our hero, on returning home from a dinner party, finds himself briefly transported into the Future, i.e. present-day England. If you've read the previous four stories, it comes as no surprise that Gaskin's modern England is a nightmare world of neon lights, swearing, litter-dropping poor people who are more concerned with catching the latest episode of Coronation Street and arguing in raucous voices than enjoying the simple beauty of life. It all reminded me a bit too much of the Daily Mail's constant stream of articles on 'Broken Britain!!!' And although the hero's plight does inspire sympathy, I find it very hard to stomach his assertion that the working classes were better off before the wars than after!
After all this grim social commentary the next tale, 'From Lydia With Love and Laughter' is a real breath of fresh air. Set in the ruins of an ancient Greek temple in Turkey, it's another good piece of pagan horror that strikes the right balance between charm and unease. It doubles as a critique of modern-day fame, though Gaskin's politics are less obtrusive here. It also reminded me strangely of E M Forster, with its characterization of repressed Brits abroad being forcibly opened up to new experiences! And 'The Bay Window' is a very fine, enigmatic tale that tackles the loss of innocence and benefits from a well-described, unusual setting (a railway station by night.) The narrator of this story, a young man working nights at a station to fund his university education, is the most likeable in the book and the best realized.
By comparison, 'Rigor Mortis' (about a piece of furniture which may be possessed of supernatural powers) is light-hearted and wry. Having read an M.P. Dare story on a similar theme recently, I was a bit underwhelmed by the subject matter, and generally prefer stories with a more serious tone, but this one should appeal to fans of raconteur writers like John Betjeman. And once I'd read the two stories that followed 'Rigor Mortis', I began to realize that the latter actually serves as a much-needed break in atmosphere between 'The Bay Window' and the collection's last stories. 'Road Closed' seems to have drawn especial praise from several reviewers, but I can't share their enthusiasm for what I consider to be a highly predictable, slow-paced premonition story. Again we have an unusual setting (a cottage by a Westcountry beach that is also overlooked by a railway bridge), but this time I got the feeling Gaskin had failed to exploit its full potential (compared to, say, M John Harrison's depiction of Cornwall in The Course of the Heart.) The dying love affair between two well-to-do fourtysomethings provides an atmosphere of unrelenting bleakness which I found a bit discouraging, and the characters failed to come alive, beyond providing me with a mild sense of indignation! But I can see there being a market for this sort of thing nonetheless.
Luckily, the closing story 'Omega' succeeds where the previous story fails, and delivers a decent emotional 'punch'. It deals with an old man who has been told he is facing death and heads off into the hills of his youth for that one last walk. It could easily have been maudlin, but Gaskin creates and then preserves an air of resigned, bitter-sweet melancholy that many an author of 'proper' literature would envy. The collection is also book-ended by two series of short poems - possibly another nod to John Buchan? - on Youth and Age respectively. None of them are exactly amazing, but they are quite endearing in a simple way, and free from pretension.
So there you have it: a short but generally satisfying collection, but not, I thought, massively indebted to M R James. It's possible that the old-fashioned political views of Gaskins' heroes has convinced some readers that he is the spiritual heir of James, since the latter held many opinions that now appear far from forward-thinking, and also boasted a fear of new academic disciplines and administrative shake-ups that bordered on the phobia (if some of his letters are anything to go by!) If so, then these readers are forgetting an important thing about James: his insistence on situating his stories firmly in the present. James' heroes are doubtless sexist, classist, racist and any other 'ist you'd care to think of, but those prejudices were widespread at the time the stories were written, and the narrators' political views never intrude on the plot. Of course, it could just be a question of Gaskin's choice of antiquarian settings, which I suppose could be lazily described as 'Jamesian'. But if Gaskin is Jamesian in basic content, his style is far more expansive and leisurely. He is also concerned with developing characters and pondering the 'twilight' of life and those 'borderlands' between our world and the supernatural realm - making him quite similar to Hugh Walpole in some ways - and his use of pagan horror brings to mind Blackwood, E.F. Benson and Buchan more than anyone else.
Sadly, The Long-Retreating Day is now out of print (I got my copy second-hand from Cold Tonnage), and no mass market publisher has yet stepped forward to spread Gaskin's writing across the Horror sections of our nation's chain bookshops. This is a great pity, as for all his odd flashes of quaintness he is an accessible author whose works everybody should be able to enjoy. But until then he's doomed to remain one of those not-very-well-kept secrets between book bores I'm afraid! Though the paperback Dark Companions may be more widely available...
Things get off to a cracking start with 'The Conceit of the Dancing Man', about a bet made between two students, one of whom challenges the other to spend the night in a deserted church. Praised as a rightful successor to M R James, Gaskin's debt to old Monty is probably at its most obvious here, with all the cosy trappings of 50s university life and a lot of detail about church architecture (albeit updated to include a particularly horrific example of post-war wood carving!) However, the narrator (a Jew who attends university in Britain straight after the second world war) is a more complex, well-rounded character than anyone James created, and the subtle references to such modern topics as closet homosexuality and racism prevent the reader from becoming too comfortable.
Next comes 'Tapiola', a fine (if depressing) example of 'pagan horror' reminiscent of Algernon Blackwood's masterpiece 'The Willows'. Though I must say, on reading this story of two young hikers lost in the Scandinavian wilderness the first thing it reminded me of was The Blair Witch Project! The ending is a bit duff, consisting of a single paragraph set in the Future, when it seems people have phased out the use of the letter 'c', among other things, but that does nothing to detract from the power of the story. Gaskin's use of sound (the crunching of pine needles underfoot, a mysterious whispering etc.) is especially good.
'St. John's Wood', on the other hand, left me feeling a bit short-changed. It's a relatively long story which in my opinion could have done with a bit of trimming, and Gaskin's attempts to recreate the atmosphere of a good old-fashioned bird slaughter (sorry, 'hunt') in a Scottish wood falls a bit flat. The problem with any story set in the Scottish landscape is that it invites comparison - usually unfavourably - with the works of John Buchan, a truly awe-inpiring author of pagan horror. So perhaps I'm being a bit harsh on Gaskin! Less easy to forgive is his tendency to use fogeyish narrators who seem to be forever moaning about the vicissitudes of modern life - the sort of people who complain about 'political correctness gone mad' every time poor people ask for the right to vote, or whatever. In context, its understandable that wealthy landowners should harbour ultra-Conservative views, but as the collection progresses, showcasing the thoughts of one ageing reactionary after another, the reader is left with the unpleasant sensation that Gaskin is using his narrators as a political mouthpiece.
'The High-Stepping Man', a tale of bureaucracy and crime in the confines of a sub-Oxbridge University, is likewise marred by the narrator's opinions on the state of modern higher education which, even when they do coincide with fact, are delivered in such a stuffy tone that it's hard to access the narrator's more human side. This is the least successful story of the collection as far as 'frighteners' go, and though it has a couple of eerie images it's probably best enjoyed as an astute, chilling portrayal of deviant psychology and the way sociopathic people succeed in creeping into the higher echelons of society.
But it is the title story 'The Long Retreating Day' that suffers the most from what seems like a genuine fear of modern life and progress. It could've been an affecting story, since it deals with a handful of men enjoying a privileged life in the 'Golden Afternoon of England' who become gradually aware that their little world is about to be blown apart by war. I don't know how to describe this without giving away the central conceit of the story - so you'd best look away now to avoid 'spoilers'! - but our hero, on returning home from a dinner party, finds himself briefly transported into the Future, i.e. present-day England. If you've read the previous four stories, it comes as no surprise that Gaskin's modern England is a nightmare world of neon lights, swearing, litter-dropping poor people who are more concerned with catching the latest episode of Coronation Street and arguing in raucous voices than enjoying the simple beauty of life. It all reminded me a bit too much of the Daily Mail's constant stream of articles on 'Broken Britain!!!' And although the hero's plight does inspire sympathy, I find it very hard to stomach his assertion that the working classes were better off before the wars than after!
After all this grim social commentary the next tale, 'From Lydia With Love and Laughter' is a real breath of fresh air. Set in the ruins of an ancient Greek temple in Turkey, it's another good piece of pagan horror that strikes the right balance between charm and unease. It doubles as a critique of modern-day fame, though Gaskin's politics are less obtrusive here. It also reminded me strangely of E M Forster, with its characterization of repressed Brits abroad being forcibly opened up to new experiences! And 'The Bay Window' is a very fine, enigmatic tale that tackles the loss of innocence and benefits from a well-described, unusual setting (a railway station by night.) The narrator of this story, a young man working nights at a station to fund his university education, is the most likeable in the book and the best realized.
By comparison, 'Rigor Mortis' (about a piece of furniture which may be possessed of supernatural powers) is light-hearted and wry. Having read an M.P. Dare story on a similar theme recently, I was a bit underwhelmed by the subject matter, and generally prefer stories with a more serious tone, but this one should appeal to fans of raconteur writers like John Betjeman. And once I'd read the two stories that followed 'Rigor Mortis', I began to realize that the latter actually serves as a much-needed break in atmosphere between 'The Bay Window' and the collection's last stories. 'Road Closed' seems to have drawn especial praise from several reviewers, but I can't share their enthusiasm for what I consider to be a highly predictable, slow-paced premonition story. Again we have an unusual setting (a cottage by a Westcountry beach that is also overlooked by a railway bridge), but this time I got the feeling Gaskin had failed to exploit its full potential (compared to, say, M John Harrison's depiction of Cornwall in The Course of the Heart.) The dying love affair between two well-to-do fourtysomethings provides an atmosphere of unrelenting bleakness which I found a bit discouraging, and the characters failed to come alive, beyond providing me with a mild sense of indignation! But I can see there being a market for this sort of thing nonetheless.
Luckily, the closing story 'Omega' succeeds where the previous story fails, and delivers a decent emotional 'punch'. It deals with an old man who has been told he is facing death and heads off into the hills of his youth for that one last walk. It could easily have been maudlin, but Gaskin creates and then preserves an air of resigned, bitter-sweet melancholy that many an author of 'proper' literature would envy. The collection is also book-ended by two series of short poems - possibly another nod to John Buchan? - on Youth and Age respectively. None of them are exactly amazing, but they are quite endearing in a simple way, and free from pretension.
So there you have it: a short but generally satisfying collection, but not, I thought, massively indebted to M R James. It's possible that the old-fashioned political views of Gaskins' heroes has convinced some readers that he is the spiritual heir of James, since the latter held many opinions that now appear far from forward-thinking, and also boasted a fear of new academic disciplines and administrative shake-ups that bordered on the phobia (if some of his letters are anything to go by!) If so, then these readers are forgetting an important thing about James: his insistence on situating his stories firmly in the present. James' heroes are doubtless sexist, classist, racist and any other 'ist you'd care to think of, but those prejudices were widespread at the time the stories were written, and the narrators' political views never intrude on the plot. Of course, it could just be a question of Gaskin's choice of antiquarian settings, which I suppose could be lazily described as 'Jamesian'. But if Gaskin is Jamesian in basic content, his style is far more expansive and leisurely. He is also concerned with developing characters and pondering the 'twilight' of life and those 'borderlands' between our world and the supernatural realm - making him quite similar to Hugh Walpole in some ways - and his use of pagan horror brings to mind Blackwood, E.F. Benson and Buchan more than anyone else.
Sadly, The Long-Retreating Day is now out of print (I got my copy second-hand from Cold Tonnage), and no mass market publisher has yet stepped forward to spread Gaskin's writing across the Horror sections of our nation's chain bookshops. This is a great pity, as for all his odd flashes of quaintness he is an accessible author whose works everybody should be able to enjoy. But until then he's doomed to remain one of those not-very-well-kept secrets between book bores I'm afraid! Though the paperback Dark Companions may be more widely available...
