Two Victorian Sensationalist Treats!
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darkling_talesAfter hearing many recommendations, I've finally got round to reading Richard Marsh's 1897 shocker The Beetle, now out in a smart new Penguin paperback edition. I have a feeling other people have reviewed this book before in these pages, but I thought I'd put my oar in anyway :) I really enjoyed this novel, which appeared in the same year as Dracula, and outsold Stoker's work for a time, although Marsh has since spent most of this century languishing in obscurity. I'm glad he's undergone a critical re-evaluation lately, as in several ways he is a better writer than Stoker - whose The Jewel of the Seven Stars I've also just read! I thought I'd lump them together in a two-for-one comparativey review (the two novels were actually re-issued together in an omnibus edition lately by Coach Whip books, so it sort of makes sense!)
The Beetle is about a terrifying, polymorphous occult entity who comes over from Egypt to wreak havoc on the lives of a small group of Londoners, sometimes appearing as a scarab, sometimes as a singularly ugly human of indeterminate sex, and a whole lot more besides. Paul Lessingham, an up-and-coming politician cynically known as "the Apostle" by his love rival, Sidney Atherton, is somehow connected to the terrors, and soon the object of the two mens' affections, Marjorie Lindon, also starts receiving some odd visits...What impressed me most about this novel - apart from its delightfully over-the-top sensationalist content (virgin sacrifices, torture physical and mental, vampirism, suggested rape and other unspeakable violations for both sexes are all par for the course here) is the relative realism and modernity of its characters and dialogue.
Obviously, as a turn-of-the-century novel, it contains some rather long, verbose passages and occasionally a surfeit of noble feelings and chivalry, but far less than in most novels of the day (at least, among the ones I've read.) There is a pleasing ambiguity to all the characters: Atherton, a respectable Victorian who just happens to double as a maker of lethal chemical weapons, spends the whole novel carping savagely about Lessingham, and the scenes where the two men are forced to work together to save the heroine from a Fate Worse Then Death are very funny at times. The oh-so-perfect Lessingham turns out to have a hideous secret in his past, and the blushing swooning heroine turns out to be a bit of a New Woman who argues with her Dad a lot and also spends a large part of the novel in drag for various reasons. The ghastly androgyny of the 'Beetle' is a nicely original touch, and the crimefighting aspect is almost startingly modern (even reminiscent of CSI when the good guys leaf through crime-scene photos and evidence of the creatures' past crimes!) The lumbering pace of some Victorian novels is avoided by spreading the action over several perspectives - it's a real patchwork of different characters' accounts.
Another atypical feature of the novel is the manner in which the hauntings and bouts of supernatural molestation are handled. Many seem inspired by real symptoms of mental illness and are a million miles away from the overblown gothic manifestations of a novel like Dracula. Marsh shares his era's preoccupation with hypnosis, but his descriptions of thought control, premonitions and hallucinations have a decidedly 20th-century flavour (one scene where Margaret hallucinates beetles swimming out of a pattern in the carpet is especially chilling.) His closest contemporary is actually Conan Doyle (who, after all, wrote 'The Parasite'), especially in the last third of the novel with its hair-raising chase.
One area where the novel does show its age is in its representation of foreigners. Having said that, while Wikipedia dismisses the novel in a few words as "xenophobic" that's not really the case. Yes, the 'Beetle' does seem to have some stereotypically foreign characteristics and spends the second half of the novel masquerading as a very rude Arab man, but it is stressed at several points that the creature is not a typical foreigner - we learn that the average Egyptian is just as horrified as the English by the bloodthirsty cult that the creature leads.
Some people find the ending of the novel somewhat anticlimactic and contrived, but I didn't think it was that bad, and the rest of the novel is so much fun it seems churlish to complain. If you like Victorian novels this is a must-read (I've been inspired to order a copy of Marsh's companion novel, The Joss: An Inversion), and even if you don't particularly care for 19th-century writing The Beetle is still a rewarding read, as long as you have a half-decent attention span! If you'd like to find out more, there is a good academic essay on the novel by Minna Vouhelainen here.
Beetles are also the order of the day in Bram Stoker's The Jewel of the Seven Stars. This novel also deals with an ancient force rising up from the Egypt of the pharaohs to maraud polite London society, though in this case, the gentlemen have rather brought it on themselves by desecrating (sorry, "discovering") the tomb of the powerful Queen Tera and dragging her mummy and all her kit back to London. I confess to having read none of Stoker's novels except Dracula before now, but everyone tells me the Jewel... is by far the best of his other works. And I did enjoy reading it, though if you come to this novel straight after The Beetle, Stoker's Victorian shortcomings are at times painfully obvious. Here, there are no dryly humorous remarks to leaven the endless flow of noble speech and manly deeds, and the heroine Margaret Trelawny is a standard-issue Victorian gal who positively drips with self-sacrifice and patience, having clearly never even heard of the New Woman. The fact that most of the novel is narrated by one person (Margaret's sighing swain Malcolm Ross) also adds to its slower feel, though Ross seems a nice enough sort of chap.
Having said that, I did rather like the book. This is mainly because of the mind-bending profusion of themes Stoker throws at the reader: using the archaeologist Trelawny as a mouthpiece, he blends science, history and religion into a jaw-dropping tapestry of prediction and speculation on the future of science and mankind itself (as a physicist, I found his talk of early discoveries in radioactivity and the emerging science of light especially intriguing.) If you like visions of the future from the past, you'll find much to love about The Jewel of the Seven Stars, and the more ridiculous the theorizing the better I liked it. And many of the concepts are not ridiculous at all, but actually quite beautiful (I for one would like to see jewellery play much more of a part in modern-day astronomy!) And Margaret Trelawny does get more interesting as the novel goes on and we discover that she and her spoilt cat Silvio have an uncanny affinity with the dead Queen...
I read the Desert Island edition of the book, edited and waspishly annotated by the well-known Dracula scholar Clive Leatherdale. While some of the annotations are interesting, many are pointless, pedantic and at times amusingly bitchy - though they may be more welcome to academics studying the book than to the casual reader. The main reason for buying this edition (or getting a generous benefactor to give it to you, in my case) is that it contains the novel's original ending. In one respect, Stoker bucked the popular trend by giving his novel a really savage ending, which upset his publishers so much they forced him to write an alternative "happy" ending (also in the book.) There is also an extra "missing" chapter in which Ross speculates on science and God but nothing much happens. Both novels leave rather a lot unanswered questions, but that's not an entirely bad thing, and over-explanation is a far worse sin to my mind.
All in all, I'm glad I read The Jewel of the Seven Stars, but unlike The Beetle I wouldn't recommend it to the general reader, or even the lover of modern horror, unless I was sure they liked Victorian stuff! I still want to check out Stoker's other famous non-Dracula book, The Lair of the White Worm though...
The Beetle is about a terrifying, polymorphous occult entity who comes over from Egypt to wreak havoc on the lives of a small group of Londoners, sometimes appearing as a scarab, sometimes as a singularly ugly human of indeterminate sex, and a whole lot more besides. Paul Lessingham, an up-and-coming politician cynically known as "the Apostle" by his love rival, Sidney Atherton, is somehow connected to the terrors, and soon the object of the two mens' affections, Marjorie Lindon, also starts receiving some odd visits...What impressed me most about this novel - apart from its delightfully over-the-top sensationalist content (virgin sacrifices, torture physical and mental, vampirism, suggested rape and other unspeakable violations for both sexes are all par for the course here) is the relative realism and modernity of its characters and dialogue.
Obviously, as a turn-of-the-century novel, it contains some rather long, verbose passages and occasionally a surfeit of noble feelings and chivalry, but far less than in most novels of the day (at least, among the ones I've read.) There is a pleasing ambiguity to all the characters: Atherton, a respectable Victorian who just happens to double as a maker of lethal chemical weapons, spends the whole novel carping savagely about Lessingham, and the scenes where the two men are forced to work together to save the heroine from a Fate Worse Then Death are very funny at times. The oh-so-perfect Lessingham turns out to have a hideous secret in his past, and the blushing swooning heroine turns out to be a bit of a New Woman who argues with her Dad a lot and also spends a large part of the novel in drag for various reasons. The ghastly androgyny of the 'Beetle' is a nicely original touch, and the crimefighting aspect is almost startingly modern (even reminiscent of CSI when the good guys leaf through crime-scene photos and evidence of the creatures' past crimes!) The lumbering pace of some Victorian novels is avoided by spreading the action over several perspectives - it's a real patchwork of different characters' accounts.
Another atypical feature of the novel is the manner in which the hauntings and bouts of supernatural molestation are handled. Many seem inspired by real symptoms of mental illness and are a million miles away from the overblown gothic manifestations of a novel like Dracula. Marsh shares his era's preoccupation with hypnosis, but his descriptions of thought control, premonitions and hallucinations have a decidedly 20th-century flavour (one scene where Margaret hallucinates beetles swimming out of a pattern in the carpet is especially chilling.) His closest contemporary is actually Conan Doyle (who, after all, wrote 'The Parasite'), especially in the last third of the novel with its hair-raising chase.
One area where the novel does show its age is in its representation of foreigners. Having said that, while Wikipedia dismisses the novel in a few words as "xenophobic" that's not really the case. Yes, the 'Beetle' does seem to have some stereotypically foreign characteristics and spends the second half of the novel masquerading as a very rude Arab man, but it is stressed at several points that the creature is not a typical foreigner - we learn that the average Egyptian is just as horrified as the English by the bloodthirsty cult that the creature leads.
Some people find the ending of the novel somewhat anticlimactic and contrived, but I didn't think it was that bad, and the rest of the novel is so much fun it seems churlish to complain. If you like Victorian novels this is a must-read (I've been inspired to order a copy of Marsh's companion novel, The Joss: An Inversion), and even if you don't particularly care for 19th-century writing The Beetle is still a rewarding read, as long as you have a half-decent attention span! If you'd like to find out more, there is a good academic essay on the novel by Minna Vouhelainen here.
Beetles are also the order of the day in Bram Stoker's The Jewel of the Seven Stars. This novel also deals with an ancient force rising up from the Egypt of the pharaohs to maraud polite London society, though in this case, the gentlemen have rather brought it on themselves by desecrating (sorry, "discovering") the tomb of the powerful Queen Tera and dragging her mummy and all her kit back to London. I confess to having read none of Stoker's novels except Dracula before now, but everyone tells me the Jewel... is by far the best of his other works. And I did enjoy reading it, though if you come to this novel straight after The Beetle, Stoker's Victorian shortcomings are at times painfully obvious. Here, there are no dryly humorous remarks to leaven the endless flow of noble speech and manly deeds, and the heroine Margaret Trelawny is a standard-issue Victorian gal who positively drips with self-sacrifice and patience, having clearly never even heard of the New Woman. The fact that most of the novel is narrated by one person (Margaret's sighing swain Malcolm Ross) also adds to its slower feel, though Ross seems a nice enough sort of chap.
Having said that, I did rather like the book. This is mainly because of the mind-bending profusion of themes Stoker throws at the reader: using the archaeologist Trelawny as a mouthpiece, he blends science, history and religion into a jaw-dropping tapestry of prediction and speculation on the future of science and mankind itself (as a physicist, I found his talk of early discoveries in radioactivity and the emerging science of light especially intriguing.) If you like visions of the future from the past, you'll find much to love about The Jewel of the Seven Stars, and the more ridiculous the theorizing the better I liked it. And many of the concepts are not ridiculous at all, but actually quite beautiful (I for one would like to see jewellery play much more of a part in modern-day astronomy!) And Margaret Trelawny does get more interesting as the novel goes on and we discover that she and her spoilt cat Silvio have an uncanny affinity with the dead Queen...
I read the Desert Island edition of the book, edited and waspishly annotated by the well-known Dracula scholar Clive Leatherdale. While some of the annotations are interesting, many are pointless, pedantic and at times amusingly bitchy - though they may be more welcome to academics studying the book than to the casual reader. The main reason for buying this edition (or getting a generous benefactor to give it to you, in my case) is that it contains the novel's original ending. In one respect, Stoker bucked the popular trend by giving his novel a really savage ending, which upset his publishers so much they forced him to write an alternative "happy" ending (also in the book.) There is also an extra "missing" chapter in which Ross speculates on science and God but nothing much happens. Both novels leave rather a lot unanswered questions, but that's not an entirely bad thing, and over-explanation is a far worse sin to my mind.
All in all, I'm glad I read The Jewel of the Seven Stars, but unlike The Beetle I wouldn't recommend it to the general reader, or even the lover of modern horror, unless I was sure they liked Victorian stuff! I still want to check out Stoker's other famous non-Dracula book, The Lair of the White Worm though...
