Madam Crowl's Ghost by Sheridan Le Fanu

Bringing up the Irish contingent in the Victorian ghost story sub-genre is Sheridan Le Fanu. He's a well-known writer of early spook stories, and was much-respected by the later greats such as M. R. James.


However, he suffers from having been over-influential. Today, virtually all of his plots and situations will be over-familliar to pretty much any reader, and the stories seem tiresome and hackneyed as a result. Perhaps in his day he was able to send shivers down spines, but after  a few stories I really couldn't take another formulaic yarn about evil deeds done in creaky old houses.

Le Fanu does set a couple of his stories in Ireland, and it is interesting to hear his take on the rural accent... some things about it seem not to have changed even over one hundred and fifty years. For the most part, however, even his Dublin-set stories are interchangeable with the standard London-based horror fiction of the Victorian period. Le Fanu did occasionally make use of Irish folklore as part of his story-telling, but not in this volume.

I can't really recommend this book except as a curiosity, or to anyone who is tracing the evolution of Victorian fantastic fiction, and even then it isn't very interesting.

Sorry Le Fanu, I really did want to like your work! You being from the ol' sod, and all. Ah well.

Flashman And The Dragon by George MacDonald Frasier

Man, it’s good to come back to Flashman. After a period of trying to broaden my palate with other popular historical fiction writers of varying quality, it took less than one paragraph of Flashman And The Dragon to remind me of what I was missing. I was beginning to think that I was holding other writers to some unfair or impossible ideal; but no, I have been reminded that Flashman really is that good. This is what historical fiction is capable of, and there’s no excuse for anything less.

Chronologically, we meet Flashy here just after his pre-civil-war adventures with Tom Brown in the USA (that adventure is chronicled in Flashman and the Angel of the Lord). Somehow he has wound up in Hong Kong, awaiting a ship home. Of course, once again his attention for the ladies gets him into trouble, and our ‘hero’ winds up running opium into the Chinese mainland, hoping to make some quick cash and get some attention from a smitten clergyman’s wife. But it’s all a ruse, and Flashy ends up getting a much closer look than he intended at the fighting that has been tearing China apart for ten years…

By 1860, when Flashman foolishly drifts up the Yangtse, the rebels known as the Taipings were at their greatest strength. Years earlier, the movement had started when a humble clerk failed his exams and fell into a religious frenzy. He came up with his own crazed version of the Christianity that was being peddled by Westerners in China at the time, and gathered quite a following, which eventually snowballed into what was effectively the biggest and bloodiest civil war of all time, with an estimated death toll up to sixty million. The Taipings fought against the Imperial forces of the Manchu dynasty, the invaders from the north who had ruled China as a high caste for centuries, engulfing enormous swathes of China in their war. Somehow, this event has slipped off the radar in the intervening years, and Westerners, for the most part, have never even heard of this titanic conflict. Perhaps it’s because the Taiping Rebellion, as it’s known, had the misfortune to have occurred around the same time as the far more fashionable American Civil War (though it lasted eleven years longer than Lee and Grant’s little spat).

Please excuse the excessive use of italics, but the real-life figures and history that Fraser has to play with here are absolutely astonishing, especially given their little-known status in this part of the world.

But there’s more: in the midst of this mind-blowing struggle, Britain decided to step into to once again force the issue of trade with the stubborn Mandarins, inevitably causing more war. Hilariously, in cities like London and San Francisco, immigrant Chinese were scorned and feared for their spreading of the opium habit- ‘a heathen curse on Christendom,’ as Alan Moore satirically put it in his Victorian-era League of Extraordinary Gentlemen- when in reality, opium was outlawed and almost unknown in China before Britain fought two wars to be able to import it there.

And that’s where Flashman steps in. He soon becomes involved in his country’s efforts to negotiate (at the point of a bayonet, natch) with the Mandarins at Peking. One of the most interesting themes of the book (to an anti-colonial whelp like myself) is Flashy’s description of the Chinese at this time: arrogant, insolent and as racist as he is himself. What’s true is that before the mid-19^th century, China had existed in a kind of dream-world for centuries, believing itself to be literally the centre of the world (‘the middle kingdom’), with a god for an emperor.  It wasn’t until the First Opium War in the 1840’s that China was forced to accept that there were other powers in the world besides itself, and that it would sometimes have to respect those powers. But the belief that Westerners were sub-human barbarians (not aided, of course, by said wars) seems to have returned, and Fraser depicts them as treating the Westerners like scum, hampering their efforts every step of the way to Peking.

Now, my mindset would generally be that the Chinese had every right not to aid the British in getting their claws into the country. If they had any sense, they would obviously have seen what was happening in the rest of the world, and done everything they could to keep the foreigners out. But Frasier’s point here is that this policy was being proposed by a rotting structure of small-minded, bigoted Sino-centrists, to coin a phrase. And, to be fair, he goes a fair way towards convincing me that he has a point. If the Chinese had had a more realistic take on the world and its politics, perhaps they would have accepted a certain amount of trading (which was perhaps inevitable anyway) and played their advantage to maintain a more powerful position among the nations. Instead they were crushed and humiliated because they refused to accept the reality of the situation. As usual, Frasier manages to convince me at least that there is another side to the story, or that the nations crushed by the imperial powers didn't always behave like angels either.

There’s a very high level of Orientalism in the book too- quite enough to make Edward Said run crying to his harem. The Chinese court, and in particular the famous Summer Garden, are portrayed as being so alien as to be ‘not of this earth.’ It’s as evocative as it is convincing. I have a particular love for a slightly unreal take on exotic cultures, probably as a progression from my love of the alien worlds of science fiction when I was a kid. My heart sings as Flashman wanders through corridors of green jade and dragon temples, and however patronising it is, I will always love this kind of thing, even if I know that it's all slightly silly.

Something else I love about this book is that it’s one of the Flashman novels that really focuses on the history. While Flashy himself is the glue that holds the series together, I have always felt that the books fall apart whenever the emphasis is on too many of Frasier’s fictional characters or unlikely coincidences (I rather loathe fan-favourite John Charity Spring, for example). I far prefer the books in which Flashy is thrust through a series of real events, and Flashman And The Dragon is played almost completely straight in this regard. Almost all the impossible events that the anti-hero bumbles through really happened, which adds a certain frisson to the proceedings. The only serious fictional intrusion is Flashy’s dealings with the scheming Trooper Nolan (of note to those looking for the Irish connection!), which falls rather flat compared to the rest of the novel.

Alongside tantalising hints as to an elderly Flashman’s presence at the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, and a brief walk-on part for ‘Chinese’ Gordon (whom Flashy seems to have come to know better later on- surely at Khartoum?), possibly the saddest missed opportunity here occurs at the very end of the book, when Flashman’s American contacts catch up with him, and shanghai him into what is surely the most lusted-after of Frasier’s unwritten books: the scoundrel’s adventures during the American Civil War.

Flashman And The Dragon is an epic adventure through a never-never-land that really was, and will likely introduce the reader to a world of extraordinary events and characters. Not to be missed.

Dreadnought by Cherie Priest

Well, thisis a change. After plodding through the meticulously recreated (in military terms at least) 19^th-century of the Sharpe books, Cherie Priest’s Dreadnoughtcomes as quite a different flavour, to say the least. It’s a far more free-wheeling, unashamedly fun take on the 19^th century that even apologises on its opening pages for not really giving a shit about history. Right off the bat, we’re warned that we’ll be encountering zombies, a twenty-year American civil war, and all manner of other strange stuff.

See, Priest is part of a wave of writers who write very deliberate steampunk. Unlike the founding writers, who were cautiously feeling their way into terra incognita and unwittingly creating a new genre, Priest and her ilk know exactly what they and their readers now expect from a ‘steampunk’ novel. These writers are light on the history (alternate or otherwise) and heavy on the zepplins and men with brass goggles. The pseudo-Victoriana setting is often used as a backdrop for fantastic adventures rather than as a study of what might have been. All of which is perfectly acceptable, if the writer is any good. And Priest is pretty damn good.

Mercy Lynch is a nurse at a Confederate hospital. When she finds out that her Yankee husband has died in a prisoner-of-war camp, she decides to pack in her job and travel across the country from Virginia to far-off Washington State to see her ailing father before he croaks. Of course, this being an alternate, steampunk 19^th century America, her trip involves airships, feuding steam-powered automatons, and armoured train engines built like battleships. This part of the book is tremendous fun; it reads almost like a road trip novel set in a world slightly askew from our own. Anyone who’s ever enjoyed crossing continents will get a little buzz every time Mercy pulls into one of her many stops Mercy is a fun protagonist, she’s a professional and level-headed woman. Her independence as she moves about the country, and the degree to which most characters accept it, might strike a little bit of a false note for anyone who knows a bit about the real attitudes of the 19 century, but this is not a big barrier to enjoying the book. It is an alternate reality, after all, so I’m willing to suspend my disbelief a little! Mercy meets a lot of characters as she travels, most of whom don’t stick around long enough to affect the plot much. This kind of thing does annoy some readers, but I found it added to the ‘road trip’ feel of the book, and added a real sense that anything could happen next.

Priest doesn’t really go to town with the steampunk touches: apart from a few uses of improved technology and machinery, the setting is still a recognisably Victorian one. Most of these changes are required to drive the plot- in particular the battle-engine Dreadnought, which ferries Mercy out into the wild, unincorporated west where the second half of the book takes place. Here, unfortunately, the fun pace of the earlier chapters drops, and Mercy’s train seems to drag quite a bit. Other small issues niggle too: the earlier hype about the train’s feared battle prowess seems to be forgotten as the Dreadnought is attacked by a paltry group of Confederate raiders who manage to cause the train’s soldiers some real worry. I thought this was the pride of the Union army, yet it seems to have real trouble brushing off some yahoos on horses!

Though there are definitely pacing issues with the second half of the book, it’s Priest’s smooth prose style and likeable characters that kept me reading. Relatively late in the proceedings, we even get an interesting insight into the politics of this America, and its relationship with the independent state of Texas and its southern neighbour Mexico. I’d definitely have appreciated a little more of this.

My final criticism of the book concerns its finale. The plot slowly builds to a ‘revelation’ that is not only obvious to anyone over the age of five, but also features elements that have been massively over-represented in media recently. To be blunt, won’t everyone just get over zombies already?

All that said, I did enjoy Dreadnought and will probably pick up the other books in the series at some time.

King of the Cloud Forests by Michael Morpurgo

In empire-set fiction, a classic set-up for European folks living in exotic climes is to have the main characters be missionaries. Missionaries, by their very nature, go out into the wilds, spreading their own brand of Western interference exactly where it’s not wanted. In King of the Cloud Forests, the protagonist Ashley (oddly, Americans still insist on saddling male children with this most effeminate of names) is the son of a Christian missionary in a city in western China in the nineteen-thirties.

I read this book as a child (well, most of it) and it always stuck with me as being extremely odd. Though I never finished it, it lingered in my memory as that book with the yetis. An 80’s book, it’s considered a bit of a minor classic in children’s literature, and I originally found it in my school library, but because it takes place in a rather serious and grim time and place, it was never going to be the kind of thing I would have chosen to read as a child (I hated historical fiction then, and only wanted to read about the future and fantastic alien worlds), but I ploughed through because I knew that there was going to be some cryptozoological element. But I was to be somewhat disappointed…

Before I go any further, I’d like to note that the classic, haunting cover remembered from my childhood in which a mysteriously-shrouded figure makes its way through a howling snowstorm has been replaced in the Egmont Press edition by a CGI monstrosity. A horrible font, cheesy-as-feck ‘spooky staring eyes’ and a misshapen reject from a PS1 game wandering among the Himalayas made me almost not want to open the book. You may be ‘committed to ethical publishing’, Egmont, but Christ, get your act together regarding covers.

Anyway, the story opens with Ashley (heh heh) living a relaxed life with his father, his friends and a Himalayan helper named Uncle Sung. Reading the book now, I’m impressed at how the religious element is handled. Ashley’s father is a good man who’s devoted to his faith and helping others. Too often nowadays in all kinds of fiction, the religious character is a figure to pity or mock. But the religious debates that are very briefly touched on (it is a children’s book) raise unsettling questions about the possible conflict between faithfully observing religion and being a truly intelligent and moral person. It’s played very subtly- so subtly that I doubt even religious folk would find anything objectionable- but there’s just enough there to leave the door open for debate in the mind of an intelligent child reader (it obviously flew over my pre-teen head). I like the idea that Ashley’s father is still a good man even though his own worldview may not necessarily be very realistic. He’s also not portrayed as being any better or worse than the Buddhist Uncle Sung. Sung himself is something of a realist, remaining cynical about aspects of even his own religion. None of this is idle background, either; Morpurgo is working up to something big.

Then the Japanese invade. Reading his book the first time around is almost certainly the earliest memory I have of being aware of this terrible conflict. There’s no real detail about the war or why it’s happening, and young readers are spared any mention about the many, many Japanese war atrocities committed. Instead, the war is played as a plot-device to get Ashley and Uncle Sung to leave the city and head into the Himalayas, bound for Tibet and ultimately British India, where Ashley will get a boat to England.

The hardships of their journey also stuck with me for many years. It felt like an enormous, epic quest equal to The Hobbit. The two travel across plains and high into the snow-covered mountains. The landscape is vast and cruel, the hardships broken only by rest at the occasional house or monastery. Also introduced to me by this book was the idea of Tibet as being a seriously mystical place- Ashley and Sung encounter superstitious locals, including a llama who tells Ashley’s fortune. He claims that Ashley will be a ‘king of the cloud forests.’ Sung merely scoffs. They also come across legends of the yeti, the wildman who supposedly inhabit the mountains.

The friendship between the two travellers grows until, almost unbearably, Sung fails to return from a trip to gather supplies during a snow storm. Ashley holes up in a hut, waiting for Sung’s return. Instead, he gets a very different kind of visitor…

Ashley gets taken in by a tribe of yetis, and this is where it all went south for me as a child. I remember losing interest as soon as the beasts were revealed to be a lovable, caring bunch of critters. I wanted my crypto-creatures to remain mysterious, dammit! I never have had time for the ‘noble savage’ plot, and still find it boring today.

Anyway, Ashley has a lovely time living with the yetis, and over time he comes to know them all, giving them token cave-man type names (you know the kind of thing: One-Eye, Big-Leg, No-Face, etc). True to the noble savage stereotype, they know no anger or selfishness, and live in perfect harmony with their surroundings. He stays with them for almost a year until he realised that they pretty much worship him, and after their devotion causes a disaster to the tribe, he knows that he can no longer remain as a false God; he must leave. Ah, now it becomes obvious what all that religious sub-text was for earlier! It’s subtler than I’m making it sound, and Morpurgo definitely deserves credit for getting his point across naturally without any overt God-bashing.

I loved the scene where Ashley leaves the tribe during a goat-raid on a monastery. His first contact with humans in a year does not go well, and he realises that he will probably never feel the same towards his fellow man (or woman? The mind boggles) again. And to his credit, the author allows this trait to persist without sugar-coating it: Ashley is allowed to grow up as a somewhat isolated boy who, true to his experiences, never quite fits in and dreams of someday returning to his mountain idyll.

There’s also an odd reversal when Ashley meets a man who has come to wonder if the yetis are after all not a step above mankind, given that they have managed to live a ‘better’ lifestyle than we do and exist in a sort or unspoiled garden of Eden, thereby putting themon a sort of God-like pedestal. Even though the book finishes on a note of aching loss for this departed ‘paradise’, the subtext is clearly that revering anyone as a perfect being, and surrendering reason to such worship, is an act of folly.

I would certainly recommend King of the Cloud Forests for anyone who’s interested in challenging their children (or themselves) with a haunting story that raises some uncomfortable questions, and provides no easy answers.

Sharpe's Triumph by Bernard Cornwell

As I've noted before, Cornwell's famous Sharpe novels seem to me to exist in a bit of a cultural and historical vacuum. The author provides just enough context and background to make the story work, but no further. In Sharpe's Triumph, for example, we learn that the Brits are now fighting the Mahratta Confederation, which is a conglomeration of Indian states and rulers who have banded together, and who are using some renegade European generals such as the German Pohlmann and the traitorous Englishman General Dodd, to lead their troops. From this set-up all Cornwell's heroes, villains and conflicts spring, and this he does well. But as in Sharpe's Tiger, there seems a curious lack of depth; a fear to look into any of the issues encountered when writing about the early 19th-century British Empire. Once again, neither Sharpe nor the reader gets more than a cursory reason why these mighty forces are opposed to one another.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh. The book is still very entertaining, and at heart it's a very well-written action extravaganza, and wants to be nothing more. It's just a shame that Cornwell, who clearly does know his history, and can write epic battle scenes like nobody's business, doesn't put the same care into recreating other aspects of his historical writing.

The book begins with Sharpe surviving a massacre perpetrated by Dodd, who has fled from the British ranks to avoid being punished for murder. It's a great opening that cements Dodd as an intriguing villain (this potential doesn't really come to fruition, but he's still a pretty good character). In the intervening four years since his last adventure, Sharpe's been comfortably stationed at Seringapatan, the former capital of the Tipoo Sultan. Nobody knows that Sharpe himself killed the Tipoo, nor that he still hides the dead king's jewels among his clothes.

Sharpe makes an appearance at the siege of the city of Ahmednuggur, where Dodd's men are stationed alongside the forces of the Mahratta Confederation. Scottish troops storm the walls, led by one Colin Campbell, who will later meet the equally fictitious Flashman(!) during the Sikh wars in the 1840's. Campbell joins Wellington as one of the few real-life people who have met both famous fictional Empire-builders. Meanwhile, Sharpe's nemesis Seargeant Hakeswill, who somehow survived his tiger ordeal at the end of the last book, is still alive and looking to make trouble for our hero...

The best part of the book comes when Sharpe and his mentor McCandless visit the Mahratta troops commanded by the General Pohlmann. Pohlmann takes Sharpe aside and tells him that he could join the Mahrattas and rise up the ranks. For once we get a look inside Sharpe's head as a real human being and not as an action hero as he is tempted by Pohlmann's offer- in the British army, he is cast forever as a low-ranking soldier due to his social class, with no hope of rising up the ranks regardless of ability, while as a traitor in Pohlmann's ranks, he could become a rich, decadent officer within a few years, because the Mahrattas value his skills.

There are some great scenes as Sharpe wrestles with this idea. After all, unlike the right-wing Flashman, Sharpe is an apolitical sword-for-hire who has been scorned by his own establishment and bears no real loyalty towards the British army or the East India Company. Unfortunately, Cornwell declines to use this plot point to critique the morality of the British Empire (I know, it's not that kind of book, but he came so close!), and a conveniently-timed act of treachery of Dodd's causes Sharpe to shelve any idealogical notions and once again side with McCandless and the British.

The book does finish with a tremendous (if exhaustive) description of the battle of Assaye: the battle that made Wellington's youthful career. Nobody else does battles like Cornwell, nobody else can handle the epic amounts of men, animals and troop movements. It's only disappointing that the aforementioned lack of context spoils things somewhat. The fact that we don't really know what's at stake, or what the Mahratta's motivations are, somewhat robs this superb technical exercise of its emotional heart. Nevertheless, it's exciting stuff, and the various plot points associated with the cast of heroes and villains tie together nicely- except of course, those necessary to set up the next book.

Of Irish interest, there is one or two fleeting references to the old sod, including when when a sly Indian fighting for the British asks McCandless about his Irish-bred horse.

'County Meath is in Ireland?' Sevajee asked.

'It is, it is.'

'Another country beneath the British heel?'

'For a man beneath my heel, Sevajee,' the Colonel said, 'you look in remarkably fine fettle. Can we talk about tomorrow? Sharpe, I want you to listen...'

Sigh. So close...

(Incidentally, if you get your hands on the book, please note the grossly misshapen faces of the soldiers on the front cover. At best, they're pulling faces that suggest they've just taken a spoonful of the Tipoo Sultan's elephant dung. At worst, their heads are twisted at an Exorcist-style angle. It's really a horrible painting.)

The Jewel Of Seven Stars by Bram Stoker

Ok, so what if I'm always willing to give an Irishman another chance? So Dracula didn't do it for me when I finally got around to reading it; no matter. The old boy's such a big name in Victorian horror, and has been so influential, that there was bound to be something he'd written that I'd like. And after a chance viewing of the original 1932 The Mummy, I was on something of a Mummy binge. I watched the Hammer Mummies, I re-read refutations of Tutankhamun's curse, and I gobbled up every Victorian era piece of Egyptian horror hokum I could- and that didn't take long, because there aren't that many.
Besides Conan Doyle's formative takes on the genre, and a few others (including The Beetle, and that crazy story where the mummy comes back to life in the far future), there was only one other serious piece of 'classic' mummy fiction that I had yet to tackle- and that was The Jewel of Seven Stars by old Abraham Stoker. And so we were to spend several more nights together, sifting through lumpy prose, spelunking for plot points and keeping a watchful eye in case any action showed up.

The action (or inaction as it'd be more accurately described), gets underway when a young lawyer called Malcolm Ross gets called to the house of one Margaret Trelawny. What's that you say? Not the daughter of the famous Egyptologist, Abel Trelawny? Why, the very same (Yeah, this is one of those universes where Egyptologists are household names)! Ah, but Stoker's playing it cool, and this plot-relevant tid-bit is kept from us for some little time. It's all part of his plan to make us think that Jewel is not a mystical horror story, but in fact one of those boring Victorian locked room whodunnits (look, I really don't care whodunnit, unless it was a mummy, in which case, GET TO THE MUMMY). Instead, we get to spend lots of time with several police officers who potter around in Trelawny's house, mostly not even leaving his room. They learn that old man Trelawny's been somehow put into a coma. Eventually, something that would have been immediately obvious to the characters is revealed to the reader: that Trelawny's room is absolutely crammed with Egyptian artifacts, including several mummified cats and even people.

At this, Malcolm and the policemen and doctors who are now on the case wonder if the artifacts could possibly be disseminating some kind of poisonous odour that the old man has picked up, so they start wearing face-masks when they're in the room. Strange things begin happening in the house at night, and suspicion quickly falls on young Margaret. This bothers Malcolm, because though he can see that she's the most likely culprit, she still makes his head go giddy and his stomach turn to mush. Well, that's something I can get behind, you know. I mean, we all know how much love sucks. But Malcolm is such a typical late-Victorian chaste goody-two-shoes romantic hero that he makes me a little bit sick myself. He puts Margaret up on a ridiculous pedestal constantly, making the love subplot contrived and unbelievable. His anguish and mood swings are the only things about him that strike a note of truth for a young man in love, but when it comes to Margaret herself, he never thinks anything that a real person would in such a situation. Did Victorian gentlemen really have to restrain even their thoughts like this? This part of the book goes on for way too long.

Anyway, after some time Abel Trelawny wakes up, and things start to look up for the reader. When one of his Egyptologist colleagues shows up at the house, Abel is forced to tell the gang some of the backstory behind the mysterious goings-on. It turns out that Abel and his man have something of a history of mucking about in cursed tombs- in particular, the tomb of one Queen Tera. Finally the story escapes the confines of Abel's bedroom (in the form of a flashback), and there's a few very effective chapters describing the history of this rogue queen, as well as the Englishmen's violation of her tomb.

Here Stoker manages to conjure up the mystic side of Egyptology, which really is what we all came for really, right? Tera's perfectly-preserved hand (notably white, mind you) gets removed, and starts turning up in some really weird places. My favourite part of the book is when they are lugging Tera's coffin through the desert after plundering her tomb, only to find their missing Arab servant lying dead with the missing mummy hand on top of him. If anyone is ticking boxes, yeah the Englishmen are accompanied by a bunch of untrustworthy, superstitious Arabs who come to nasty ends at the hands of the curse while their white masters, who instigated the tomb robbery, make it out alive. I guess the writers of the Hammer movies must have really loved that bit.

Tera's character herself is drawn pretty sketchily, and though she does control all the events of the plot, we never really feel like we know her. From what we do learn though, there's definite echoes of Ayesha from She going on- a powerful woman from an ancient civilization who uses sorcery to gain immortality. Tera plans to bring herself into the nascent 20th century in the 'northern land' she has always dreamed of: England. The particulars of her plan are very intricate, and Stoker has constructed a set-up of spells, amulets, and centuries-long plotting that Dan Brown would be proud of (err... might not seem like it, but that's a compliment). Another of my favourite bits is when the protagonists realise that the titular jewel of seven stars matches the stars of the plough, even though thousands of years ago, when Tera constructed it, they would not have been in the same position. It's a nice touch that brings home the vastness of the time involved and the perfection of her plan. There's plenty of other interesting Egyptological information, and it shows that Stoker really knew his stuff.

Meanwhile, the crew has relocated to Cornwall so that Trelawny can... help to raise the obviously evil (or at best extremely powerful, troublesome and unpredictable) Tera. He comes over all Doctor Frankenstein here, pondering on what modern people could learn from messing with Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. It's hinted that the Egyptians may have been far more advanced than us in many fields, including possibly having knowledge of radioactive materials (here Stoker again includes some ripped-from-the-headlines stuff). They begin to wonder what a successful resurrection of Tera would mean for their religious beliefs, which is a step further than most Victorian fiction usually goes! A good old-fashioned storm brews as they assemble the necessary equipment around her sarcophagus in a cave beneath their Cornwall house. Meanwhile, Malcolm is wondering why Margaret (who was conceived the moment her father had a mysterious 'missing time' episode in Tera's tomb, and who is the spitting image of the ancient queen) hasn't quite been acting herself lately...

It should be obvious that there is a lot of good stuff in The Jewel of Seven Stars. Stoker was something of a minor expert in Egyptology, and the book is better-researched than most of its ilk. There's definitely more going on here than just using Egypt as a handy place to pull spooky stories from; there's the fear that this time (unlike in Dracula), even science and modern technology might not be enough to save us from ancient evils. And like She, that evil will take the form of what a turn-of-the-century man would fear the most: a powerful, liberated woman.

But these interesting themes are marred by a pace that's slower than intercontinental drift, turning the non-Egyptological sections into quite a slog. And it would have helped if Malcolm wasn't such a wet blanket either. I would recommend this one only to those with a serious interest in the development of the 'Egyptian' theme in Victorian weird fiction. Well, that's what you get for trusting an Irishman...

Only If You Wear That Dress: Street Fighter (1994)

Being the first of several possible reviews of 90’s video-game movie adaptations!

Fans who were at the right age when Street Fighter 2 ruled the world in the early 90’s remember that there were two films based off this franchise at the time. One of them was hard to find (in Ireland at least!) since it was a Japanese animated effort, and anime hadn’t yet become the ‘nerd-chic’ powerhouse market that it now is in the west (before the information age, ‘niche’ actually meant ‘niche’! As in, you couldn’t buy it anywhere!). But if you did manage to come across a copy of it on VHS, bootleg or otherwise, you were in for a shock: to kids used to Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, this stuff was somewhat adult. It was definitely aimed at an older audience, and, unfamiliar with any form of Japanese weirdness, we didn’t quite know what to make of it. We certainly didn’t know what to make of the Chun-Lee-in-the-shower-scene, that’s for sure. April O’Neill never did anything like that.

In Celebration of the Ghost Ship

Being an insane over-analysis of one of my favourite sub-genres!

You know this story, you’ve seen it a million times. It’s two parts sci-fi and one part horror, and it owes its ancestry almost entirely to movies and later, videogames; its only direct literary ancestor would by the haunted house story. Usually taking place in the future, the story will feature a group of humans (often military) who either stumble upon or are sent to investigate a mysterious space ship, space station or remote colony or outpost of some sort. At first it seems as if the place is deserted. There will be no signal and no response to any attempts at communications. There may be some evidence that the previous occupants came to a sticky end. The characters will wander around in the dark with flashlights. Sooner or later, they will encounter whatever it was that killed the original crew, and things will get nasty. It’s often aliens, zombies, ghosts, demons, or some combination of the above. Depending on the ratio of horror to sci-fi, members of the team may be killed off one-by-one, or they may fight the threat outright.

Fictionpress

So, maybe you’ve heard about this fanfiction thing, eh? I remember when I first did, because it was in an article in the Sunday Times, and it was opposite a review for Jurassic Park 3. Nothing dates a moment like a reference to a tired film franchise.

The idea always intrigued me- the presence of a large base of readers and writers of amateur fiction out there seemed like a positive thing. But, by and large, playing in other people’s universes did not really appeal to me. These writers were stuck on using characters and situations that were not their own. Fanfiction.net is the biggest collection of this stuff out there, but it’s got its own sister site for ‘original’ fiction too at Fictionpress.net.

An Airport Novel Takes Off: The Eye of Ra by Michael Asher

*Spoilers all over the shop*

I found The Eye of Ra in the library at work. At first glance, I pegged it as the kind of history-themed thriller that has been clogging bookshelves since the success of The Da Vince Code. In fact, it was published in the late 90’s (most of the action takes place in 1995), before the Dan Brown effect made centuries-long conspiracies, Templars, and famous stuff from history necessary for thriller plots. In fact, this book takes its cues more from Indiana Jones as well as a bunch of much stranger sources, such as the work of Erich von Daniken. So, yeah, there’s going to be some ‘ancient astronaut’ theories bandied round before the sun sets behind the pyramids in this one.

The Table-Rappers by Ronald Pearsall

The Table-Rappers is presented as a scholarly and exhaustive take on Spiritualism and other Victorian occult phenomena. It isn't that exactly, but it still makes interesting reading.

What the book really is, for the most part, is a sort of high-brow, skeptical version of the works of Charles Fort, or even the later books by Colin Wilson on the supernatural. In Table-Rappers, seemingly hundreds of individual cases and incidents are chronicled in an endless array of brief encounters.
Like Wilson's books, there are many fascinating stories buried somewhere within each chapter, though the 'filing' system seems rather odd (some of Wilson's stories stuck in my head for years, prompting much flipping through his strangely-edited chapters to find them years later). And as an Irish connection, I was delighted to learn that gangs of occultists wearing 'all-concealing black robes' were operating in Dublin during the late Victorian period!

Rather than attempting a chronological history of the subject, Pearsall has opted to separate his chapters based on the various types of phenomena- seances, spirit photography, etc. In a way, there is a loose chronology, as there were slightly overlapping 'waves' of interest in these subjects, but it's done at the expense of a more meaningful, interpretive take on the subject. And while many of the incidents alluded to are fascinating, shockingly short shrift is given to many of the most important spiritualists who shaped the movement: the Fox sisters, whose 1840's table-banging marked the beginnings of Spiritualism, D. D. Home, the only psychic who was never caught cheating, and the Davenport brothers. The book gives little hint about how the movement was perceived in the world at large, or how important these characters were during their lifetimes.

Most of the book is taken up with these brief accounts of Spiritualism, giving the feeling that the Victorian age must have been absolutely full of fraudulent mediums, all squabbling for their 15 minutes of fame and quick to besmirch one another's reputations. Pearsall's tone is skeptical throughout, assuming foul play and trickery in every case. It's true that most mediums were caught cheating at some point, but it's interesting to compare this book with Peter Lamont's The First Psychic, a book that's primarily a biography of D. D. Home, but which serves as a very effective commentary on the Spiritualist movement and the Victorian need to believe. Lamont never assumes that any mediums were cheating unless they were caught; he does eventually confess his own personal skepticism, but on an academic level his scrupulous fairness is impressive.

Later on in Table-Rappers, Pearsall includes a few chapters on other aspects of Victorian spookiness, including poltergeists and good old-fashioned haunted houses. For some reason I enjoyed this stuff better- perhaps because they're just stories, and he can neither prove nor disprove them with his slightly sarcastic prose. But because he was writing in the 70's, when the supernatural- sorry, the paranormal- was having a renaissance in credibility, he does let slip that although most Victorian 'mind-readers' were bogus, we of course now 'know' that there is definite evidence for telepathy (!). He cites some unspecified 20th-century research to prove this; I suspect that he's referring to the work of J. B. Rhine and the Duke University Parapsychology Lab, an interest subject in itself. (In fairness, Rhine seems to have been a serious, rational-minded scientist who worked extremely hard for decades, using only variants on the Zenner cards theme, to provide statistically significant evidence for telepathy without ever getting caught up in the silliness that often comes with the subject). There's also a fascinating chapter on the feud between the outrageous Madam Blavatsky (creator of the break-away movement 'Theosophy') and the mostly-rational Society for Psychical Research.

Late in the book, Pearsall does throw in a few chapter of analysis, but it's very 70's-type analysis that includes some of the odd ideas regarding the paranormal at that time. It's weird to find this skeptical author drawing a line between Spiritualism and manifestations, which he believes to be bogus, and clairvoyance and table-rapping, which he does not. It's still a worthwhile read, however, for the countless strange stories that characterized the 19th -century occult scene.

Sharpe's Tiger by Bernard Cornwell

‘You like Flashman, right?’

‘Yeah. Love Flashman.’

‘Oh, man, you’ve gotta try Sharpe so.’

Fine so. I finally have tried Sharpe. And, while entertaining, I find myself agreeing with the Flashman fan who noted that Sharpe is ‘too straight an arrow by half.’

Bernard Cornwell and his fictional Napoleon-era soldier Richard Sharpe have a lot of fans out there- Sharpie’s probably one of the biggest names in British Empire military-themed historical fiction, only partly as a result of the popular tv adaptation starring Sean Bean. It’s really a bit of a surprise he hasn’t crossed my path before- probably as a result of my lack of interest in the Napoleonic Wars.

But despite the slight age difference, the parallels to Flashy are unavoidable- Sharpe is a British soldier who works his way up to a high rank, and has a long career around the globe, appearing in many of the famous military escapades of his time (including Waterloo).

I picked up Sharpe’s Tiger because I found it for two pounds in a shop in Yorkshire, but also because it featured Sharpe’s early adventures in India, which seemed more interesting to me than his later Europe-based adventures. It’s actually chronologically the first book in the series, though not the first one written.

Sharpe begins the book as a private, having signed up for the army following a scuffle at home. He’s a rough Lancashire lad with a troubled background; he spent some time stealing luggage from stagecoaches, eventually killing a man over a fight with a woman.

In the army, he becomes part of the slow British take-over of India. Come 1799, the redcoats are struggling against the mighty Tippu Sultan in what we now know as the fourth Anglo-Mysore war. The Tippu, a Muslim of Persian background, has come into control of the largely Hindu city-state of Mysore in the south of India. The French, always eager to see the British thwarted, have sent an adviser to aid the Tippu. And there is an Irish connection here: the last British leader to have taken a swipe at the Tippu prior to this was Lord Cornwallis, the same guy who surrendered to the Yanks at Yorktown and put down the 1798 rebellion on the Emerald Isle (I'm not a big fan of him, so).

During preparations for the siege of Seringapatam, Sharpe earns the ire of one Sergeant Obediah Hawkeswill, a tyrannical officer who goads Sharpie into assaulting him. A flogging follows, cut short only by the news that a senior British officer carrying sensitive information has fallen into enemy hands. Someone is needed to pose as a deserter and join the Tippu’s forces to rescue the man- is Sharpe up for the job? Already thinking of deserting for real, Sharpie volunteers, but is dismayed to find that he’s going to paired for this perilous mission with Lieutenant Lawless, an upper-class officer who has to also pose as an unruly deserter.

So begins the book. Later, there’s adventures, rescues and spills aplenty in the Tippu’s city as Sharp faces off against tiger-striped Mysore soldiers, a team of professional torturers, and even an actual tiger. It’s all pretty entertaining stuff.

Aspects of the novel are great- the play between Lawless, a decent but slightly effete man who needs to convince as a ruffian, and Sharpe, who’s the real deal, are among my favourite parts. It gives a glimpse into the injustices of the British class system of the time. Other small touches I liked include the French adviser’s shock at how the British army recruits and treats their troops- in France at that time, soldiering even at a private level was considered an honourable and respectable position, and officers often mingled with their troops. Hawkeswill too is a flat if hateful villain, sure to have the reader hissing from his first appearance.

So it’s an enjoyable adventure with some nice period touches. But compared to Flashman?

For starters, the history quite often simply isn’t there. Sharpe, as an uneducated private plucked from the gutter, doesn’t particularly care why the British army are in India fighting against the Tippu, and the reader doesn’t find out much about this issue either. In a Flashman book, the hero would have ended up learning much about the Tippu's point of view and coming to understand (if not appreciate) his culture, but here this fascinating historical figure is reduced to a generic villain. Late in the book, there is a very brief discussion about how trade is the main reason that the Brits, the Frogs and the Tippu have come to blows, but this interesting tidbit is kept tantalizingly brief. Throughout, other interesting topics are brought up and then discarded (such as the place of religion in the various characters’ lives) as though the narrative is afraid to look any further beneath the surface of what is essentially an action-adventure novel. Which is fine, but it could have been much more. In total, what we have here is a British Empire-themed novel that is not really interested in addressing any of the issues raised by the day-to-day realities of the British Empire. Compared to Flashy’s satirically scathing commentary on just about every aspect of Victorian life, it just won’t wash.

The writing is solid and occasionally striking, but it often retains an unremarkable airport-novel style that’s pretty bland and lacking the character of Fraser’s work.

As for Sharpe himself, he is somewhat more interesting than most thriller heroes. His rough background and pragmatism sometimes cause him to do shocking things- in order to prove his ‘loyalty’ to the Tippu, he is fully prepared to assassinate British officers if necessary. And the glibness with which he accepts that he’s been dumped by his up-to-then sweetheart is a bit shocking too. He’s angry at how the world has treated him because of his lowly birth. But by and large, he’s a far more conventional hero than Flashy. Which is to be expected, really.

Perhaps comparing the two isn’t fair. But the Sharpe novels were begun a few years after the original Flashman books, and were surely influenced in some way by them, so in that regard it’s a little disappointing to find them a similar idea carried out far, far more conventionally. The end result: Flashy would totally take Sharpe (probably by throwing sand in his eye and rogering his woman, too, the coward).

Lost Games: Bodies On The Docks

It’s popularly accepted by fans of old-school gamebooks that the coming of age of video games finally knelled the death for the paper-and-dice brigade. Gamers no longer had to shirk their computers for truly immersive experiences. But is this the way it had to have been? Surely the new technology ought to have provided new way to play text-heavy gamebooks, allowing them to be played in a way that didn’t have other, irrelevant paragraphs visible all the time and where cheating was not possible?

Lost Games: Adventure Creator

Remember when games came free with floppy disks on the front of computer magazines? Of course you do. They were demos, mostly- games like Lemmings, Wolfenstein 3D and Escape Velocity- designed to sucker you in and make you buy the full versions. There was shareware, too- full games, made by amateurs (usually a single person) that pleaded with you to send ten dollars- just ten dollars!- to some guy in California if you liked the game. Usually there’d be a stack of these games on a single disk. Somehow I often found these ‘homebrew’ efforts more interesting than the proper studio games- they were always small, and usually somewhat graphically impaired, but they had a charm and randomness about them that big company products couldn’t match.

The Silver Key by H.P. Lovecraft

Okay, so we all know a little about Lovecraft, the guy who invented ‘cosmic horror’: he feared that mankind was adrift in an endless and uncaring universe, he created a Parthenon of god-creatures that are unspeakably terrifying (if occasionally plush and cuddly), and he liked using the word ‘eldritch’. A lot. And let us not forget his contribution to later generations of teenage mealheads (curse Metallica’s spelling of ‘Ktulu’- I always thought it was some kind of bird).

But today’s topic is a sometimes less-noted facet of his works- the ‘dream-works.’ See, when he wasn’t scaring the bejesus out of readers with his madness-inducing monsters and his turgid prose, he wrote stuff that was, well, a bit different. A bit airy-fairy. The ‘dream-works’ refer to a bunch of his stories that are more overtly-than-usual influenced by one Lord Dunsany, an Anglo-Irish writer (woop woop!) who wrote fantasy fiction around the turn of the century. Dunsany’s stuff is extremely whimsical, a little like slightly twisted children’s fairy tales. There’s been a lot of speculation about exactly how to classify some of these writers who were churning out fantasy and science fiction-type stories before those terms had really solidified (Lovecraft is usually thought to feature elements of both), but be sure that the dream-works fiction would register as extremely soft on the hard/soft sci-fi scale.

These tales generally take place in regions of a dream-world that’s as well mapped as Lovecraft’s fictional New England. It’s a place full of ‘strange and ancient cities’ and ‘elephant caravans tramping through the perfumed jungles of Kled.’ A place of wonders rivalled only by the Arabian Nights themselves, and limited only by the imagination of a dreaming artist. The stories feature real people who discover ways to enter the dream-realm, and once there they have fantastic adventures. They’re mostly enjoyable for their sheer whimsy and lack of logic, though they’re probably not my favourite of his works. When they start to include roving bands of intelligent cats (HPL bloody loved cats) as main characters, that’s when I check out.

But there is one Dream-cycle story that has a special meaning to me.

The story starts with a tale called The Statement of Randolph Carter. Carter is a young man who acquires a strange Southern friend with an interest in the occult. As usual, they go messing with Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, and Carter’s associate comes to a messy (if vague) end in an eldritch tomb in a graveyard. It’s a short, throwaway tale, standard for Lovecraft, and Carter is just another of HPL’s author-stand-in protagonists. There’s no evidence that Lovecraft had any particular plans for the character.

Carter next shows up in a tale called The Silver Key, and suddenly he’s become a much more interesting character. The first line is unforgettable-

When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key to the gate of dreams.

The story is about how Carter, who once was imaginative and unsullied by convention, made nightly trips to fabulous dream-worlds. As he grew older, however, experience and friends caused him to adopt a more prosaic, world-weary attitude, and he becomes unable to enter the dream world. Achingly conscious of what he has lost and yet unable to abandon the logical, scientific approach to life, Carter desperately searches for the key to the dream-world by adopting and then abandoning various world-views. It’s a fantastic tale that challenges the reader. Lovecraft weighs up the merits of religion, atheism, rationalism and finds them each lacking in wonder. Essentially it’s a poignant ode to the innocence of childhood. It’s especially interesting knowing Lovecraft’s own real-life views; he believed that science was an inarguable truth that freed man from superstition as much as it killed wonder. He often noted that his own need to write weird fiction stemmed from his belief that the world was decidedly not mysterious or mystical- he was in effect, a hardline rationalist who mourned for the death of romanticism.

Eventually, Carter returns to his childhood home, the place where he first learnt to dream. Exactly how the story ends depends on the reader’s interpretation, as well as the reader’s attitude towards the real life vs fantasy theme. Relatives find his car and some of his clothes near the house, but Carter himself has vanished. Has he finally escaped for good into the dream world, or was he just a silly dreamer who earned nothing but sordid oblivion? It’s a great open ending.

EXCEPT that there’s a sequel, Through The Gates of The Silver Key. Supposedly Lovecraft was reluctant to write this, and was persuaded to do it by another writer, E. Hoffman Price. It’s a slightly ridiculous tale sci-fi that destroys the mystery and ignores the timeless fantasy and commentary of the original. During a will reading to divide up the missing Carter’s stuff, a well-wrapped-up stranger appears (wonder who that is?!). Turns out that Carter travelled through the cosmos, ending up trapped in the body of a stupid-looking alien on some faraway planet. Eventually, he figured out how to build a spaceship, locate Earth, and return just in time for the will reading. Ridiculous.

When I first read The Silver Key it had an enormous impact on me. I had spent several years at college training to be a scientist (which I had enjoyed), and without really noticing it, going through an extended creative dry period. The story shocked me- I recalled my former love for writing, for books and stories and movies, and I identified with Carter. I too, had lost the key! Fortunately, I had not left it as late as Carter did to realise this! I still enjoy science, but it’s only a part of what I do. Immediately after reading this story I began a slow change in career trajectory. I began writing reviews, articles and fiction once again. For a story to have such an effect 90 years after it was published sure means that the old guy was surely doing something right.

The Diamond Lens by Fitz-James O'Brien

It is my privilege to rescue from obscurity an unfairly-forgotten writer from the annuls of history, and a man from my own county at that- the great Fitz-James O'Brien. Born Michael O'Brien in County Cork, very little seems to be known today about him (I reckon there's a decent English thesis in there somewhere, as the chap definitely deserves a revival).

What we do know about him is that he moved to America in the 1850's, changed his name and whittled away a sizable inheritance living the lavish lifestyle of a dandy. By all accounts (not that there are many), he was a raucous, rollicking man to have at a party, and he supposedly entertained and palled with many of the famous writers of the day. Like many an Irishman, he fought with the Yankees in the US Civil War, and died after being wounded

Fortunately for my own purposes, he also dabbled with ink himself. One of my favourite of his compositions is The Demon of the Gibbet, a rattlingly good Poe-esque tale of a late-night horseride past the Gallows Tree, where a demon is said to haunt. In every alternate verse, the demon speaks to the protagonist, telling him that he's going to steal his cloak, his wine, and eventually his woman as well! The existence of various locations around Cork city named for being former sites of gallows and hangings (Gallows Green, for example) makes me wonder if he had the Cork landscape in mind when he wrote this. The nature of this poem seemed to be crying out for a melody, so I did once put it to a tune, and played it many times with my group, The Thirsty Scholars, in our haunting ground, An Spaipin Fanach. Perhaps it will end up on Youtube someday!

Anyway, O'Brien also frequently wrote proto-sci fi stories for the American Victorian magazines almost thirty years before Wells was on the scene, which is pretty remarkable, especially seeing as how well he fares against the Grand Old Man of Victorian fiction. His tale What Was It?, though not one of my favourites, is thought to be possibly the earliest use of invisibility in fiction, predating The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce, The Horla by Maupassant and Predator. True to my own heart, he was massively influenced by the Arabian Nights (moreso even than Lovecraft, perhaps), and liked to inject his speculative fiction with a jolt of Orientalism, setting tales in Arab or far Eastern countries.

But for today's selection, I've chosen a tale that could have slipped easily into the Wells canon, except for one twist. The Diamond Lens at first appears as if it's going to be a classic Victorian sci-fi yarn- a a story of new science gone wrong. Here's the plot: Linley is a boy who grows up obsessed with microscopy. He loves it so much that as a child, he tears the eyes out of fish and animals in order to use the lenses within. Eventually his family buys him a real microscope, but this only fuels his obsession.

In order to live his life without interference from his family (who expect him to become a doctor), Linley enrolls in a medical course in a New York university and gets himself an apartment. He never turns up for lectures and spends his parents' money on more microscope equipment. But it's never enough! He wants to see more, he wants to see deeper. He curses the limitations of physics.

On the advice of his shady Jewish roomate (Wells would have approved), Linley does what any mid-Victorian gentleman would do when he had a problem- he goes to see a spiritualist. In a rather loopy twist, she puts him in touch with the father of microscopy, the eighteenth-century Dutchman Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek. The spirit of Leeuwenhoek tells Linley that to gain the clarity he craves, he must use a certain type of diamond to make the lens.

And what do you know? Upon returning home, the Jewish roomate (he's also French, just to add insult to injury) reveals to Linley that, through shady means, he's come into possession of just such a diamond! So what's a guy to do? Linley immediately decides to kill him and steal the diamond. After all, he reasons with himself, the Jew must have killed someone himself to get it (it's implied that the Jew had some background in South-American slave-trading). And thus, a perfectly good evening of wine and tipsy indiscretion ends in murder.

Linley carves the diamond into a lens, and finally gets the view he has always dreamed of. In a single drop of water, he discovers worlds that seem like fantastic gardens of colour and splendour. But then he spies something else in this world- a creature that looks like an exquisite, miniature girl. Linley is smitten. For days he cannot leave his microscope- even seeing the drop of water she inhabits depresses him, as it reminds him of the uncrossable gulf between them. I won't spoil the ending, but if you're thinking that this unnatural love will eventually destroy Linley, then have yourself a drink.

Man, I do love this story. It's simple, creepy and effective. It's also wonderfully old-fashioned and harsh in its themes of obsession and karma. From youth, Linley's obsession is depicted as driving him to unnatural acts, viz. the mutilation of animals. And the fact the he receives the information on how to make his breakthrough by supernatural means wonderfully foreshadows its later effects on him. Via consulting with spirits, theft and murder, Linley has achieved his goal. He has broken the natural order, and what he discovers will ruin him in the most personal way possible- through love (a touch that Wells would never use).

The writing is solid and far less annoying than even much later Victorian prose (Stoker, I'm looking at you!). The descriptions of the new world that the hero discovers are stirring, and the sense of wonder-turning-to-horror is masterfully handled. Who else but a Corkman could do as well?

Read the story here, if you would.