The Ghost Hunters (2013) by Neil Spring

Borley Rectory is, for me, the ur-haunted house. The original. The most 'pure' manifestation of the idea of the 'haunted house.' When I close my eyes and think of a haunted house, it's that Victorian red-brick monstrosity I see, its twin front windows staring malevolently. Before there was Hill House, before there was the Belasco House, there was Borley Rectory. I can't even hear those two words without being forcibly yanked back to my childhood: a childhood filled with 'real-life' books about ghosts and hauntings that I collected obsessively.

And those books were filled with Borley Rectory.


Colin Wilson and Peter Underwood had a lot to say in their books about Borley Rectory, but the one that first introduced me to that rambling Suffolk mansion was the Usborne supernatural guide Haunted Houses, Ghosts & Spectres. I've still got my copy, and the painted illustrations in it still give me the creeps. I remember reading it on a sunny summer's day, aged about ten, and within minutes being so terrified I couldn't bring myself to took out the window, lest the ghostly nun of Borley Rectory be there, looking in at me, as she looked in on the Bull family so frequently. Eventually, I read, the rector was forced to brick up the dining-room window.

Brr.

So I think it's fair to say that I was pretty excited to find that someone had finally dramatised the story of the Borley Rectory haunting. Neil Spring's book The Ghost Hunters tackles the haunting of the house, and it's investigation by Harry Price. Price was one of my heroes as a child; the books I read painted him as a heroic man of science who investigated the most unusual unexplained phenomena the pre-war world could muster. He was a psychic investigator; a ghost-hunter. I must have thought the man had the best job in the world. To this day, I still believe that ghost-hunting ought to be done by English men in tweed who are scrupulous scientists and sift through their evidence in wood-paneled libraries, and not by fat, uncritical middle-aged American southerners who listen to too much Coast To Coast Am.

Great cover.

The story of Price's investigation of Borley Rectory has always been one of my favourite stories of 'scientific' paranormal investigation. As a kid I was mad for the idea of the time between the wars being a world in which intelligent men of science could properly investigate - and maybe just prove - the existence of the supernatural. Price investigated spiritualists, mediums and ghost reports, talking mongooses and even magickal demon-summoning. But his most famous investigation, the one with which he would always be associated, was the haunting of Borley Rectory.

The nun - THE NUN!

Spring rightly focuses on Price in his book, mixing fact and fiction skilfully throughout. His narrator is the fictional Sarah Grey, Price's assistant during his investigations at Borley Rectory. Sarah is a young woman who begins working with Price in 1926. Gradually her life comes to revolve around Price and the Rectory. It's a clever way to make a study of the man, and though Spring doesn't stick scrupulously to the historic record, and isn't afraid to bend the facts to fit the story he's crafted, I feel that he paints a portrait which is correct in tone if not in detail. Harry Price was a showman as well as a scientist; as much P. T. Barnum as he was Sherlock Holmes, and was in reality frequently accused of faking the phenomena he was supposed to be studying. My early fears that this aspect of his character would be glossed over in the book in favour of a more clean-cut, heroic version of Harry Price, were thankfully unfounded.

Harry Price - who you gonna call?

When Sarah first meets Price, he's a confirmed skeptic who delights in exposing false mediums. But when they hear stories about 'The Most Haunted House In England', they wonder if Borley Rectory just might be the case that changes Price's beliefs. Price and Sarah meet the various inhabitants of Borley Rectory (who are frequently not what they seem) and become involved in the haunting - and Sarah comes to wonder if the horror at the Rectory has come to take over her own life.

There were a few little things that didn't quite work for me in this book. The story takes place over many years, with years sometimes passing in just a few lines. This has been done to follow the true story, but it does result in some occasionally odd plotting. Also, there are just a bit too many plot twists, with Price's character flipping and flopping quite a lot as to whether he's a skeptic or a believer, some of his revelations happening off the page and some of his behaviour being a little inconsistent. And there's some clunky dialogue in the opening chapters that didn't sound like anything any real human being would ever say, including a cameo by a historical character who basically turned up and name-dropped a bunch of things that he's famous for.

Borley Rectory

BUT, having got the bitching out of the way, I can say that The Ghost Hunters is a fantastic book. I can't remember the last time I devoured a book as quickly as this one. It took me three days to read, but that's just because real life kept getting in the way. If I'd been left to my own devices, I would have read it in one sitting. And it's not a small book either. It captured my interest and filled my mind. Granted, I was already fascinated by the subject matter, but Spring does the subject proud.

Spring's greatest skill is in his treatment of the supernatural. Just as he straddles the boundary between fact and fiction, he leaves us ever unsure as to whether human agencies are causing the 'haunting' or whether something fantastic is really happening. Like the actual reports of the haunting, the manifestations are mostly low-key but extremely disturbing. There are some real scares to be had in this book, and had without forgetting the complex reality of the Borley Rectory story. The line between truth and lie becomes so tangled that it'd hard to know what to believe or what to expect. many characters have reasons to make up stories about the house, but some of the phenomena remain inexplicable. The sense of mystery, rather than in-your-face horror, is masterful. The nun chilled me just as she did years ago, the seance scenes tapped into my sense of wonder, defeated the cold, logical part of my brain and left me wondering if it was just possible that communication with the dead wasn't all just smoke and mirrors. And it's this dichotomy between belief and skepticism, between the real and the fake, that fuels the plot of the book.

This IS the definitive version of the Borley Rectory story; not the true story, but the legend that Borley Rectory has become. There will never be a better fictional take on it. This book is the closest you'll ever come to spending a night in a haunted house with the first ghost-buster, Harry Price, back when people believed that science was going to prove the existence of life after death. And not just any haunted house, either:

The original.

The Khyber Connection (1986) by Simon Hawke

I really ought to like Kipling – as the so-called ‘bard of Empire,’ he represents the personification of the jingoistic colonial attitude that both repels and fascinates me. As a son of British India, and a writer who chronicled its zenith, he should be right down my street. But for some reason, I don’t enjoy much of his prose. I think it stems from a problem common to some fiction from times past: contemporary writers of the Victorian period weren’t trying to give their works a Victorian flavour, and as a result, readers today used to period fiction, with an interest in Victorian settings, are left wanting. For me, I find it strangely difficult to get a feeling for what life might have been like during the British Raj by reading Kipling… either he neglects to mention aspects of culture, or he overloads the reader with alien phrases and concepts without explaining them. Don’t get me wrong, I know my jemadar from my pukka-wallahs, but when but when a barkandaze and a havildargo out for a chukka on the maidan, well that’s where I check out.

His poetry, on the other hand, I often find quite inspiring. Check out this excerpt from Arithmetic on the Frontier, which Simon Hawke uses to warm the reader up for his Afghanistan-set piece of sci-fi pulp nonsense, The Khyber Connection:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

And the women come down to cut up your remains,

Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,

And go to your God like a soldier.

Masterful. Kipling was writing about the Anglo-Afghan War of 1878-80, which was only the second time the British had stuck their bayonet into Afghanistan’s business. To be a completist: they got a sound drubbing in the war of 1839, did a little better in the war of 1878, ended things quite quickly in the war of 1919, and as for 2001? Well, they’re still there. It’s their longest one yet, and still counting! I love that for the recent BBC show Sherlock, they updated Doyle's characters to modern times, but didn't have to change the plot point that Watson had fought in Afghanistan because it was still contemporary!

Incredibly, there was another skirmish tucked in there between these encounters; one not quite large enough to have earned the title of a ‘war.’ This was the siege of Malakand, a region in what was then called the ‘Northwest Frontier Province.’ The British had set up this area as a buffer zone to prevent British India from sharing a border with Russian territory, but their careless border-shifting had irritated enough tribesmen to cause them a headache. Dissatisfaction eventually spilled over into violence and rebellion. It is this conflict that is described in The Khyber Connection.

The book is from a completely insane (but enjoyable) series called Time Wars. The central conceit is that after time travel is discovered, nations at war send agents back in time to historical conflicts to fight it out there rather than in their own time. A group called the Time Commandos (hell of a goofy name) attempt to police these conflicts in order to prevent temporal anomalies. But things are even more complex than that, because it appears that in a previous book, our heroes accidentally created an alternate timeline that merges with their own at certain points in history. Both timelines may cause the destruction of the other, so each is out to destroy the other. The Time Commandos encounter alternate versions of themselves from this other timeline; they’re essentially the same people, though they may have lived their lives differently.

Anyway, typically for a time-travel story, things get off to a confusing start. A temporal soldier (that is, a soldier from the future) who has been sent back to the 1987 conflict gets himself murdered by an Afghan dervish who looks strikingly similar to him. More than similar: they are the same man. During a clean-up operation, Future War Control (that’s what I’m calling it, anyway) figures out what this means: the alternate timeline people are up to something nefarious in the Khyber Pass in 1897! And so the Time Commandos are sent to nineteenth-century Afghanistan, and before you can say ‘Elphinstone’s ghost’ they’re up the Khyber without a paddle, or however the saying goes.

Leaving aside their base-dwelling, cigar-chomping boss, the Commandos are a power trio: Priest, an everyman character, Delaney, a hot-headed Irishman and typical rule-breaking maverick, and Cross, a 12^th-century French peasant girl who’s taken up living in the future. Yeah, she’s basically Laureline from the weird French comic Valerian. They’re simply drawn but likable characters. They disguise themselves as a missionary, soldier and nurse respectively to infiltrate the British forces invading Afghanistan.

Early on in the proceedings the reader comes across one of the odd conceits of the series: in this universe, certain fictional characters are real historical persons. The Commandos come across three soldiers called Learoyd, Mulvaney and Ortheris. Yeah… I guess there aren’t that many well-known literary characters associated with the Afghan Wars. I’d not heard of these three before and I didn’t even suspect that they were a literary reference until I read the afterword. They’re taken from several short stories by Kipling as well as a book called Soldiers Three, as it turns out. Later on, they meet a Hindu water-carrier called Gunga Din, who is to play an important part in the proceedings also.

Apart from these, Hawke has packed his version of the Khyber Pass with an array of bizarre characters. Most of them we get only the barest introduction to; six books into the series, Hawke has amassed quite a lot of continuity baggage. There’s Dr Darkness, a man who has become able to travel instantaneously anywhere in the universe but can’t touch anyone else, there’s an enemy agent who has impersonated so many other characters that our heroes no longer know what to call him, and there’s not one but two rabble-rousing Islamic messiahs stirring up trouble, one or both of whom may also be imposters from the future. In fact, there are scenes in which it seems that barely anyone in this historical scenario is who they’re supposed to be. Oh, and did I mention Winston Churchill? Yes, Churchill really was involved in the Siege of Malakand as a young man. Hawke has juggled the dates around slightly to make him fit in with the other historical events he references, but in a novel that messes with history so much already this hardly seems worth griping about.

For a short, pulpy book the science-fictional elements and time-travelling shenanigans are both rather complex and in-depth. The reader very quickly gets buried in a mess of techno-babble that’s hard to keep up with but does have an internal consistency if you’re paying attention. The universe created is lively and interesting, with much world-building done in very few pages. It’s perhaps telling that the multiple time-streams plot is actually less baffling that the real-life explanation given for the political machinations of Afghanistan at the time: not even a sci-fi author could make those sound sensible!

There’s so much going on in this little novel that the history gets short shrift, though there are interesting tidbits, and anyway I’m always happy to read about 19^th-century Afghanistan. I’ve enjoyed one other Time Wars book so I’ll pick up a few more if ever I see them, though they’re definitely not common in 2^nd shops these days. Recommended if you like cheesy scifi action that actually gets rather complex. And as a final aside, the book did provide me with a few more works of Kipling’s that I enjoyed, in particular during a drunken bar scene where Cross, the female Time Commando, surprises the other soldiers by belting out a few verses of this song from Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads. Great stuff!

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1990) by Edward Rice

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Well, they do say you should never meet your heroes. And in this case, it’s not because my hero was an asshole, necessarily. It’s more the sense of crushing inadequacy that reading about Burton fills me with. I can never be as amazing as he was, not even if I brought mammoths back to life. Mammoths that shit out anti-global-warming unobtaneum.

Though, to be fair, the same can probably be said for most people who have ever lived. Sure, there were probably better people who have lived: Burton, after all, was not really any kind of philanthropist. He didn’t really work to better the world’s lot. In fact, in many ways, he probably made bits of the world indirectly worse off, by laying the foundation for British colonial rule. He did occasionally try to act as a just and fair governor in the various odd places he wound up. But, by and large, he spent his life doing things that he wanted to do for himself, and sod what anyone else wanted.

But there have been few people as genuinely awesome as Burton. Winding through the potted history of 19^th-century colonialism, Burton appears like a real-life combination of James Bond, Indiana Jones and Harry Flashman. He investigated interesting cultures from the inside. He travelled to forbidden places. He was a spy. He was present at game-changing historical events. He was a reckless, brilliant rule-breaker who was never entirely trusted by the establishment, and he was tall, mysterious, scarred, and alluring to women.

Legend.

 Aside from my all-consuming jealousy (I can never compete with his knowledge of 19^th-century exotica because he had the unfair advantage of living through it), would I have liked him as a man if I met him? Unlikely. Despite sharing more than a few of his interests, Burton would probably have soured me with his sarcasm and unsociable ways.

Rice must have had a devil of a task researching Burton: aside from his own insanely prolific (I’m inclined to coin the phrase ‘diarrheic’ for this man who seemed to positively shit out books) tendencies, the resources on Burton are varied and conflicting, with his wife’s input attempting to paint him as a saint (and a Catholic to boot; good luck with that, love) and her jealous nemeses colouring him far more negatively. It seems that everyone had their own version of the man. Burton’s bizarre sense of humour does not help matters much either, with him frequently coyly referring to himself in the third person, hinting at ‘a certain officer known to me,’ with Rice having to guess whether the blackguard is referring to himself or not. The sheer amount of things the man got up to that were deemed not acceptable to Victorian society, but which he simply had to commit to paper, means that he adopts this approach rather frequently. Whether, ahem, examining the gay brothels of Karachi for his superiors or measuring the average penis size of Ethiopians, Burton just has to write about it.

Lad.

So who was this guy, exactly?

I feel as though the man did so many varied and interesting things that I must resort to a list in order to cover them all, adding some commentary where I feel it’s appropriate.

-he travelled Europe as a young man and learned multiple languages. Prodigy, then.

-he went to Oxford, and though a genius at multiple subjects, could not tolerate the stuffiness of the establishment. He antagonised staff and students, fought duel (whenever someone insulted his moustache, seriously) and was expelled. He left by tramping the flower beds with his horse and carriage. That's how much he didn't care.

-he signed up for the East India Company and went soldiering in exotic lands. This is exactly what I would have done had I been living in the early 19^th-century, no question. I too, am ‘fit for nothing but to be shot at for sixpence a day.’ He left for India, having been ‘duly wept over.’ Cynical bastard.

-he became, more-or-less, a believer in Islam. This gave him a significant edge on other contemporary Orientalists, whose sympathies for those they studied was sometimes suspect. Old 'Ruffian Dick', on the other hand, was a true believer.

-he became an initiate into various cults and secret societies including the Sufis and the Hashassins. To be honest, for me this section of the book gets somewhat bogged down in theological matters. But then, I’m not a genius like Burton was.

-he (probably) acted as a British spy during the wars of the North-West Frontier, becoming enemy and advisor to various Muslim Khans and religious leaders. Let’s just say that various places he scouted out during this time later fell under the protective embrace of the British Empire. Who knows how that happened? Oops.

-he was involved in the Crimean War, though, as always with Burton, things didn’t exactly go to plan. His ragtag regiment didn’t come out covered with glory (they were more like the dirty dozen, in the first half of the movie anyway).

-he became one of the first white men to visit Mecca and Medina… and survive.Even though he went in disguise, his deep belief in Islam means that this trip was a religiously meaningful one to him, and not just an act of colonial bravaggio or cultural insensitivity.

-he took a spearhead through his cheek when ambushed by Somalians in his tent. This gave him a scar that made him look like a serious badass for the rest of his life.

-he travelled (and fought) with John Hanning Speke across central Africa to find the source of the Nile. This is one of the things Burton is most remembered for. The story of the two men’s friendship and eventual hatred is one of the most interesting parts of the book. The hardships the two underwent are almost unimaginable. Burton’s attitude towards the Africans, however, is far less enlightened than his attitude towards the Arabs.

-he underwent a mid-life crisis of sorts, travelling through the US alone on an epic drink bender, about which almost nothing is known. Despite the fact that Burton inevitably wrote multiple doorstoppers about his impressions of American life, this bit of his own chronology remains comparatively blank, and we know little of his feelings or motivations apart from a deep sense of melancholy. I think someone needs to fictionalise a series of adventures about these hard-drinking days. Maybe he even had a native American sidekick.

-he served in diplomatic positions in various exotic locations, from the island of Fernando Po, off West Africa, to regions of Brazil and Damascus, and finally Trieste. Most of his time in these places, however, he seems to have spent skiving off to investigate archaeological ruins or write books.

-he wrote the most popular English translation of the Arabian Nights. But he wasn’t content merely to translate; if he felt that an appropriate English word didn’t exist, he didn’t hesitate to make one up, resulting in some of the most bizarre writing you’ve ever come across. His Nights, like his Kama Sutra, was stacked with sex and scandalised Victorian society.

Quite apart from many of the other great characters of the era, Burton was never exactly what you might call successful. His knighthood came late in life, and most of his cushy posts were begrudging favours given by those who could no longer deny his achievements. He seems to have spent a good deal of his life being at odds: with his university, with the army, with the government, with his colleagues, his superiors and his friends. None of his frequent schemes to make money worked out. Even his achievements were often tinged with scandal – especially his writing, which was always criticised for so flagrantly ignoring the conventions of Victorian society. By the end of his life, he seems to have been afforded a certain reluctant, uncertain credit by the powers that were, and his funeral was a lavish one attended by the great and good.

Rice’s book… well, it seems unfair to sum up. This is not a review, after all – I could no more review a book about Burton than I could review Burton’s life itself. Like the man himself, it is many-faceted, complex, puzzling, maddening but ultimately fascinating. Rice seems to have traveled half the globe in researching it, and is probably a pretty interesting guy himself. The difference is that Burton did all this stuff first, back when it was not just dangerous but socially unacceptable. The man simply did not give a shit what anyone though, and that’s what made him a real hero. It’s also why I’d probably have hated to meet him.
 

Hero.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne

Descend, bold traveller, into the crater of the jokull of Snaefell
Which the shadow of Scartaris touches before the Kalends of July
And you will attain the centre of the earth.
 I did it. Arne Saknussemm

I've been harsh on Verne before. Like, really harsh. For years I typified him as the antithesis of Wells: stuffy and scientific where Wells was fun and lyrical. Well, I'm here now to take it all back. Journey to the Centre of the Earth is one of the greatest adventure novels ever written.


And actually, I have no idea why it hasn't always sat in my head as a classic, as I was fascinated by the illustrated Ladybird version as a child. The images in this book were in a really weird style, but they've stuck with me for years. Despite not having read the book since the Jurassic, I still remembered vividly the mysterious message of Arne Saknussem, the Liedenbrock Sea, the plesiosaur vs icthyosaur battle, and the lonely caveman.

Here it is. Weird, eh?

More recently, I picked up a Wordsworth edition for just a few pounds in a favourite late-opening Charing Cross bookshop during an otherwise bleary-eyed night in central London. What strikes me, reading the book again, is the sense of awe and wonder it evokes. I've felt nothing like it since reading The Lost World years ago; it's enough to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. As usual with Verne, there's tonnes of infodumping, though on this occasion the inclusion of barrel-loads of barmy 19th-century geology and zoology is handled far more entertainingly than in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

I don't suppose I have to tell you anything about the plot, but here goes anyway: the eccentric German Professor Liedenbrock finds a book containing a note in code written by the historical Icelandic explorer Arne Saknussem. The note includes a description of how to get to the centre of the Earth by traveling through the Sneffels volcano in Iceland. This opening, of course, set the template for a thousand lesser adventures and thrillers ever since, but the original is still thrilling. Imagine...every single lame movie you've ever seen that opens with the hackneyed 'coded map to adventure' trope... this is where it all started (with apologies to Mr. Poe!).

After decoding the message, Liedenbrock immediately packs and departs for Iceland, despite the whines of his nephew Axel. Along the way, they pick up a 'stoic' Icelandic guide named Hans. Now in terms of characterisation, Verne does a little better here than he did in Leagues. Liedenbrock is one of your classic 'eccentric scientist' characters, though of course without the sinister edge of satire that Wells gave to the likes of Professor Cavor. Verne's work remains nigh-on free from satire of any kind, and though this bothered me previously, I find his gee-whiz optimism rather refreshing now. Liedenbrock is genuinely likeable; positive, knowledgeable and exciting where Axel is dour and cowardly. Axel's character arc from yellow-belly to adventurer is also enjoyable in its own simple way. Hans, however... I don't know what Verne was thinking with Hans. You've only got three characters in your book, Mr. Verne, and you chose to make one of them mute? At least we can be thankful he's a mute Icelandic guide and not an African one. Sometimes its blessings for small mercies with 19th-century fiction (Frycollin from Robur the Conqueror, anyone?). A running joke involves Hans silently demanding his payment at exactly the prescribed time each week, regardless of their circumstances. Ha.

Anyway, these three travel to the Sneffels volcano, which they find has got three 'chimneys' leading into it. They have to get there by a certain date (no I'm not fact-checking what date it was) so that the shadow of the cone will touch one of the entrances, letting them know which leads to the centre of the earth. It's a great touch, and Verne wrings out the tension by having the sky remain clouded until the last possible minute.

Remind you of anything?

I really love the use of a natural phenomenon (in this case, the movement of the sun) as a necessary part of finding the trail. It's been used hundreds of times since, most famously in Raiders of the Lost Arc of course, but this must be one of its earliest uses in fiction. It gives the impression that Saknussem must have been a very clever man indeed.

Our heroic trio descend into the chimney, and make their way through the world beneath the surface of the earth, using a delightful array of 19-century devices to light their way and provide directions. Liedenbrock keeps tabs on where they are with regards to the surface world; ie which country they're currently beneath. There's a truly horrific scene where Axel gets separated and lost for several days in the pitch-black tunnels. This scene always affected me; I'm not particularly claustrophobic, but it's difficult to think of a more awful place to be lost and alone in. Despite this, Axel becomes more and more excited about the prospect of the discoveries they're sure to make. The excitement is palpable; the feeling that they're doing something no-one has ever done before (except Saknussem, of course) is ome f the main attractions of the book.

Eventually they come to the great central idea of the novel: a cavern so vast that its walls and ceiling cannot be seen. This blew my mind as a kid and it's still an amazing idea. They emerge on a beach, a vast sea stretching out before them. Above their heads, clouds have formed, and some strange electrical phenomenon provides light, though it shines from no particular direction, and thus casts no shadows. They have come to the Liedenbrock Sea.

This is an amazing scene. I don't have any smart-ass remarks to make about it.

This scene is truly one of the great feats of imagination of 19th-century literature. As the explorers traverse the beach, they come upon that mainstay of bizarre alternate worlds: the giant mushroom. I don't know why, but ever since, the presence of giant mushrooms has been used by storytellers to indicate that characters have arrived somewhere weird and alien. They then build a raft to cross the sea, encountering the very first fictional prehistoric animals in all of literature in another of Journey's famous scenes.

The idea of prehistoric animals hadn't been around for very long when Verne wrote Journey. Prior to the 1820s and the discoveries of Mary Anning, the biblical account of the Earth's history was largely accepted without question, and fossils were explained away as being the remains of animals that had failed to make it to the arc. The idea that God would have created creatures only to doom them to extinction made no sense. The Earth, of course, was thought to be no more than several thousand years old. These ideas were still changing, and still contentious, when Verne chose to pit an icthyosaur against a plesiosaur in the Liedenbrock Sea. Probably afraid to offend sensitive readers (no doubt on the advice of his canny publisher, Hetzel), Verne talks about geological ages and the appearance and extinction of different species without making any specific mention to evolution. Clever man. Hetzel certainly knew his audience, and this wouldn't be the first time he made 'political' changes to Verne's work: in the Captain Nemo books, Nemo's was originally to be a Polish nobleman revenging himself upon the Russians. Hetzel removed this background because of France's alliance with Russia.

Our trio cannot at first distinguish exactly what kind of animals are fighting in the water. There seem to be many. They then realise that there are just two, though they are massive and seem to be made up of the parts of different animals. It's a great idea - without this scene, there might have been no Jurassic Park - but it's not my favourite scene in the book.

When they get to the other side of the sea, Liedenbrock finds a boneyard full of the remains of thousands of creatures, including an anatomically modern human. They seem to be on the verge of even greater discoveries; but from here on out, Verne exercises incredible restraint, giving us only tantilising hints of the wonders that this inner world has to offer. Having created a world which would appear to be abundant in prehistoric creatures, he has his characters now skirt around the very edge of it. Instead of filling the narrative with chases and danger, or encounters with dinosaurs, Verne settles for a single clash between prehistoric beasts and merely hints at the rest. Bones, fossils and one human corpse alone hint at the living relics that populate his inner earth. These fragments are as close as the characters come for the most part, leaving Verne's world with a tremendous sense of mystery still intact. Their vision from a distance of a lonely caveman tending to a group of mastadon is perhaps the ultimate act of restraint. If only Burroughs had such subtlety! From there, Liedenbrock and co make their way back to the surface (without technically having reached the centre of the Earth) via the most ludicrous invention in the book: their raft is propelled up through a volcano shaft by rising lava. They emerge in Italy.

It's characteristic of Verne that the final loose end to be tied is a scientific one and not a personal or emotion one. Liedenbrock and Axel figure out that their compass had been polarised by a magnetic storm while on the raft, thus fooling them into thinking that they had been heading north for much of their journey, instead of south.

Overall, Journey is a surprisingly short, taut and focused novel, showing Verne at the height of his powers. It gets the plot rolling from the very first sentence, and never lets up. Highly recommended.

Beneath Nightmare Castle - Part 1

I CURSE MYSELF FOR AN INATTENTIVE FOOL: as I've mentioned before, somehow without my noticing, gamebooks have changed from being a fond and fuzzy memory of my youth to a full-blown web phenomenon. Who would have thought? To be honest, before I discovered this, I would have been hard-pressed to think of an aspect of nostalgia less likely to recurr in this electronic age. After all, who wants to have to keep their own scores and roll their own dice in games anymore?

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2009) by Peter Ackroyd

Left the book in Cork, forgot to take a picture. Sorry, internet.

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 Have you ever wondered what Frankenstein would have been like if the titular character, instead of remaining in Switzerland, travelled to England in order to carry out his grotesque scientific investigations in early-19^thcentury London rather than continental Europe? Me neither – and I’m not really sure why Peter Ackroyd wondered either. I mean, it’s not exactly a massive difference, or any kind of important re-imagining that tells you things about the characters you didn’t know in the original text. Wide Sargasso Sea, this ain’t. For the most part, it’s just Frankenstein as you know it, only happening in a slightly different location.

And, as it happens, it’s the location that’s key. Anyone familiar with Ackroyd’s back-catalogue knows that the man is obsessed with the history of London. He’s written a lot of books set in London, and with Casebook, he’s even set a story there that normally belongs somewhere else. As an aside, ever since reading From Hell, I’ve taken an interest in the architect Hawksmoor; wandering through London, I’ve tracked down most of his churches and wondered at the supposed ‘occult’ meanings that lie behind their geographical placement. Ackroyd has written a fictionalised biography of Hawksmoor which I really ought to check out, and whenever I'm looking at one of the churches I think 'I really ought to track down a copy of that Hawksmoor book'. So yeah, it's not like we've got history or anything, but I know Ackroyd.

Anyway, on to Frankenstein. The story gets underway when Victor, a boy fascinated by the power of nature and the elements, persuades his father to let him travel to England to study at Oxford. The old man reluctantly allows this, and the reader quickly figures out the real reason that the infamous scientist has been transposed by Ackroyd: so he can faff about having college-age adventures with his real-life creators (sort of) Shelley and Byron. Yes, it’s like an early-Victorian Animal House as the learned poets come to grips with college life, hanging out in disreputable taverns, gorging themselves on theatre and high culture, and having a high old time. Soon after, they move to London, where the good times continue in settings more familiar to me, given as I’ve not yet breathed the rarefied air of Oxford (though they’ve still cause to remember me in Cambridge, I’d reckon). I felt that Ackroyd was quite enjoying himself here, and could have let this bit go on for quite a while if the bloody plot hadn’t intervened, spoiling the lads’ fun.

'Away, away ye notes of woe!'

 But intervene it does, and soon Victor finds himself treading down a path that is well-worn, though it may be happening in the slums of Limehouse rather than a spooky old castle in Europe. Victor picks up a few things about science during his time at the city of spires, but it’s mostly his own work that teaches him what he needs to know about the boundary between life and death. Ackroyd of course misses no opportunity to fill his prose with galvanism, ether, magnetism and other discredited 19^th-century sciences, though he goes light on the jargon, and anyone hoping for Umberto Eco-style in-depth diversions into these arcane areas will go home hungry.

Eventually he succeeds, creating the monster we all know and love, which he subsequently abandons and fears for the rest of the novel as it begins to destroy his life. Apart from the setting – and one oddity which might just make or break the novel for some readers, but which is not as clever as Ackroyd thinks – this section of the story is very similar to the original. By now, Victor’s hanging around with Byron and Shelley’s extended circle of friends, including Dr Polidori (creator of The Vampyre) and Mary Shelley (who is of course his own true creator), and he even manages to work in the famous story night at the Swiss lakehouse where the idea for the original Frankensteinwas born.

None of which I found particularly clever – I’ve read too many books recently where it’s clear that the author is just amusing themselves playing around in a time/place/location that they love, chuckling to themselves everytime they use a historical or fictional character in a sliiiightly different way - but it’s well-written, and it’s fun. Yeah, I love 19^th-century London, and I never get bored of seeing it portrayed in different ways. In this book, I enjoyed it being used as a fun place for intelligent, artistic young men to run riot as they push the boundaries of known science and meddle with things that should not be. The writing is crisp and efficient and the story doesn’t stay still for a moment. Historically, I didn’t learn too much about life during this period – and yet somehow the actual day-to-day living of it felt real to me.

'So we'll have The Saint in there as well... God this is fun!'

 Having said all this, my final point is: what’s the point? To which I have to admit that I haven’t a bloody clue. I mean, not every book’s got to have a point. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of airport fodder, if that’s what you fancy. But Frankenstein was about lots of things; about fear of progress and the discovery of man’s place in the Universe; about tampering with natural laws; about hubris. It’s a classic story that had some very important new ideas in it, pretty much inventing science fiction and modern horror. Casebook, on the other hand… is a lark. It’s great fun, it tells an exciting story… but it’s handling such idealogically heavy material that it’s difficult to imagine that Ackroyd didn’t intend there to be more beneath the surface. It's not exactly like writing a light opera about the Holocaust, but it is an odd juxtaposition. Whatever point there might be, it’s hard to discern it beneath the cod-gothic prose and use of themes so commonplace that they’ve become almost threadbare.

So while I recommend The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, I’ve no idea what kind of book it really is or what it was written to achieve.

The Terror (2007) by Dan Simmons

The Terror lay heavily on my mind for a very long time before I had the courage to pick up a copy for myself. At the best of times, I feel a sort of grim obligation to read and review any and all British Empire-themed books and films I come across, which of course means that I end up reading a lot of dross, and also that my shelves are fairly creaking with as-of-yet unread volumes. But The Terror… that was a step beyond. It takes a special kind of commitment to begin a thousand-page epic about frostbite, scurvy and the general grimness of 19^th-century Arctic exploration, and know that you’re going to see it through to the bitter end. And, to be sure, the end wasgoing to be very bitter. Like I say, The Terror lay heavily on my mind… perhaps as heavily as the upcoming 1845 Arctic expedition to force the Northwest Passage must have lain on the mind of its commander, Sir John Franklin.

But I sure am glad that I did pick it up.

Once in a great while you come across a book that thrusts you into a world and a subject that obsesses you: The Terror is such a book.

The Terror tells the story, in a fictionalized form, of the doomed Franklin Expedition. Once a Victorian cause celebre, it is now a largely forgotten event. I had certainly never heard of it before reading the book, but I was intrigued to find that my mother had memories of singing a song known as Lady Franklin’s Lament, a balled composed about this event just a few years after it happened.

So, what was all the fuss about? Well, as you may be aware, frost-bitten seamen had already been killing themselves north of Greenland for centuries searching for a safe way to sail over the top of the world: the fabled Northwest Passage. If found, such a route would allow ships to trade with the Far East without going around the infamous Capes. The thought of all that lovely trading and money had long convinced sailors that the Arctic ice must surely have been a relatively narrow band, with an easily-navigable (and completely mythical) ‘open Polar sea’ available to anyone who was brave enough to get to it.

Well, we’ve made some pretty sizeable dents into the Arctic with global warming since those days, but there still isn’t and never has been an open Polar sea. The net result is that pretty much all voyages with this goal became grim records of utterly futile horror and death. And into this litany of woe stepped Sir John Franklin in 1845, as he planned an ultra-modern expedition of over one hundred men and the latest in ice-worthy ships, the Erebus and the Terror, to force the Northwest Passage.

Sir John Franklin

Simmons’ weighty tome takes on this story from about a year into the expedition, when the two ships had already been trapped in ice for some time, and the proud Sir John was only just beginning to admit that he probably wasn’t going to realise his goal. Soon into the proceedings, it becomes pretty clear that even getting home alive would be quite an achievement for the team.

The day-to-day horrors of life at the frozen north are brought home with terrible clarity. Scurvy, starvation, rationing, and having metal objects such as pistols and telescopes tear off chunks of flesh whenever they touch bare skin are all common occurences for the crew of the Franklin Expedition. And yet, despite the unrelenting grimness, there is a kind of strange positivity to the whole thing. Somehow, Simmons makes you like and admire the characters. I won’t say there’s hope in the story, as pretty much every character seems to know that he’s doomed from the beginning, but there’s a certain dignity and respect for man’s determination to survive to the proceedings.The extraordinary level of detail of their ordeal, helped by the sheer length of time the reader spends with them, makes them  knowable and somehow admirable.

Simmons focuses largely on an officer called Crozier, an Irishman who has been passed up for promotion countless times because of his origin, despite being an extremely capable veteran of many polar expeditions. Crozier is a great hero, and a character who seems to have been extremely interesting in real life; Simmons depicts his redemption from hopeless achoholic to driven leader (upon the death of Franklin) with a panache that wrings real emotion from the reader. I seldom warm to a character as much as I grew to like Crozier: he’s a believable hero. He’s not perfect but he does the right thing, even under extraordinary circumstances.

Francis Crozier

 And it’s the extraordinary circumstances that I expect will make or break this doorstop of a novel for most people. For, in a genre-bending move, Simmons makes the most immediate threat to the crew not any of the above troubles, but instead a seemingly-supernatural creature, barely seen, that stalks them from the ice. It’s a weird twist indeed, changing the book from being a strictly historical thriller to a speculative pseudo-horror story. It’s a trick that works best towards the beginning, when we’re still unsure whether or not the creature is real or if it’s a product of madness and superstition. Inevitably, Simmons overplays his hand and is forced to ‘show’ us more and more of the monster. It still works as a decent thriller, but the mystery and horror elements do get somewhat watered down the more frequent the monster appearances are. I’m not going to indulge in a ‘don’t show the monster = better horror’ debate, but there are works that make me think that there's something to be said for the theory.

There are always pacing problems with a novel this size. I do personally value brevity and efficiency in fiction, and I feel that it takes a real master to justify the ludicrous page length of, say, the average Stephen King novel. And Simmons, while exellent, and a better writer than most, doesn’t quitesustain my interest at its initially high level. Which is a light criticism, but describes a problem which the author could easily have remedied, if he’d exercised a little more restraint. For the first 300-odd pages, I was completely hooked, entirely obsessed with the minutia of polar exploration. And what a feeling that was… I exhaustively researched the Franklin Expedition and its predecessors, sourced folksongs and stories dealing with Franklin and his crew, and generally bored everyone around me stupid with Arctic exploration stories for about two weeks (which is how long it took me to plough through this monster). The Rogers Stan song Northwest Passage in particular gave me chills the first time I heard it, and when he mentions Franklin in the chorus I felt as though he was singing about someone I had known and shared hardships with.

Compared to this, I found the monster stuff less interesting, though it was well done. Perhaps it's a sign that I'm getting older, that I prefer the historical stuff to the supernatural. Who knows.

There are very few books that obsess you, and for that reason I shall place The Terror proudly beside the few others on my shelf that have done the same. But the initial high did wear off about halfway through, and though I was never bored, there were times when I wondered how I would have felt about the book if it had finished while still rocking my world.

Stay frosty.

The Future Eve (1886) by August Villiers de L'Isle Adam

A word of warning: The Future Eve is not a novelette that you’re going to find easily. Not in English anyway; from what I can tell, the only available English translation, apart from some rather academic and expensive-looking journals, is in a strange collection called The Frankenstein Omnibus which is almost definitely out of print. So, chances are, you’re probably not going to be reading it, which is a shame. For this reason, I may be a little more lenient with the spoilers this time.

I’ll admit upfront that The Future Eve is not really anything to do with Imperialism or colonialism, but it is choc-full of other points of interest to the nineteenth-century enthusiast. For starters, the author was a fin-de-siecleFrench bohemian who hung out in cafes writing, drinking (absinthe, presumably), being poor and attempting to get rich society ladies to marry him (a bit like my life, really. Except I'm not French, obviously). The novelette is a sort of take on the Frankenstein theme, and what makes it interesting is its distinctly romantic/decadent spin on the subject.

At the beginning of the story we’re introduced to one Professor X, who sadly is nothing to do with the X-Men, but is in fact a sort of literary stand-in for none other than Thomas Edison. That’s what the intro says, anyway; if it’s true then the general public (in France at least) must have had some pretty weird ideas about the man and his abilities back in the 1880s. We first meet Not-Edison rambling about in his mansion outside a city (presumably New York), being attended to by the disembodied voices of artificial personalities he has somehow created using ‘electricity.’

Not in this book.

One of the great joys of reading literature from this period is the almost mystical reverence that was given to electricity. I guess even this late in the century it was still seen by many people as being wondrous and a little bit mysterious… the kind of ill-understood force that could be capable of almost anything. Think of Captain Nemo in 20,000 Leagues telling his captives that ‘my electricity is not the same as everyone else’s’ in an attempt to handwave the workings of the Nautilus. Way to fluff your research there, Verne.

Electricity in Victorian novels is always a plot device for creating monsters, bringing people back from the dead or other Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, mostly based on its demonstrated ability to make dead frogs twitch. Makes perfect sense, really. In the 1950’s, its place as a magical monster creator was taken by atomic power, and later by genetic engineering, which are similarly both misunderstood by the public and misused by narrative media. Read this for a bizarre real-life example.

This is exactly what Victorian science was like.

Not-Edison’s devices are described and explained in very strange ways in the novelette. The science isn’t ignored or handwaved away like in Wells, nor is it excruciatingly and accurately thought-through like in Verne. Instead, the author does go into quite a lot of detail; it’s just that none of it makes any bloody sense. There’s lots of talk about telephone wires and reflections, vibrations and currents. Of course, none of these descriptions really address how Not-Edison has achieved artificial intelligence, no matter how long they go on for. But they do bring a wonderfully romantic feeling of science-as-magic to the story.

How did I do it? I'll never tell!

 The scientist receives a visitor: the young and handsome Lord Ewald. But despite being the very picture of virile English manhood, the lord has a problem: he’s desperately lovesick. Despite having a position and profile that would win him the heart of almost any woman he meets, he’s gone and got himself hung up on a girl who’s doing him wrong. Things are so bad that he’s considering suicide.

The girl, one Alicia Cleary, is so beautiful that she’s regularly compared to the Venus of the classical world. She is, in a way, attached to Ewald, but he is constantly disappointed by her because the silly chit’s personality is not equal to her beauty.

Ah, yes. It would be neglectful of me not to mention that The Future Eve contains more than a strain of misogyny. In fact, it’s rather famous for it: the misogyny is the main thrust of most of the literary criticism that has been written about it.

Professor X and Ewald talk over the particulars of the situation. Apparently Miss Cleary is so physically perfect that Ewald is willing to die for her, he is so in love. They also agree that her personality is deficient: she doesn’t like opera or sculpture, she’s small-minded and selfish. The two men discuss which aspects of her being are acceptable and which are lamentable, and they both agree how wonderful it could be if they could somehow keep the former while jettisoning the latter.

And then Professor X realizes that, actually, he knows just how such a thing could be achieved.

Uh-oh.

Yeah, it’s pretty despicable. There’s no getting around that. Ewald, like all romantic/decadent heroes, is so hung up on this girl that nothing else in life really seems to matter. Fair enough, we’ve probably all been there. But the explicit fact that he’s only in love with her beautiful exterior, and cannot stand her personality, makes him utterly shallow. And that the two characters coldly and rationally decide what characteristics are desirable and not desirable in a woman makes them both pretty unlikable. Also, their limits for what’s desirable, personality-wise, are offensively narrow, which I suppose was probably typical for the time.

Eventually, Professor X reveals his plan: he will create an electronic facsimile of the girl, an exact copy: an android (the first use of the term in literature, fanboys!). Ewald is at first horrified, noting that even if the physical likeness was perfect, her store of conversation and actions would necessarily be woefully limited. Professor X mentions that they’ve both observed in the past that a proper society lady is nothing more than a limited number of learned conversations and actions. Shudder.

The two then retreat to Professor X’s gigantic underground cave of electronic wonders, where he explains in fascinating (and horrifically offensive) detail exactly how one would go about making a perfect woman. He ‘proves’ to Ewald that real women aren’t that ‘real’ anyway, because they use make-up and can alter their appearance. It’s this that a man really falls in love with, he says while pointing to a drawer full of cosmetics. An illusion. So really, falling in love with an automaton isn’t that different. Again, the superficiality is staggering.

This section is fascinating, if ghoulish and ethically questionable. Again, the author goes into masses of detail about how the android will be constructed, how she will function and how perfect the likeness will be. And even though he’s despicable, I liked how Ewald’s emotions swing constantly as he see-saws between revulsion and lust at the idea of having his desires granted in this unorthodox way. By the end, I wanted to find out what was coming next as much as the lovesick Lord.

Later, there’s an amazing scene in which Ewald has a surprise meeting with his automated lovedoll that prompts us to think about what it is that we really fall in love with. Ewald is obsessed with an ideal of Alicia; an impossible vision of her that is no more or less real than the automaton is. It’s an interesting idea, and one the author delves into in some detail, only to slightly spoil it with his underlying shades of misogyny, as well as the fact that he cheats by having the android inhabited by the essence of one of Professor X’s artificial personalities through supernatural means, thereby giving it a bona fide soul, as it were.

Large portions of the novella take place in real-time, with the Professor and Ewald having long conversations (while smoking cigars and drinking brandy, of course) that allow the writer to indulge in reflections on morality, science, and emotion. Even if some of the ideas are now repugnant to us, it’s still a good deal more interesting than the flat characters that usually turn up in Victorian speculative fiction. Ewald in particular fascinated me as a man who knowingly and deliberately buys into his delusion in the most literal way over the course of the story.

The Future Eve is not easy to come by in English, but it’s well worth looking out for.

Mmm... gentlemanly.