Horror: The 100 Best Books (32 page)

Brendan Doyle, an academic and expert on the poet William Ashbless -- a contemporary of Coleridge's -- is hired by millionaire J. Cochran Darrow to act as an expert guide on a time travel field trip to 1810 in order to attend one of Coleridge's lectures. Once in the past, things go awry and Doyle finds himself lost and caught up in a complex series of plots involving ancient Egyptian gods, sinister travelling showmen, a body-hopping spirit whose victims turn into hairy apes, various literary notables, mad scientists, and a community of artificially created mutants living under the streets of 19th-century London. Among other things, Doyle is tricked into another body and forced to live out the life of the little-known Ashbless, a fictional but convincing character who also figures briefly in James Blaylock's
Homunculus
(1985).
The Anubis Gates
is the ideal post-modernist genre novel, at once science fiction, horror, literary fantasy, historical recreation, swashbuckling thriller and comic apocalypse: it was awarded the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award in 1984.

***

There is no getting away from the man who invented steampunk. Charles Dickens (1812-70) may not be mentioned by name anywhere in
The Anubis Gates
, but his shaping presence can be felt everywhere in the populous chortling shadows of the London of 1810 to which the 20th-century hero of Tim Powers' time-travel fantasy travels, never to return. It does not much matter that Powers sets his tale in a time Dickens could never have experienced, and of which he never wrote, because novels like
Oliver Twist
(1837-9), which depicts a London not dissimilar to that explored by Brendan Doyle, are a kind of apothesis of the supernatural melodramas popular at the beginning of the 19th century, so that Dickens' Fagin and Powers' Horrabin share a common source in
Grand Guignol
. Similarly, the Gothic fever-dreams of such writers as Monk Lewis or Charles Maturin can be seen to underpin the oneiric inscapes of the greatest achievements of Dickens --
Bleak House
(1852-3) or
Little Dorrit
(1855-7) or
Our Mutual Friend
(1865) -- those novels in which the nightmare of London attains lasting and definitive and horrific form. For Dickens that nightmare of London may be a prophetic vision of humanity knotted into the subterranean entrails of the city machine, while for Powers the London of 1810 may be a form of nostalgia, a dream theatre for the elect to star in, buskined and immune; but at the heart of both writers' work glow the lineaments of the last world city. Between Dickens and Powers, of course, much water has flowed down the filthy Thames. Between steampunk -- a term which can be used to describe any SF novel set in any version of the previous century, from which entropy has been banned -- and the desolate expressionism of its true founder lies what one might call Babylon-upon-Thames-punk.
Fin de siècle
writers like Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and G. K. Chesterton attempted to domesticate Dickens' London by transforming it into a kind of Arabian Nights theme park capable of encompassing (and taming) all the strangenesses that an Empire in pullulant decline could possibly import. Even H. G. Wells was sometimes capable of quasi-Dickensian sentiment (as in novels like
Love and Mr. Lewisham
, 1900) about the London he more normally destroyed utterly. That this enterprise of domestication was deeply suspect, most writers of Babylon-upon-Thames-punk knew full well, and as a result much of what they wrote gave off an air of bad-faith complacency, uneasy nostalgia, weird inanition. It is from their doomed enterprise (and from other sources as well) that contemporary steampunk authors like K. W. Jeter and Powers and James Blaylock and others have borrowed not only a vision of a talismanic city, but also (it must be said) some of the complacency and diseased nostalgia of the epigones who thought to tame Dickens. But there is no getting away from Dickens, and
The Anubis Gates
, despite the occasional chilling Chestertonian whimsy, is radiant with the ambience of his genius. The villains of the piece -- like Horrabin, the beggar-king on stilts, half-immolated by the energy of his own self-depiction, or Dog-Faced Joe, or the Spoon-Sized Boys -- strut through Powers' pages with a grotesque theatricality that is proudly Dickensian. The geography of London --from the Avernal Thames to the underground cathedrals whose crepuscular Romantic arches evoke thoughts of Henry Fuseli in at least one character -- has all the inspired animism of Dickens at his most convinced. And the inturning twists of plot -- fumbled, as so often in Dickens, only in the final pages -- seem to tell the tale of a country in which anything can happen, and not decay; in which entropy is reversed. This -- it must be said -- is not the message of Charles Dickens. An inextricable compact between world and self ordinates the whole of Dickens' work, a rhetoric of entailment. If his London is glowing and corrupt, multitudinous and confining, star-shot and subaqueous, then it is so by reason of the human soul, which it expresses. In
The Anubis Gates
, on the other hand, world and self are carefully separated from one another. As they twist and dance through the long theatre of their tale, Powers' protagonists -- Brendan Doyle and Elizabeth Tichy -- are like tourists in an enchanted wonderland; they are like readers of
The Anubis Gates
. We do not enter their interior lives, nor are we meant to, and the novel only fails when, by all rights, we
should
come to grips with some soul in extremis, as in the final pages when, after innumerable adventures and scrapes, Doyle is finally tortured to death -- or so close to actual death as makes no difference. We hear his screams, but from off-stage. Before he can die of his terrible wounds, the barge of Ra surfaces into the world to encompass his fallen form, and to deliver him, like a new-born child, to the waters of old Father Thames, whole again and baptized. To understand the superflux of implications unleashed at this point, perhaps unwittingly, we must enter Doyle's transfigured mind; but of the resurrection and epiphany of the hero we are tendered nothing but a brief passage of hearsay, offhandedly couched. Powers' strategy has allowed him no choice in the matter. Terrible monsters do lurk in the cellars of
The Anubis Gates
, and fever-dream hints are dropped of circumstances in which it is possible for the hero truly to die. But after all, steampunk is a form of theodicy, and Powers displaces these intimations of the revolution-and-Frankenstein-haunted exterior world on to a harlequinade of magicians and other villains who know their place, genetically familiar templates whose attempts to spook England into decline and corruption and despair are constantly thwarted by the invulnerable Adamic Doyle. In externalizing the horrors of the world of change, Powers has invented a tale of paradise, where entropy lies down with the lamb and the steam yachts run on time. In
The Anubis Gates
he has written a book of almost preternatural geniality, a book which it is possible (rare praise) to love. Let us all, it suggests, co-inhabit the Christmas London of Brendan Doyle, and gape like children at the pageant of the world-stage of his triumphs. We do. He is having the time of his life. We join him. -- JOHN CLUTE

Cairo, 1486. Dirty Yoll, the story-teller, relates a series of adventures that mainly befall Balian of Norwich, an ostensible pilgrim who has been sent to the Holy Land as a spy for the Franks. Balian encounters Michael Vane, an English alchemist, and his sorcerer colleague, the King of Cats, and comes to suspect that he is suffering from a mysterious, deadly curse, The Arabian Nightmare. Stories unfold within stories, in which talking apes, murderous courtesans, an order of leprous crusaders, insoluable riddles, demons, and curses figure heavily. Yoll dies, but the stories continue, and a plot to bring about the end of the world is uncovered. A dense, witty, erotic, imaginative and macabre fantasy,
The Arabian Nightmare
is one of the most original works in its many genres to appear in the '80s. Irwin, a former teacher of medieval history, is also the author of
History of the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria
(1984) and a novel about the Wars of the Roses,
The Dreadlord
(1984).

***

The Arabian Nightmare
is a thoroughly modern fantasy cast in a classical mould. Its literary antecedents are the
Thousand-and-One Nights
, which first came to Europe in the French edition issued between 1704 and 1717, and
The Saragassa Manuscript
, written by the Polish count Jan Potocki and first published (likewise in French) in 1804. Each of these makes use of a discursive and convoluted narrative structure in which tales are embedded within other tales; the first displayed for fascinated Europeans an exotic, mysterious and highly intriguing Eastern world; the second has a most effective recurrent motif in that its hero, who goes to sleep beneath a gallows-tree, is victim of a terrible dream and then awakes, only to find that this awakening is but the first of many illusory moments of relief in a nightmare which will never let him go. Irwin takes up this theme, of a man quite lost in a dream so tortuous he can never be certain that he has awakened, or ever will awake; and populates that dream with the phantasmagoria of that mythical Orient which so obsessed the French Romantic writers of the 19th century. He brings to this task a remarkable freshness, enlivening his consideration of the nature of dreams with ideas drawn from modern psychological inquiry, filling out his marvellous descriptions of 15th-century Cairo and its dream-analogue with detail drawn from the perspective of modern history. It is typical of such a deceptive scheme that the nightmare into which Balian delivers himself might or might not be the Arabian Nightmare of the title, for that is a nightmare which can never be remembered; each time Balian thinks he awakes, he may reassure himself that he has not, after all, suffered
that
dread fate . . . but then, he only
thinks
that he awakes. In much the same way, we are invited to wonder who, within the tale, is its true teller . . . but every time we think we know, we are confounded; the text is engaged in a constant game of self-deconstruction which links it to the fancies of those more recent French Romantics, the Barthesian mythologies and Derridaesque post-structuralists. There never was another tale as self-conscious in its convolutions as this one, and never one which brought the unease of the dream-state into such seductively sinister intercourse with the intelligence of the reader. It is a tale of horror because it reminds us, unremittingly, of the precariousness of our identity in the face of a world whose solidity and predictability might at any moment dissolve, and abandon us to be rent upon the rack of our anxieties. And yet, even while he taunts and undermines us with this cognitive vertigo, Irwin writes with great charm and suave wit, and almost compels us to believe that in nightmare -- though nightmare it is -- there is such wonder and such plenitude as would make a fool of any man who preferred jejune reality. There is no greater achievement at which the literary fantasist might aim. -- BRIAN STABLEFORD

Frank, the sixteen-year-old narrator, lives on an island off the coast of Scotland. Between accounts of his militarist fantasies -- which involve murdering various animals -- and various forays to the pub with his midget best friend, Frank reminisces about his farcical killings of his cousins Blyth and Esmerelda and his younger brother Paul. Meanwhile, Frank's unbalanced brother Eric has escaped from an institution and is travelling back to the island. Castrated, as he has been told by his reclusive father, in infancy by a dog, Frank makes discoveries about himself that exceed in strangeness anything that has gone before in his life. Iain Banks followed up this extraordinary and controversial first novel -- typically, British readers were more offended by the cruelty to animals than the murdering of children -- with the equally strange
Walking on Glass
(1985) and
The Bridge
(1986) before turning to science fiction.

***

The Wasp Factory
was Iain Banks' first novel, and became an immediate literary
cause celebre
on its first publication in 1984. Reactions ranged from extravagant praise to expressions of baffled disgust. It is debatable whether or not
The Wasp Factory
is a horror novel -- it is not fuelled by any vision of a malign universe, or any sense of Evil -- but it certainly fixes on horrific incidents, and it has found a following among horror readers. Banks has published several books since, ranging from a rock-'n'-roll novel (
Espedair Street
) to an extravagant space opera (
Consider Phlebas
), but though they have generally been well received, and in some cases have reached the bestseller list, none has had quite the impact of
The Wasp Factory
. The novel is set in the present day on a small Scottish island connected by a bridge to the mainland. The only inhabitants are the teenage narrator, Frank Cauldhame, and his eccentric ex-hippie father. Frank apparently suffered a bizarre accident when only three: he was attacked by the family sheepdog, which bit off his genitals. When he was five he murdered his cousin by placing an adder inside his artificial leg, and before he was ten he also killed his younger brother Paul (whom he persuaded to attack an unexploded bomb with a plank) and his cousin Esmerelda (attached to a giant kite and never seen again). Each of the deaths was seen as a bizarre accident, and Frank tells us that this was just a phase he was going through at the time. By contrast his older half-brother Eric was a good-natured and idealistic child, who went away to study medicine, only to be sent insane by the discovery in a hospital ward of an infant child whose brain was being eaten alive by maggots (a fly having got under the metal plate in its skull). Eric took to feeding worms to children and setting dogs on fire, and was institutionalized. The novel's plot (such as it is) is triggered by Eric's escape: Frank's account to the reader of his life is punctuated by Eric's deranged phone calls as he gets nearer the island. Since Frank gave up murder his defences against the rest of the world have taken the form of a bizarre series of rituals and totems: animal heads mounted on "Sacrifice Poles" around the island; a kind of temple in a Second World War bunker whose altarpiece is the skull of the dog which unmanned him; and the Wasp Factory itself, an elaborate construction centred on an old clock face, in which wasps are murdered (depending on which way they wander) in any one of a dozen different ways, which are interpreted by Frank much as an astrologer or tarot reader would interpret signs. The ritual murder of small animals is another essential part of Frank's invented symbol system for understanding and guarding himself against the world. This may sound absurd in summary, but the novel's strength is that it pursues its central character's obsessions unflinchingly, and never steps outside Frank's skull to allow in conventional reality or perception. Its weakest moment is its denouement, where we learn that Frank's father has been lying to him all his life: he isn't a mutilated boy, but a more or less normal girl, dosed with male hormones by his father, partly as an experiment, partly as a sort of practical joke. The problem with this is that it reduces the situation from an obsessional reality to a puzzle with a solution -- which ties up the novel, but is less interesting than what has gone before. Still,
The Wasp Factory
is a remarkably sustained performance; for all the grotesquerie of its content Frank's narrative is written with tight control and a notable absence of sensationalism, and is sometimes very funny. Unsurprisingly, one of its greatest admirers is J. G. Ballard, himself probably the foremost chronicler of obsession in contemporary British fiction; like Ballard's
Crash
, Banks' novel shows the power of obsession to reform the world in its own distorted image. -- MALCOLM EDWARDS