| Author | Message | ||
     Richard_gavin (Richard_gavin) Username: Richard_gavin Registered: 03-2008 |
This month is John L. Probert's selection, 'The Depths.' | ||
| John Llewellyn Probert (John_l_probert) Username: John_l_probert Registered: 03-2008 |
Thanks Richard! I'm nearly ready... | ||
| John Llewellyn Probert (John_l_probert) Username: John_l_probert Registered: 03-2008 |
Plumbing The Depths – Ramsey Campbell & The Power of the Imagination I’ve just been reading David Schow’s comments on reviewing in his excellent collection of columns ‘Wild Hairs’ where he claims that people don’t really want proper reviews, they just want a summary of the plot, a witty quip or two about the work, and finally and most important, an instruction to either read it or don’t read it. While I’m not claiming that I’m going to go out of my way to avoid some of those presumed pitfalls I hope that what follows will be up to the standard of those more experienced in literary criticism than I: “The last nightmare was still demanding to be written, until he forced it into the depths of his mind.” When I was trying to pick a story to review for this group I flicked through all the notes I had made prior to my interview with RC a couple of years ago. I’ve written one line summaries of all of Ramsey’s short stories as an aide memoire (in fact that might make quite a good Christmas Quiz one year), and for ‘The Depths’ I had written ‘writer becomes a scapegoat of the imagination’. I still think it’s a great idea, and the tale itself is one which deserves a lot more that the above media-friendly soundbite, so it’s nice to have the opportunity to go into a little more detail here. Jonathan Miles is a crime writer, successful enough, we later learn, to fill half a shelf in London’s Foyles bookshop as well as stores in the Charing Cross Road. Lately, however, he’s become blocked. In an attempt to relieve this and gain inspiration for a proposed non-fiction work he takes up occupancy of a house in West Derby where a horrific murder/suicide has taken place. We learn little of the case, only knowing that it was a bank manager who rendered his boutique-owning wife “unrecognisable as a human being” before he had “dug the carving knife into his throat and run headlong at the wall.” Miles is as shocked by the crime as anyone, and takes what is most likely a similar view to everyone else in that ‘such things shouldn’t happen here’ (i.e. in lovely Derbyshire): “Such a murder in Cantril Farm…he might have understood; here…it didn’t make sense” In fact it makes such little sense to those who live in the area that they ignore it: “as though by keeping quiet about it they might prevent it from having taken place at all” and render those associated with the house as being ‘tainted’ by it: “Why should (the owners) be treated as though by living there they had taken on the guilt?” and “They thought Miles was the same as the house.” Something does, however, happen while Miles is living there. Whether it is the house itself, what has happened there, or Miles, or Miles’ treatment by those living near him, he starts to have nightmares, ones so severe that he has to leave & return to his flat. The nightmares, however, persist, to the point where he finds himself having to write them down, although of the first ‘batch’, the very worst, that of a microwaved baby, he keeps to himself (in the depths of his mind as quoted at the top of this review), and that is the one he ends up reading about in the papers the next day. Thus begins a series of atrocities that Miles somehow feels responsible for because he has seen them in his dreams. Miles suffers further nightmares, writing them down because he “must get rid of them” and in doing so he feels “cleaner, absolved…of responsibility”. Meanwhile the newspapers report the crimes he feels he should have prevented as “evidence of the impotence of the law, of a total collapse of standards.” At the same time he is using the content of some of his dreamed atrocities for his publisher Hugo Burgess’ new horror magazine ‘Ghastly’. Hugo believes the public these days prefer to read of real horrors because “that way they don’t feel they’re indulging themselves”. The nightmares persist,. After failing miserably to stop murders he has foreseen in both Oxford Street and Chester to achieve this, Miles reaches his epiphany as he looks at rows and rows of houses and imagines the occupants reading his horrible stories in Burgess’ magazine: “Perhaps in time some of them would gloat over his pornographic horrors, reassuring themselves that this was just horror fiction, not pornography.” And the houses in which these people live are: “self confident and bland: they looked as convinced of their innocence as he was trying to feel” Which leads him neatly to: “all at once, he knew where his nightmares were coming from.” He realises that back in West Derby the neighbours “used him as a scapegoat to cast him out, to proclaim that (the crime) had nothing to do with them”, and now it doesn’t matter where he goes because: “the nightmares would find him. He was an outcast from surrounding reality.” Miles is a recipient for the evil urges, feelings, and emotions of a general public who have selected him as the scapegoat of their imaginations. His writing down of his nightmares is akin to the lancing of an abscess, the accumulated pus of which has been contributed to by many thousands of ‘decent folk’. In fact a little later on we learn that Miles feels like “an abscessed tooth”. And what happens to the scapegoat in any society? A powerful, perfect ending rounds off this mini-masterpiece of a big idea set neatly within the small world of a struggling writer. First published in Ramsey’s 1982 collection Dark Companions, The Depths explores an idea that has always fascinated me – that of the mental or psychological abscess – an accumulation of imagined horrors that eventually becomes so large or severe that it has to find a way of being released or else render its subject insane or worse. There is a saying amongst surgeons: “If there’s pus about, let it out”. The same it would seem would hold true for the psychological kind, although in the end it does Miles little good. I first came across the concept in David Morrell’s superb short story ‘Orange is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity’, first published in Douglas E Winter’s Prime Evil anthology in 1988. In that tale the artist Van Doorn is able to relieve the tremendous pressure on his brain, the ‘creative abscess’, by painting thousands of screaming faces, etching them almost imperceptibly into his work. It would be interesting to know if Morrell was influenced however slightly by Ramsey’s tale which of course predates it. The second deliciously horrible theme here is the idea of any society being able to foist its unsavoury elements onto one individual or group and feel that by eliminating that individual then society as a whole has cleansed itself. Although it isn’t quite the same thing I can’t help but be reminded of another horrifying concept my young mind was introduced to and has stuck with me, namely Nigel Kneale’s idea that ‘we are the Martians’ in Quatermass & the Pit – that society itself is capable of acting as a single organism, and that those that don’t fit, or rather the ‘feelings’ that don’t fit, can and must be cast out if that society is to survive. Ramsey has written in his introduction to ‘Alone with the Horrors’ (curiously it doesn’t rate a mention in the introduction to the collection in which it was first published) that he considers this a companion piece to his fine 1981 (revised 1985) novel The Nameless. To quote: “ ‘The Depths’ is concerned with the process of demonisation, another way of finding someone else to blame. I’m sure I’m guilty of it myself; the worst writing in my field gives me any number of excuses. “ I wonder if ‘the worst writing’ and the presence of ‘Ghastly’ magazine is a veiled attack on the ever-popular Pan horrors of the time? Is Hugo Burgess Herbert van Thal? Have I said enough? Probably. John L Probert 31 vii 2008 | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 |
I think the Van Dorn in Morrell's "Orange is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity" (indeed, a magnificent story) is based on Vincent van Gogh and the 'screaming faces' are obviously a literary transformation of the curls and curlicues van Gogh was forever painting towards the end of his life. Recall, too, that, like Van Dorn, van Gogh stayed in the south of France for a number of years. | ||
| John Llewellyn Probert (John_l_probert) Username: John_l_probert Registered: 03-2008 |
Oh dear, I seem to have killed the reading group stone dead with this one. Sorry everyone | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 |
John, this is a difficult and very bleak story. A fine story, but not an easy one to discuss. Don't blame yourself! I'll post some comments tomorrow. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 |
There's a great example of synesthesia at the end of this tale: " . . . the glints in their hands were sharp." glints (visual) = sharp (touch). | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 |
John's commentary is acute and well backed up with detail, and while I read the last part of the story a bit differently I think his reading has more textual justification. To me, the story is about an individual losing his grip on reality, and then finding that his madness resonates with the collective madness of society. The scapegoat myth is his own way of making sense of this, but what has happened is more like a snowfall triggering an avalanche. A personal fear resonating with a collective terror. I don't have much textual justification for that reading: it's just how the story affected me. 'The Depths' is grim even by Campbell standards, and combines two recurrent themes in his work: the potential madness of creative artists (especially writers) and the violence inherent in the collective myths of society. What makes this story partticularly bleak is that there is no apparition, no weird entity to give the story a focus: what might be the subtext in another Campbell story here takes centre stage, and the reader has no symbolic filter through which to assimilate the story's theme. That makes it an unusually tough, discouraging story. Like 'No Story in It', this is Campbell saying: 'OK, let's cut the bullshit, I'm ANGRY here, never mind the sheeted apparitions, never mind the cosmic entities, I'm in no mood for playing around, we're in trouble and we know it.' This is also a strong example – like Harlan Ellison's 'The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World' – of a story that deals with atrocity and sadism without pandering to the adolescent bloodlust of what 1980s publishers assumed to be 'the horror readership'. Ultimately, a story as grim and condemning as this one gives the reader no closure, no sense of a 'pleasing terror', but a great deal to think about and some pointers to what may be going on in what we like to call 'reality'. It denies the reader the escapism of violence as entertainment and the parallel escapism of supernaturalism as entertainment. Needless to say, normal service – complete with apparitions, entities, the works – will be resumed as soon as possible. 'The Depths' is a difficult, bleak, brave story that is hard to enjoy, but deserves appreciation. Very few writers are even trying to do stuff like this. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 |
I'd forgotten how powerful this story is. Is it - among other things - an attack on the splatterpunk movement? If so, it's an effectve one - Campbell's brief sketches of atrocities are far more disturbing than when they are spelled out. Another example of the sheer quality of his writing. "an accumulation of imagined horrors that eventually becomes so large or severe that it has to find a way of being released or else render its subject insane or worse" Oh, yes. Like Lord P, I've always been drawn to this theme. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 |
Zed, this story's five or six years (at least) too early to have the splatterpunks in its sights. I'd like to think it's talking about FEAR magazine, but it's too early for that as well. More the spate of paperback originals from that time that described men, women, children and fluffy kittens being tortured, mutilated and eaten by cannibals, Satanists, rabid voles or whatever. Horror fiction as an atrocity factory. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 |
Ah, so it's a critique of the Shocklines forum? ;-) | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 |
I think Joel means THE PAN BOOK OF HORROR STORIES. Or the FONTANA equivalent? | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 |
No, I meant novels: paperback originals by the likes of Guy N. Smith. I think the Pan series was so far up its own arse by the end of the seventies that nobody involved with the genre gave it a second thought. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 |
I've enjoyed reading the comments on this thread, since I've always liked this story a lot. It's particularly oppressive, reading like a palpable caffeine headache. That's Ramsey's signature style: it's like a displaced consciousness - we're reading a 1st person's P.O.V. presented in 3rd: almost like a secondary personality, in therapy, relating what happened to the primary consciousness. Everything is filtered through *A* P.O.V., naturally the protagonist's; but we don't know it until we're deeper in - we're fooled into thinking it's the author's at first. There's almost an unconscious "twist" in his tales, as we gradually come to find we're not being told a story; rather, we've been locked in the main protagonist's mental hell the entire time... one gets the sense the author is drifting farther and farther away from the action, leaving the main character in a spiraling hell of projection... until, finally, imagination becomes reality - usually at the tippy-tip ending. You get a single peek into the "undiscovered country": it's never pleasant. At the beginning, Miles strives to imagine the state of mind - the "knowingness" - of the murdered bank manager and his wife, as the murder/suicide took place, and he can't (but has he just cast an evil spell upon himself?...). This is the Central Question of the piece: Will Miles come to understand "the depths" of evil? As more and more horrors cram into his mind, Miles struggles, but fails to comprehend them - he has only two choices: he can either ignore, or dictate. His comprehension later goes to action: is there a grander design? Am I being tested? The fact he has no power to stop the murder in the alley by a shadowy figure (the two times we see the murderer/s, they are faceless and shadowy: read, God-like), is near achievement/renewed failure, to achieve his goal. The awkward presentation of the "scapegoat" myth, comes in like a sore thumb: just happening to remember a vital fact so late in a story, reeks of the "amateur" writer - a mistake Ramsey is incapable of making, so there's a real meaning here: Miles has achieved his goal, understanding (he has to or the story won't work), but it's a scrambling last-minute paste-on - Miles is no scapegoat. There is no understanding of "the depths." There is only being on this side, or that. But you can "myth" one: he is allowed a kind of deluded victory, as is the reader. The idea that all our data is delusion... wow, is that ever bleak.... | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 |
Your first paragraph sums up perfectly why I like Ramsey's stuff. That and the monsters. Which for me are often akin to something in a surrealist painting. I wish I had read this story more to comment. Although I will say that the protagonist's condition sounds like mine. I crashed another plane the other day. I can't help myself. | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 |
It’s been a while since I read this one, and yet I can’t imagine why it’s taken me so long to return to. I think it’s one of the reasons I do love this Ramsey Reading Group idea. The tales we wouldn’t automatically go back to are suggested by someone and you get to read them all over again, remind yourself just how good Ramsey is. Miles’s journey, beginning in that dark, brooding house of ugly ends – the striking image of the woman knifed to death to the wall is so wonderfully and economically conveyed that it sets the scene for the further atrocities, told in a subtle edge of the eye manner, with gleams and glints and second mouths half open – is wonderfully put across. In many ways a typical protagonist of Ramsey’s short stories, Miles is not so studied and pedantic as some of his other protagonists, allowing us to empathise and like him more than is often the case of those characters. It’s an important thing. Allowing us to feel Miles’s case more closely, and want him to win, to fear for all that’s creeping around him with utter insidiousness. I love the way that at this stage of his career Ramsey’s developed the snapshot scene shifts and descriptive backdrops, as though we’re viewing movie snapshots or the sepia images on an old pack of cards being stroked. Simple yet effective, and less intrusive than in his earlier stories, when he was developing the technique. And of course, here’s a tale written – shite – thirty years ago, parading headlines and solutions that we see in our papers daily now. But what I most take away from this tale is the biggest and most subtle trick of them all. Miles is left to transcribe the details of the horrors, yet they are never starkly revealed to us in a direct light. Ramsey leaves it all up to us to interpret, knowing our minds are complicit in the scenes of torture and death, as infected by the pandemic of crime as Miles’s final revelation suggests, because we provide the dread of his grizzly end after Ramsey’s final sentence. Thanks for suggesting this one, Lord P. |