Conference noted::sf

1172.0. "William Hope Hodgson" by VERGA::KLAES (Quo vadimus?) Tue Sep 28 1993 15:30

Article: 374
From: dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
Subject: REPOST: Belated Reviews #32: William Hope Hodgon
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
Date: 24 Sep 93 11:47:22 GMT
 
	     Belated Reviews #32:  William Hope Hodgson
 
Between 1907 and his death in 1918, William Hope Hodgson wrote some of the
most unusual fantasy novels.  I've sometimes seen his books classified as
supernatural horror:  I'm not sure I agree with that classification, but
it is true that his books share a key characteristic of horror, which is
that they stand or fall on their ability to sustain a mood, rather than to
tell a story.  
 
"The Night Land" (*?****?) is Hodgson's masterpiece.  Sort of.  Readers
who appreciate a remarkable use of language should read it.  Readers
who don't like language getting in the way of a story should avoid it
like the plague.  The first chapter is placed in the seventeenth, maybe 
eighteenth, century.  The narrator finds the love of his life and loses 
her, after which he is granted a dream of finding her again in a future so
distant that the sun has burnt out.  The rest of the book is set in that
future.  The bad news is that, since the narrator is supposed to be from
a few centuries ago, so is the language.  More specifically, it's a
combination of pseudo-archaic language and Victorian prose (the sort where
'Beauty' is mentioned frequently and always capitalized) apparently
designed to set my teeth on edge.  Amazingly, remarkably, it works.
 
The Night Land of the title is the Earth, billions of years from now.
(It's not SF:  Accept as a premise that the sun has guttered out but the
Earth is still slogging along on tectonic activity, and don't worry about it.)
The world outside the last bastion of humanity, is dark and inimical (albeit
with some bright spots), and through four hundred pages of the narrator's
sojourn in this land (to rescue the last survivor of another habitat) we
never forget it.  And that's what's remarkable about the book -- not the
story, which is basically a journey from here to there and back again,
fighting off assorted dangers and monsters on the way, but Hodgson's
ability to create and sustain an atmosphere.  Despite the unfortunate
language (or perhaps because of it:  I certainly haven't seen this pulled
off half as well in modern colloquial English) Hodgson draws the reader in 
and makes that dark land real. 
 
"The House on the Borderland" (***) is Hodgson's most accessible novel.
It begins with two vacationing friends discovering the ruins of house --
eerie ruins, dismal and disconcerting -- and in the house a hand-written
manuscript.  Most of the rest of this short book is devoted to the
contents of the manuscript.
 
(Digression:  The modern fantasy genre isn't much more than a century old.
There are many older works that we point to as predecessors, or even call
fantasies, but it was only in Hodgson's lifetime that writers started
creating worlds out of whole cloth and setting their stories in them.
That's why Hodgson and other writers had the awkward-to-us habit of using
an opening chapter to ground the story in the real world, via a dream or a
manuscript or some similar means.  The genre *convention* of letting the
author define a setting with no reference to the real world was not yet
established, and writers had to provide an explicit transition from the
reader's world to the writer's.)
 
The writer of the manuscript was a old man who came to live in the house,
alone except for his sister and his dog.  The house was odd, old, and --
because nobody in that part of the country would live there -- cheap.  The
tale was told it was built by the devil.  Perhaps it was.  At the least,
the house turns out to border more than one reality, and some years after
the writer came to the house, another reality -- or perhaps the same
reality in a later eon -- began to impinge on it.  The tension builds,
from the first intimations of danger to the attack of the monsters (the
swine creatures have always provided my mental picture of Orcs) to the
writer's travel through an incredibly distant future but, typically for
Hodgson, that tension is never allowed to build too far.  Hodgson is more 
interested in creating an atmosphere of mystery and wonder and terror, and 
maintaining it, than in settling for climax and anticlimax.
 
(Roger Zelazny's novel "The Changing Land" centers on a building which
seems to be meant to be this same house.)
 
"The Boats of the Glen Carrig" (**) is Hodgson's first novel, and the only
other one that is reasonably findable.  (I was told -- I don't have the
details -- that a collection of his short stories has recently been issued
in a $90 limited edition, but I don't consider that "reasonably" anything.
"The Night Land", "The House on the Borderland", and "The Boats of the
Glen Carrig" are the only Hodgson books I've seen in paperback.)  "The
Boats of the Glen Carrig" begins in media res, the Glen Carrig having sunk
a few days earlier, with the lifeboats lost in a strange sea.  In the pages
that follow, the survivors make landings on two strange islands, both of 
which seem to have been plucked from the drearier portions of Dante's Inferno.
 
The sailors have to fight storms and monsters, but the main enemies seem
to be the dismal islands themselves.  This book is weaker than the others,
but the style Hodgson would use in later books is present.  The story
being told is slight, and serves mainly to anchor an atmosphere, a picture
of dank lands that are hostile to healthy life.  The novel's main tension
is provided by the activity of the sailors in the face of the depressing
half-life and decay of their surroundings.
 
William Hope Hodgson wrote fourteen or fifteen books, of which these are
the best known.  His influence on the other major fantasists of the early
twentieth century is probably slight, as his books fell out of sight for a
while after his death.  When the books did come to light, however, those
fantasists were *impressed*.  The cover blurbs on my copy of "The Night
Land" are by H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.  You don't find many 
books about which you can say that!
 
As I indicated with respect to "The Night Land", I can only give an
ambivalent recommendation.  If you like plot-driven fantasy, Hodgson's
books don't have much in the way of plot.  If you like character-driven
fantasy, you're in no better shape.  If you're attracted by the prospect
of seeing a talent which can work language so as to shape and sustain a
mood across hundreds of pages, you'll want to read Hodgson -- because
there's virtually nobody else.
 
%A  Hodgson, William Hope
%T  The Night Land
%T  The House on the Borderland
%T  The Boats of the Glen Carrig
 
Standard introduction and disclaimer for Belated Reviews follows.

Belated Reviews cover science fiction and fantasy of earlier decades.
They're for newer readers who have wondered about the older titles on the
shelves, or who are interested in what sf/f was like in its younger days.
The emphasis is on helping interested readers identify books to try first, 
not on discussing the books in depth.
 
A general caveat is in order:  Most of the classics of yesteryear have not
aged well.  If you didn't encounter them back when, or in your early teens,
they will probably not give you the unforced pleasure they gave their
original audiences.  You may find yourself having to make allowances for
writing you consider shallow or politics you consider regressive.  When I
name specific titles, I'll often rate them using the following scale:
 
**** Recommended.
***  An old favorite that hasn't aged well, and wouldn't get a good
	reception if it were written today.  Enjoyable on its own terms.
**   A solid book, worth reading if you like the author's works.
*    Nothing special.
 
Additional disclaimers:  Authors are not chosen for review in any particular
order.  The reviews don't attempt to be comprehensive.  No distinction is 
made between books which are still in print and books which are not.
 
-----
Dani Zweig
dani@netcom.com
 
  The surface of the strange, forbidden planet was roughly textured and green,
  much like cottage cheese gets way after the date on the lid says it is all 
  right to buy it.--Scott Jones