1.
In “Ringing the Changes,” one of the great Robert Aickman’s best-known “strange stories,” a woman asks her husband why a place in their inn is called “The Coffee Room” when no coffee is served there. He chalks it up to the lucus a non lucendo explanation, which he explains as the “principle of calling white black.” Out of the darkness comes the authoritative voice of the inn’s only other guest: “On the contrary. The word ‘black’ comes from an ancient root which means ‘to bleach.’” This etymological lesson gets to the core of Aickman’s particular brand of horror writing: strangeness is everywhere, even in the simplest of words. Like the best horror writers, Aickman is a consummate realist. The “real” and “supernatural” worlds are not distinct realms but rather as intertwined as the etymologies of black and white.
Aickman’s stories slip in and out of supernaturalism and dream states with acrobatic ease. Take “The Swords,” in which a young man loses his virginity to a woman he sees at a rather gruesome carnival act. It begins with an observation that explains the psychological foundations for the grotesquerie to come: “I have noticed several times that it is to beginners that strange things happen, and often, I think, to beginners only.” The man’s object of desire (and disgust) is a woman who could accurately be described as either a zombie or a perfectly mortal prostitute. She hovers between two modes — seedy realism and supernaturalism — as the young man wrestles with a “strange,” sordid experience in which “facts” will finally replace his “fancies.”
Faber & Faber has recently reissued four volumes of Aickman’s tales (Dark Entries, Cold Hand in Mine, The Unsettled Dust, The Wine-Dark Sea), each of which sports a suitably ghoulish illustrated cover. The collections demonstrate Aickman’s flexibility and finesse with the strange story. He can use it to craft a convincing, and often very funny, coming-of-age tale in “Meeting Mr. Millar;” set an account of obsession and jealousy against the backdrop of historical atrocities in “The Clock Watcher;” and scare the living daylights out of readers with “The Trains,” his most conventionally plotted but characteristically opaque work of horror. At one point in that spine-tingler, the villain explains the workings of the nearby tracks:
“A railway is like an iceberg, you know: very little of its working is visible to the casual onlooker.”
Aickman’s art could be similarly described: We might be blocked from seeing what lies beneath its surface, but we know it’s formidable and chilling.
2.
Aickman wrote 48 strange stories over the course of his career and two longer works, The Late Breakfasters and The Model, as well as two memoirs and two histories of England’s inland canals, which he strove doggedly to preserve by founding the Inland Waterway Association. There’s a nice symmetry between his volunteer work and his writing subjects; broadly speaking, both involved preserving or discovering those old pathways that modern man has neglected or is blind to.
Faber enlisted scholars, acquaintances, and fellow writers to provide introductions and afterwords, some of which put their own “strange” twist on these usually laudatory pieces to create a new form: the insulting encomium. Ramsey Campbell describes Aickman as a “pale, chubby fellow with the worst teeth I’ve ever seen in a living mouth.” (Only a fellow horror writer would specify “living” mouth.) Jean Richardson, a longtime romantic acquaintance, admits that she wasn’t “young enough, beautiful enough, rich enough, well-connected enough or famous enough to be a trophy, and trophy girlfriend was what Robert thought he deserved.” She then quotes his explanation for why a stroll down the aisle wasn’t in their future: “[Our temperamental difference] is perhaps symbolized in the different pace at which we walk. This stands for much.” (Whether Aickman was prone to moseying or speed-walking is left to the imagination.)
At any rate, the essays reveal that Aickman, though odd and prickly and not shy about his abilities — he claimed to have a wider range than both M.R. James and Henry James — was fundamentally decent, always good company and an impressive autodidact. They also emphasize that he was born in the wrong age, and indeed there is an elegiac strain running through the tales. A character in “The Real Road to the Church” notes the “lack of immensity in the world,” and another in “The View” laments that “there are no beautiful houses in England now. Only ruins, mental homes, and Government offices.” In “The Next Glade,” a housewife living on the outskirts of London complains that it is “impossible to get lost” in the small patch of woods next to her house. But the stories, “The Next Glade” especially, are full of people doing precisely that, stumbling upon ephemeral eruptions of a more expansive, unruly, Dionysian reality in the otherwise mundane world of Apollonian illusion:
Conventions are, indeed, all that shield us from the shivering void, though often they do so but poorly and desperately…None the less, reality lies far behind, and is unchangeable: it is ritual, in fact…Reality is often dangerous…
How characters react to that dangerous reality — what it reveals about their failings or desires and the way it imperceptibly but irrevocably changes their human relations — is one of Aickman’s recurring themes.
This Dionysian threat appears in “Ringing the Changes,” in which the young wife is caught in the “beatific throng” of dancing spirits amid the incessant tolling. The profane revelry humiliates her much older husband, whose failure to protect her is judged harshly; awakens a previously dormant voluptuousness within her; and imposes a division between the May-December couple “which neither of them would ever mention or ever forget.” The brush with the walking dead drives home the real danger lurking in the story from page one: the “perils attendant upon marrying a girl twenty-four years younger than [oneself].”
“Bind Your Hair” is another perfect story in this vein, Aickman managing to honor the seductive mysteries of a Dionysian ritual while wryly making fun of the horrors of a weekend with in-laws. Clarinda Hartley, a woman whom “no one seemed able to fathom,” visits her fiancé’s family in the East Midlands for a stultifying visit. Seeking refuge from her future in-laws, people who “lived in the depths of the country, but had no idea of the wilderness,” she stumbles on the orgiastic rites of one Mrs. Pagani — animal skin-clad bodies writhing in an open pit in the middle of a pastoral maze. Initially horrified, a parting glance the next day between the woman and the priestess-like neighbor suggests that she will be back. Clarinda, suspicious and afraid of Mrs. Pagani as she is, realizes on some level that she is more suited to frolicking in the mysterious woman’s lecherous pit than stewing in the “capacious family lobster pot” of her in-laws.
Like Clarinda, other Aickman characters stumble into a community — or cult — with its own rules. Some of these communities are benign even as they appear sinister, some sinister beneath their surface (or apparent) benignity, but all exert an irresistible influence on their foreign visitors. For example, in “Into the Wood” a restless woman accompanying her road-building husband on a business trip stays overnight at a secluded community of accursed insomniacs deep in the Swedish forest. Despite her initial aversion to the place and its people, she eventually sees the insomnia as an odd blessing that opens up literal and figurative pathways to self-discovery even as it closes her off from the rest of the society.
Another one of these tales, “The Hospice,” my favorite in all four volumes, demonstrates the full range of Aickman’s gifts. Apart from the superb “The Inner Room,” it’s the closest he comes to Kafka’s unique blend of the eerie, the horrifying, the comically absurd, and the emotionally resonant. A man named Maybury who, though he “deplore[s] all deviation,” deviates from his planned route and, low on fuel and bitten by a feral cat, takes refuge at “The Hospice,” whose sign promises “good fare” and “some accommodations.” (There is something vaguely menacing about that some that speaks to the inflexibility of the hospice’s rules as well as to the limited number of its beds.)
The story’s dining room scene is a masterpiece of low-key, sinister farce. Each guest sits alone at giant tables facing the same way. One, Maybury eventually notices, is chained to a railing on the floor. The portions are enormous, the courses unending, but when Maybury pleads satiety, he is rebuked: “That’s not necessarily for each of us to say, is it?” When he can’t finish his turkey, an incensed hostess slams his giant plate on the ground.
“The Hospice” could be paraphrased as a visit to a land of neurotic Lotus Eaters. The guests, “who come [to the Hospice] for the food and the peace and the warmth and the rest,” don’t like stimulants of any kind, forbid the discussion of unpleasantness, abhor the sight of blood and prefer not to sleep alone or in the dark, which isn’t to say that death and violence don’t find their way inside its fortifications. The Hospice — a refuge for pilgrims or a limbo for dying souls? — is an infantilizing institution that makes Maybury feel like “he was only half his normal size.” It also obliquely reflects Maybury’s own anxieties: responsible adult businessman though he is, he nonetheless finds himself submitting to the babying, wearing a pair of matching pajamas with a roommate, quaking in his bed and reflecting on his own inadequacies as a man, husband, and father.
Aickman is also a pitiless chronicler of the battle between the sexes, battles which usually depict a rather feckless man helpless to confront or comprehend the inner drives of the woman in his life. “No Stronger Than a Flower,” to name one, is a fanged makeover tale which I’d love to see a style magazine with a dark sense of humor reprint in its glossy pages.
While Aickman is never ponderous, he comes closest when he is at his most allegorical, as in “The Wine-Dark Sea,” in which a British tourist makes his way on a stolen boat onto a wondrous Greek island ruled over by three goddesses. It is a fable about the feminine energies — fertile, sensuous, wrathful — driven out of culture but still persisting as a last refuge against the barren, masculine culture that has dominated since the beginnings of Western Civilization: “The stupid Greeks even called the plays they wrote about their fight with the women, tragedies.” Despite being set around the “faintly repulsive tideless Aegean” and featuring rattling earthquakes, one feels on firmer ground than with some of his murkier tales, probably because allegories by their nature ultimately tend to reveal more than they conceal.
A much subtler tale touching on similar feminine, ecological themes is “The Stains,” in which a recently widowed civil servant meets an elemental creature collecting lichen samples for her mysterious father. After abandoning his London life to live with her in a stone cottage, she is horrified when he attempts to define lichen, and by extension their illogical relationship, for her as “a fungus and an alga living in a mutually beneficial relationship.” To which she replies: “Don’t talk about it…It’s unlucky.” The story’s gruesome ending I think stems as much from the man’s urge to explain the mysteries of nature scientifically as any malign power; his assertion constitutes some fatal violation of the natural order.
Some of Aickman’s more lurid stories could be alternately titled “Paging Dr. Freud,” specifically one entertainingly febrile tale, “Ravissante,” about a symbolist painter whose checked sensuality is awakened by a visit to the widow of a famous painter. The old, “gnomic” woman urges him to rifle through the shrine-like wardrobe of her adopted daughter, to kneel and tread on the “complex silky nebula” of her dresses. The lingerie drawer is saved for last:
“You could almost wear it yourself…Why don’t you kiss it? Roll up your blue sleeves, and plunge in your white arms…Love them, tear them, possess them.”
Describing the story so briefly, however, can’t capture the more refined accretion of oddities that culminate in this charged scene, which itself is most likely a psycho-sexual hallucination that painfully manifests to him his own unworthiness as an artist.
3.
Aickman readers are a bit like the narrator of “The Inner Room,” who never gains access to her forlorn dollhouse’s hidden sanctum where all mystery is laid bare. What one remembers most from Aickman’s stories are not the ghosts, vampires, psychopaths, goddesses, or lake monsters, but rather a feeling of dread and a lingering doubt over the precise nature of the epiphany, or atrocity, that seems to have occurred. After reading an Aickman tale, one feels as if one’s vision is occluded by the very “self-renewing, perennial” debris that covers every surface of the mansion in “The Unsettled Dust,” a story in which the prying narrator is curtly told: “The key of your room doesn’t open ever door.” And perhaps that’s for the best; some locked doors should remain unopened.
In her exquisite memoir, The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit writes movingly of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Shelley gave birth to four children, but only the fourth survived. “In the years she gave birth to all those too-mortal children,” Solnit writes:
It probably goes without saying that you’ll crave different solitudes at different moments in your life, both in books and in physical places. I have an immense love for loud books. Novels like, say, Nick Harkaway’s, about which I’ve rhapsodized at length, books that come galloping into your life with their doomsday machines and schoolgirl spies and ninjas and leave you daydreaming for days afterward about clouds of mechanized bees. But on the other end of the spectrum, there’s the immense pleasure of novels like Teju Cole’s Open City, which I finally got around to reading a few weeks back. Very little happens in Open City, plotwise. It’s a very intelligent meditation on memory, dislocation, family, music, national identity, and other interesting topics, but the action is mostly a man wandering the streets of New York. I found it mesmerizing.
1. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
5. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
Great quiet essay. Summer Book was so enchanting. Perfect.
“Both are falling, but David is waiting for Mel to fall first, so that he can catch her.” Possibly the best line I’ve read all week.
I’ve always loved quiet books (Marilynne Robinson is a special favorite), so thank you so much for this short list. I would also add Stoner, previously covered by The Millions, except that I haven’t finished it yet so no guarantees.
I read the title of this essay and immediately thought of The Summer Book, which I found by chance in a used bookstore. I had no idea what it was about or who the author was, but it seemed like exactly the type of book I needed at the moment. It was peaceful and gentle and nostalgic.
Thanks for this essay. I’ll be searching out the Yoon and Berlin books, especially. I’m in the middle of The Summer Book (which I’d saved for summer reading, of course!) and am enjoying its distinctive pace. I can recommend Jansson’s The Winter Book, too, but perhaps you might save this until winter arrives?
As for Cole’s Open City, I found his novel is be an increasingly disquieting quiet read, to the moment when I realized that all his walking is an attempt to put emotional distance on a disturbing event in his past. Then his quiet novel, at least for me, became very loud indeed. I found this book to be even more rewarding when reread . . .
A great list! I can’t wait to look into some of these novels. “Open City” and “Gilead” are beautiful. Might I recommend that “Tinkers” or (if Paul Harding’s first is any indication) “Enon” be added to your list?
This essay was a graceful, quiet read itself, and the list of recommended books is fantastic. Thank you!
As soon as I read the title of this article, I thought of “The Summer Book”, as some have mentioned. What a beautiful way to express the pleasure of quiet reads!
I have read the Snow Hunters. Very good book and a moving story!
I get the occasional need to seek books which provide comforts from the difficulties of everyday life, but the idea that a novel should adhere to some “loud” vs. “quiet” spectrum me is a largely useless dichotomy, if not a timid prescription that would be thrown out of any English class. Fiction should be flexible enough to inhabit ALL emotions: to make the reader laugh and cry, to give the reader noise and quiet (and if you’re seriously viewing OPEN CITY as a “quiet” novel, you’re clearly ignoring, if not misreading, the very loud pain that is buried within Julius and that is just as clamorous as any Harkaway vision).
This gormless and egregious essay is little more than a retread of the dreaded and utterly useless “unlikable” characters debate. It is designed to encourage a type of pusillanimous and passive-aggressive reader, one who imposes her own dull and blinkered and eggshell-walking view of humanity onto Goodreads and Amazon, who diminishes the full range of literature and discourages authors from taking chances. That this nonsense would be published on a website ostensibly devoted to serious literary discussion is a mark that nobody here is especially interested in minding the store and stirring up real debate and answering to the more serious challenge of how to stay subtle and rational-minded in literature when the world is a mess that no amount of hiding will declutter.
The last few lines are exactly what I envision when I think of a “quiet” novel. Perhaps “quiet,” then, is a misnomer.
Re: Edward Champion comments, above
I’m a big fan of Emily St. John Mandel and someone who has no concern about “likability” in either my characters or my own interactions. I like my fiction quiet. I like my fiction rough. Don’t care, so long as it’s good. Ms. Mandel’s essay displays the same lovely writing style and quietly but sharply perceptive sensibility that marks her fiction. She is a young writer I value and I look forward to following her career.
As for Champion’s hatchet job, what nonsense. Nothing she is writing about has anything to do with the “unlikable” characters debate. You, sir, have totally missed the point. A “gormless and egregious essay?” “Designed to encourage a type of pusillanimous and passive-aggressive reader…” “Dull and blinkered and eggshell-walking view of humanity.” Balderdash!
As for your galumphing and harrumphing umbrage that “this nonsense would be published on a website ostensibly devoted to serious literary discussion….” All I have to say to that is… Get thee back to your murky lair under the bridge, Troll!
Sincerely
Moe Murph (Definitely not the quiet type)
Washington, DC
I endorse Maureen’s defence of this essay; it seems churlish to attack it so venomously. The tone was surely intended to be slightly humorous and conversational, to stimulate the kind of friendly, literary discussion one would prefer to see in these comments – not an unwarranted, egregiously misguided attack! Let’s have a bit of quiet, calm comment, please.
Gilead is a marvel. So free of irony and guile and tortured self-consciousness.
I think Evan Connell’s pair of novels, Mr Bridge, and Mrs Bridge, can be tagged Quiet. So uneventful you can’t put them down. You cant wait to see what doesn’t happen next. Another way of saying that every sober paragraph, every mundane moment, feels (quietly) momentous.
Maureen: How have I missed the point? Would you care to actually offer a defense/? Do you actually have an argument? No, you don’t. And I do. And I will happily debate you at length (or, for that matter, the pusillanimous Emily St. John Mandel, who remains “quiet” and reveals her limitations as a thinker with her silence) using specific examples and taut arguments. But, of course, you have nothing more in your cheap rhetorical reticule other than asserting that the proposition is wrong. Is that too “loud” for you? Have I upset your fragile minds by calling you out on your indolent thinking? Oh dear.
Simon Lavery also belongs in the dunk tank for failing to argue. Neither of you can offer a bona-fide position. You only wish to declare my viewpoint wrong. That doesn’t fly in any real debate. Are either of you familiar with a constructive argument?
You people are what’s wrong with America. Learn how to think or you’ll end up dead and useless.
Re: Edward Champion
My above short comment was in reply to you, I just forgot to name you as the intended recipient, the point being that “quiet” simply refers to a style of writing and not the entirety of the literature put in such a category. Every dichotomy can be deconstructed, but that doesn’t change the self-evident difference in writing style between Marilynne Robinson and, say, David Foster Wallace. And, yes, there are differences in writing style between the authors listed in the article above, but I’m sure you can wrap your “rational” mind around the axis of difference we’re adopting here that shows a greater difference between “quiet” and “loud” styles of literature than between works of “quiet” literature. Again, this isn’t a rigid axis, and the standard is subjective, but, of course, you already knew that, given that literary tastes are always subjective—-as are the taste (or lack thereof) in “rational” comments.
(Why do I feel like I’ve just been trolled?)
Emily wrote, “some novels are quiet, whereas others are loud,” which is a pretty clear-cut rigid dichotomy that is even more problematic than the speculative riffing Zadie Smith was doing in her essay, “Two Paths for the Novel.” The fact that you, CJ (or should I just call you Lee Siegel?), and Emily would rather ascribe a taxonomic element to writers as deeply complicated and as variegated and as rich as Marilynne Robinson and DFW reveals that you are not especially interested in unpacking the literary ideal I described above: once again, that fiction should encompass ALL human qualities so that one does not approach the act of reading literature in the same crass manner as one orders from a Taco Bell drive-thru.
Re: My dear friend Ed,
This will be my last post on this thread, and I want to apologize on behalf of both of us for making a bloody mess of the bottom half of this page when such a beautiful article starts it off. Ed, if you still want to continue, you’re on your own.
Despite the fact that you obviously aren’t looking for an open-minded discussion rather than looking for a mole to whack with your hammer of a brain, I still find just enough logic in your post to warrant a response. Since you’re going so analytical on me, you should also know, of course, that the “some . . . , others . . . ” construction is not delimiting, as opposed to “some . . . , the others . . . .” The sentence you cited could easily have continued, “and others have pink covers, and others still are written in Greek.”
To return to the contention at hand, I’ve already mentioned that the axis chosen is arbitrary. That does not preclude other equally valid axes from being chosen, resulting in equally valid comparisons. A rationally minded person such as yourself should know very well that the first step to “unpacking” anything is to draw distinctions; otherwise everything is equally singular as everything else and no meaningful comprehension can be made whatsoever outside of, “Oh, that’s a work of fiction.” You obviously believe that more can be said, given the arbitrary standard that you put up: “fiction should encompass ALL human qualities.” Ergo, under this rubric, the closer a work of fiction is to this goal, the better it is. There is no universal truth that supports your axis as “better” or “worse” (or other such nonsense dichotomies) than any other; and I might mention the fact that democracy has no logical connection with truth.
But that brings me to my third and last point: You’re begging the question. This article never said that “quiet” works are better than “loud” ones always and forevermore. Did your cherry-picking skip over how the author said “I have an immense love for loud books”? And the numbers on the list have no ordinal value attached to them at all, not even implied in the text. There is no evidence period that the author is promoting a “taxonomy” of literature; even if there were, you have provided no argumentation supporting the harm that such a taxonomy would cause to your “literary ideal,” which, again, is as arbitrary an axis as the one you so “rationally” seem worked up about.
Even when I know I’m having my time wasted, I find this article too good to not defend. (And that, my dear Ed, is a subjective literary taste.)
I am so grateful for this essay. Just gave me two more books to my “to read” list–The Summer Book, and The Harp in the South.
I’d like to add three more books that I consider quiet books, very powerful, poignant, and unforgettable, and these are the trilogy by Kent Haruf–Plainsong, Eventide, and Benediction. About the lives of people in an imaginary town in Colorado, called Holt.
I realize that I am slow to add my comments here, and so probably no one will even get to this little submission, but just in case one person reads my suggestion, and then gives these books some attention, I will be satisfied.
Oh Mr. Champion, could you please be quiet?
Thank you so much for this article, Ms. Mandel. I’ve never conceptualized novels in this “loud” and “quiet” way, but it seems like a really useful way to think about books
.
It also helps me personally, as a reader, because lately I keep picking up “quiet” books that I’m sure I’ll like, reading for fifty pages, and then just forgetting to finish them! It’s baffled me, because I know intellectually that the book is good, but I can’t get into it. Whereas when I’ve picked up something like “John Dies at the End,” I can’t get enough of it. I think I set a record finishing that book!
What a lovely essay. I have Gilead in my to-read pile and might just move it up now. I have not read the others on this list but they are now on my list too.
I can’t recall if I’ve thought of books as quiet or loud but, yes, I get the meaning. And, as I think through my reading this year, I think The Book of Ebenezer Le Page would fall into the “quiet” category as described here – although it is a book that covers an entire man’s life over some 60+ years and filled with so many lovely characters. Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love, which I re-read this year, might fall into the “loud” category, even though I loved it even more this time around.
Thank you for this lovely piece.
Yes, Mr. Champion please do shut up. What a gormless and egregious windbag you are.
Good article, I’ll have to check out some of these books.
Ironically it ended up provoking the loudest noise I think I’ve ever seen on this webpage. For a second I thought I was on thermps or htmlwhatever with the kids.
Love books like these; thank you to Emily for giving me more to read! Have always loved the quietness of So Long, See You Tomorrow by James Maxwell. Its refusal to draw attention to itself makes it all the more compelling.