
Women in Love
David Ellis celebrates the centenary of the publication of 'Women in Love', arguably D.H. Lawrence's
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Nov
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Nov
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Arthur Conan Doyle (1859
– 1930) was a master storyteller who always had a penchant for including mysterious,
frightening and sometimes cruel elements in his fiction. Even in his Sherlock
Holmes stories there were some very dark moments, but it was with his fantasy
fiction – his tales of unease as this collection refers to them – that he let his
bleak and chilling propensities have their full rein. These twilight excursions
allowed the author’s vivid mind-set to provide stories which were strange,
grotesque and often very frightening. His narratives are almost cinematic in
their depiction of unsettling scenes and images which stimulate the reader’s
imagination.
The first story in the
collection, ‘The Ring of Thoth’ (1890) is particularly fascinating. It initiates
the myth of the mummy that lives on after death. In the story, the ancient
Egyptian, Sosra, by magical means, has achieved everlasting life. For him it is
a curse which has prevented his dying thus allowing him to be reunited with his
great love, Atma. These elements became
the essential ingredients in the plot of the 1932 movie The Mummy, which featured a desiccated Boris Karloff in the title
role. This Universal production was a great success and spawned numerous mummy
pictures by the same studio through the thirties and forties. Hammer Films
continued to produce similar sagas in the fifties and sixties. Doyle was never
credited with being the inspiration for this horror cycle, but one only has to
read this tale to note the startling similarities.
There are a number of
excellent ghost stories in this volume and to my mind perhaps the best is ‘Lot
249’ (1894). This has all the style of substance of a tale by M. R. James and
yet it was written before James had published any of his ghost stories. Doyle takes his time to create a growing
sense of horror and unreality and, as with James, it is not what he describes
that brings a sense of unease but what he does not describe, allowing the reader’s engaged imagination to enhance
the misty images that the writer presents:
‘Smith knew that his neighbour had no
dog. He knew, also, that the step, which he had heard upon the stairs, was not
the step of an animal. But if it were not, then what could it be?’
On reading this story
Rudyard Kipling said that it had given him a nightmare for the first time in
years.
One of the most unusual
of the stories and one that has become a classic spooky yarn is ‘The Captain of
the Polestar’ (1883). There is a thin
thread of autobiography in this tale for in writing it the author was recalling
details from his own experiences on a whale-hunting journey to the Arctic in
1880. The experience of seven months at sea in the cold waters of this strange inhospitable
part of the world remained a vivid memory all his life. The story is related in
a neutral detached fashion that cleverly enhances the creeping horror we
experience as events unfold slowly. The beauty of this tale lies in what Doyle
referred to as the ‘other-world feeing’ of the setting and the gradual
atmospheric build up leading to the inevitable climax – a climax that renders
the tale eerily incomplete. The denouement, which has echoes of the climax of
Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein
(1818), is as chilling as its Arctic backdrop.
Some of these stories
could be regarded as resting on the borders of horror and science fiction. The
author blends both genres to explore new worlds – worlds which lie outside
normal human exploration. One such tale is ‘The Horror of the Heights’ (1913), which
is tantalisingly presented as an incomplete fragment from a manuscript penned
by Joyce-Armstrong. We are taken to the unseen and dangerous world that lies
out of sight high in the air. ‘The ‘blood soaked note-book’ tells of strange
sky-bound monsters lurking in the clouds at forty-one thousand feet – a height
unattainable by any aircraft at the time the story was written.
Joyce-Armstrong, whom Doyle calls ‘an aeronaut’, takes his aeroplane to ‘the
edge of the earth’s envelope’ to do battle in the aerial ‘jungle’.
There is a monster, too,
in ‘The Terror of the Blue John Gap’ (1910) but this time it is a terrestrial
beast. This story considers the possibility of an undiscovered creature that
lurks beneath the earth. A strange footprint is found in a Roman tunnel where a
monstrous being reputedly dwells. Here Doyle is playing with our fear of and
fascination for large legendary beasts. The twentieth century is full of
accounts of such creatures such as Big Foot, the Abominable Snowman and the
Loch Ness Monster.
I mentioned earlier that
Doyle could introduce strong elements of cruelty into his stories and certainly
this is the case in ‘The Brazilian Cat’ (1908) and more particularly ‘The Case
of Lady Sannox’ (1893). It could be said of the latter tale that it is as
though the author was pouring all his repressed hatred, frustration and anger at
what he regarded as the weakness of human behaviour, wreaking havoc on the lives
of his fictional characters as a kind of therapy. The effect is most
unsettling.
Despite the fact that all these stories were written over a hundred years ago, they have lost none of their power to create that sense of unease in the reader in a very powerful way. There is always a feeling of uncertainty for both the reader and the central characters. By its very nature his vague apprehension makes us edgy, nervous and filled with a sense of dread. In some of the narratives, Doyle adds a further frisson by not ending our uncertainty. In fact, he prolongs it and extends it beyond the confines of the fiction we have just read. You have been warned.
Credit: National Geographic Image Collection / Alamy Stock Photo