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There's a door beneath the fire, a sword to break
I can't remember how our copy of The Owl Service (1967) incurred the water damage which is by now at least two decades old and causes its covers to look like flats of some sandy lichenous rock. It is sufficiently old and dry that it doesn't cause me any allergic problems, but the appearance is almost absurdly apropos, as if the book itself is in the process of falling back into pieces of the natural world. The pattern of the plates on the outer endpapers is lightly spotted as if with soot.
Having been away from the novel for a couple of years, this time around I found myself really struck by the technological language that I had taken for granted since childhood like the sound of the river rising constantly through time:
'I don't think it can be finished,' said Gwyn. 'I think this valley really is a kind of reservoir. The house, look, smack in the middle, with the mountains all round, shutting it in, guarding the house. I think the power is always there and always will be. It builds up and builds up until it has to be let loose—like filling and emptying a dam. And it works through people. I said to Roger that I thought the plates were batteries and you were the wires . . . The force was in the plates, but it's in us now . . . Red, black and green, is it? I wonder who's the earth.'
A hydroelectric discharge of myth is in the same class of metaphor as a stone tape of ghosts: that analog interface of the supernatural which I think of as coming to prominence slightly later than this novel whose narrative is nonetheless littered with classically hauntological artifacts of the failure to fix the inexorably reenacting story of Blodeuwedd into pigment on paneling and the glaze of a plate which contain her only in the sense of holding the charge, which rather than faithfully recording an action of the past are unnervingly subject to manipulation by it. The pattern disappears off the plates, the painting from the wall. Holiday snaps turn spirit photography when a view through the hole made in the stone by the spear with which Lleu Llaw Gyffes killed Gronw Pebr shows different iterations of its reenactment whether with the flint-leaf of an ancient spearhead or a motorcycle missing its brake blocks. It had not previously occurred to me to read the book as the obvious folk horror, but even the motif is there of the community so much more in the know than its outsiders about the ritual falling into place around them:
'One minute, if you please,' said Mrs Richards. She cut a lump of butter from a block on the windowsill. 'Is it to be the three of them again, Mrs Lewis-Jones?'
'Yes. There's the girl, too. Mister Huw says she's made it owls."
'We must bear it,' said Mrs Richards. 'There's no escaping, is there? Aberystwyth isn't far enough.'
'You've said a true word there, Mrs Richards. I'll have a packet of soap flakes.'
Even withholding the story can't stop it from playing itself out. From the first time I read The Owl Service, the character who most fascinated and disturbed me was Huw Hannerhob, not only because of his ambiguity of motives and meaning, but because he's the one who never got out of the myth. In his generation, as much as he tried to dodge it, he was Lleu who destroyed the man who stole his girl and now he's the fractured Gwydion who loses centuries in his family history and tells stories from the Mabinogion as if he performed them himself. "What do I know? . . . I know more than I know . . . I don't know what I know . . ." He tries so hard to talk the next Lleu into the actions that would turn the spear of the story aside and Blodeuwedd come as owls into flowers and he fails there too, but could he have done anything else? It's not just that the power has passed out of his triad and into the next generation, that just as in his time there's too much human pain and weakness channeled into the readymade pattern: it was Gwydion originally who turned the woman he had formed out of flowers of oak and broom and meadowsweet into the owl and there's nothing in the Fourth Branch about him ever turning her back. I wonder as much about Huw after the sudden numinous stop of the book's ending as about the three adolescents who caught the story after him. (And in fairness, while she's not as fitted into the next shock of current through the circuit as her one-time man, I don't think that being owls ever left Nancy.)
I should see the Granada adaptation. It falls in the same category as the rest of the use of my brain. The real problem is that my copy of Red Shift (1973) is still in a box.
Having been away from the novel for a couple of years, this time around I found myself really struck by the technological language that I had taken for granted since childhood like the sound of the river rising constantly through time:
'I don't think it can be finished,' said Gwyn. 'I think this valley really is a kind of reservoir. The house, look, smack in the middle, with the mountains all round, shutting it in, guarding the house. I think the power is always there and always will be. It builds up and builds up until it has to be let loose—like filling and emptying a dam. And it works through people. I said to Roger that I thought the plates were batteries and you were the wires . . . The force was in the plates, but it's in us now . . . Red, black and green, is it? I wonder who's the earth.'
A hydroelectric discharge of myth is in the same class of metaphor as a stone tape of ghosts: that analog interface of the supernatural which I think of as coming to prominence slightly later than this novel whose narrative is nonetheless littered with classically hauntological artifacts of the failure to fix the inexorably reenacting story of Blodeuwedd into pigment on paneling and the glaze of a plate which contain her only in the sense of holding the charge, which rather than faithfully recording an action of the past are unnervingly subject to manipulation by it. The pattern disappears off the plates, the painting from the wall. Holiday snaps turn spirit photography when a view through the hole made in the stone by the spear with which Lleu Llaw Gyffes killed Gronw Pebr shows different iterations of its reenactment whether with the flint-leaf of an ancient spearhead or a motorcycle missing its brake blocks. It had not previously occurred to me to read the book as the obvious folk horror, but even the motif is there of the community so much more in the know than its outsiders about the ritual falling into place around them:
'One minute, if you please,' said Mrs Richards. She cut a lump of butter from a block on the windowsill. 'Is it to be the three of them again, Mrs Lewis-Jones?'
'Yes. There's the girl, too. Mister Huw says she's made it owls."
'We must bear it,' said Mrs Richards. 'There's no escaping, is there? Aberystwyth isn't far enough.'
'You've said a true word there, Mrs Richards. I'll have a packet of soap flakes.'
Even withholding the story can't stop it from playing itself out. From the first time I read The Owl Service, the character who most fascinated and disturbed me was Huw Hannerhob, not only because of his ambiguity of motives and meaning, but because he's the one who never got out of the myth. In his generation, as much as he tried to dodge it, he was Lleu who destroyed the man who stole his girl and now he's the fractured Gwydion who loses centuries in his family history and tells stories from the Mabinogion as if he performed them himself. "What do I know? . . . I know more than I know . . . I don't know what I know . . ." He tries so hard to talk the next Lleu into the actions that would turn the spear of the story aside and Blodeuwedd come as owls into flowers and he fails there too, but could he have done anything else? It's not just that the power has passed out of his triad and into the next generation, that just as in his time there's too much human pain and weakness channeled into the readymade pattern: it was Gwydion originally who turned the woman he had formed out of flowers of oak and broom and meadowsweet into the owl and there's nothing in the Fourth Branch about him ever turning her back. I wonder as much about Huw after the sudden numinous stop of the book's ending as about the three adolescents who caught the story after him. (And in fairness, while she's not as fitted into the next shock of current through the circuit as her one-time man, I don't think that being owls ever left Nancy.)
I should see the Granada adaptation. It falls in the same category as the rest of the use of my brain. The real problem is that my copy of Red Shift (1973) is still in a box.
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I do recommend it very highly.
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