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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.
no subject
I have not, and I don't think so! Thank you for the links—I will investigate.
ETA, having read the first of your linked posts: Although I've never seen any of the films discussed (the closest I got was 'oh, Ronald Howard's dad, my fave Sherlock Holmes!'), that was a fascinating read. And, turning over the idea of 'once a thing has happened in a place, it is always on some level happening there, echoing forever in the land', it's appropriate that I've just been re-reading E. W. Hornung's Witching Hill, which funnily enough deals with similar things again. Witching Hill is less... deep? than The Owl Service—it's not an unserious book, but its genre is basically fun adventure fiction rather than disturbing fantasy-horror—but those ideas are definitely there, in a different form that's interesting in its own way in how it mixes ideas of 'modern times' and 'the past'. Hmmm.
no subject
Thank you! Leslie Howard is one of my earliest important actors. I am afraid I have never seen Ronald Howard's Sherlock Holmes; I know him mostly for supporting parts in The Queen of Spades (1949) and The Browning Version (1951) and for writing/editing a couple of books about his father which I am still trying to find. What makes him your favorite in the part?
And, turning over the idea of 'once a thing has happened in a place, it is always on some level happening there, echoing forever in the land', it's appropriate that I've just been re-reading E. W. Hornung's Witching Hill, which funnily enough deals with similar things again. Witching Hill is less... deep? than The Owl Service—it's not an unserious book, but its genre is basically fun adventure fiction rather than disturbing fantasy-horror—but those ideas are definitely there, in a different form that's interesting in its own way in how it mixes ideas of 'modern times' and 'the past'.
I'll have to read it: I am obviously interested in this complex of ideas about time and I don't feel like I've seen this novel come up a lot in them. Thanks for the pointer!
no subject
His Holmes is full of joyful liveliness and a sort of chaotic energy, which is a) something I think later interpretations often forget about the original character and b) utterly delightful to watch.
I'll have to read it: I am obviously interested in this complex of ideas about time and I don't feel like I've seen this novel come up a lot in them.
It is an obscure one (Hornung is seldom remembered for anything other than Raffles), but I like it a lot. I hope you enjoy it :)
no subject
I agree about (a) and it sounds like it should (b)! The series seems to be fuzzily and variously available on YouTube, too. If nothing else, it should help me disambiguate its star's face. Ronald Howard did not look exactly like his father, but the resemblance was close enough to be surprising every time I've seen him. I maintain that his father was weirder-looking, which did not keep him from being beautiful.
It is an obscure one (Hornung is seldom remembered for anything other than Raffles), but I like it a lot. I hope you enjoy it
Thank you!