The Lark Ascending: People, Music and Landscape in Twentieth-Century Britain

Richard King
Faber & Faber

Over the course of the twentieth century, The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams is the piece of music that has come to define the mythical concept of the English countryside, with its babbling brooks and skylarks. Yet, the landscape is not really an unaffected utopia, but a living, working and occasionally rancorous environment that has forged a nation's musical personality. On a journey that takes us from post-war poets and artists to the free party scene embraced by the acid house and travelling communities, Richard King explores how Britain's history and identity have been shaped by the mysterious relationship between music and nature.

Taking as its starting point Ralph Vaughan Williams' 1920 composition from which the book takes its name King has undertaken an exploration of the changing face of the British countryside through the 20th century and of the individuals and musicians that have been inspired by it.

Taking a sedate journey across the century we are introduced to a wide variety of both the savoury and unsavoury characters who have found solace and identity in nature; from those escaping the horrors of the battlefields of WWI to the blood and country ugly politics of the inter war years which mixed communing with nature with a nationalist ideology and folk music / dance that still pollutes much of the outside edges of folk music and on to 'back to basics' pioneers like John Seymour who's West Wales small holding along with the books and programmes he made through the 60s and 70s championed the cause into a movement so parodied in shows like 'The Good Life'.  Beyond this King provides a keen, if brief, overview into pivotal events such as the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, the Peace Convoy, the free festivals and the early rave scene and of the various legislations introduced to curtail all these activities.

Musically we travel from Vaughan Williams via Cecil Sharp and the various folk archivists through the acid folk generation chronicled in Rob Young's fabulous 'Electric Eden' (UK / US). Further on we skirt around Hawkwind and The Penguin Cafe Orchestra and composer Gavin Bryars before settling on the hauntologically lysergic sounds of Boards of Canada whose music often feels like an oneiric time capsule of days gone bye.

It's a fascinating read.  Personally I'd have liked to hear much more of the voices of the actual musicians and their views on how the landscape had influenced their work but in their absence King provides a coolly authorial analysis.  Unusually for what is a fairly short book King takes a rambling approach and makes a number of leaps of logic - those who raised an eyebrow at the mention of Penguin Cafe back there in a book about the links between music and landscape I can assure you I did the same - and the finished article is too idiosyncratic to provide the definitive word on the topic but this is a subject I hold dear and one that fuels my own music so I eagerly devoured the book and generally wasn't disappointed with what proved to be a timely and interesting read.

Buy it here - UK  / US

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The Unsettled Dust

Robert Aickman
Faber & Faber

Robert Aickman, the supreme master of the supernatural, brings together eight stories where strange things happen that the reader is unable to predict. His characters are often lonely and middle-aged but all have the same thing in common - they are all brought to the brink of an abyss that shows how terrifyingly fragile our peace of mind actually is.
'The Next Glade', 'Bind Your Hair' and 'The Stains' appeared together in The Wine-Dark Sea in 1988 while 'The Unsettled Dust', 'The House of the Russians', 'No Stronger Than a Flower', 'The Cicerones' and 'Ravissante' first appeared in Sub Rosa in 1968. The stories were published together as The Unsettled Dust in 1990. Aickman received the British Fantasy Award in 1981 for 'The Stains', which had first appeared in the anthology New Terrors (1980), before appearing in the last original posthumous collection of Aickman's short stories, Night Voices (1985).

'The Unsettled Dust' was a posthumous collection released some 9 years after the authors death.  The stories included all bear Aickman's characteristic strangeness which can result  in them being equal parts frustrating and enthralling.
The opening - titular - tale is an almost straightforward (by Aickman's standards) and old fashioned  haunted house tale as a representative of a trust is subjected to the dubious hospitality of two sisters in their dusty old house in a quietly sad tale of family, pride and unreconciled loss, themes that are echoed in 'The Houses of the Russians', an intriguing little tale of an island of abandoned homes and the memories they hold of  their former inhabitants.

'No Stronger Than A Flower' was the first Aickman tale I ever read and this story of a woman's metamorphosis loses none of it's brutal power in a reread several years on and with a wider knowledge of what to expect - that is if one can even remotely 'expect' anything in an Aickman story.

'The Cicerones' is another story I was familiar with, this time through the adaptation made by Mark Gatiss and Jeremy Dyson - watch it here.   I'm not particularly enamoured of it but I was struck by how closely the filmed version stuck to the text.

'The Next Glade' is another story that I found somewhat uninspiring.  Unusually for Aickman the strangeness here felt contrived and a little but forced.  I can't put my finger on anything in particular about it but for me it failed to gel and the story was both dull and flat.

Things get very much back on track with 'Ravissante' as we're shown into a world that is both mannered and deeply strange filled with simmering sexual repression and denied release and the folk horror duo of 'Bind Your Hair', another beautifully ambiguous enigma of rural weirdness and the book's award winning closing tale, 'The Stains', a story of love lost, love found, family, responsibility, innocence and lichen which sees about as Aickmanesque an ending to to this write-up as I'm going to come up with.

Buy it here -  The Unsettled Dust

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The Wine-Dark Sea

Robert Aickman
Faber and Faber

Peter Straub called Robert Aickman 'this century's most profound writer of what we call horror stories'. Aickman's 'strange stories' (his preferred term for them) are a subtle exploration of psychological displacement and paranoia. His characters are ordinary people that are gradually drawn into the darker recesses of their own minds.
First published in the USA in 1988 and in the UK in 1990 The Wine-Dark Sea contains eight stories that will leave the reader unsettled as the protagonists' fears and desires, at once illogical and terrifying, culminate in a disturbing yet enigmatic ending.

Over the last few years I've read a fair few of Aickman's strange tales both in the wild as part of various anthologies and caged inside the first two volumes of this quartet of reissues, 'Dark Entries' and 'Cold Hand in Mine'.  They've been an enjoyable if often slightly frustrating read.  he was a craftsman par excellence, his skill in building a story into an oppressive and bizarre atmosphere is astounding  but I've often been left unsatisfied by the conclusions he fashions for them.  I don't mean this in the same way as say Stephen King who simply cannot write a satisfying ending but more as an observation that the almost perfunctory endings he gives the stories cast both us and his characters out into the cold having been utterly changed by the experience we've just shared.

This third collection contains what felt - I've not checked so I may be factually wrong but it certainly felt - like a set of longer and more deliberate stories.  They were, not to put too fine a point on it, excellent.

From the opening paean to a simpler, spiritual experience in the title piece, via the old fashioned, and a little obvious, horror of 'The Trains' , the growing madness of the slavery of the telephone in 'Your Tiny Hand is Frozen' and the silliness of 'Growing Boys'.  Through the isolation of 'The Fetch' and the neglect suffered in 'The Inner Room' and the acceptance and rejection of 'Never Visit Venice' to the insomniacs rambles 'Into the Wood' this proved to be a most satisfying and immersive read and easily the most enjoyable so far of the quartet.

Buy it here - The Wine-Dark Sea

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The Boy Who Kicked Pigs

Tom Baker
Faber & Faber

This is the story of Robert Caligari - a thoroughly evil 13-year-old who gets his kicks from kicking pigs. After a humiliating episode with a bacon butty, Robert realises just how much he loathes the human race - and his revenge is truly terrible. 

This one has sat on my book shelf for a good long while.  It's sat there for the same reason I didn't buy it for years after it was released.  I didn't want to read it and find out it was a bit shit.  I'm the Tom Baker era type of book geek.  I was 4 when he woke up on the floor of UNIT HQ and 11 when he swan dived off the TV mast.  His is the face I picture when I think of madcap eccentrics and his is the voice I hear when I think of the same.  I really didn't want it to suck. It didn't. Phew!

This fun little novella is entirely Baker.  So entirely him that you hear his voice as you read his words.  His irreverence, his absurdity, his contempt for authority and his anarchic spirit all shine through as he tells the story of the malicious little boy, Robert Caligari, of his misdeeds and his misstep that leads to his grizzly end.

Cold Hand In Mine

Robert Aickman
Faber & Faber

Cold Hand in Mine was first published in the UK in 1975 and in the US in 1977. The story 'Pages from a Young Girl's Journal' won the Aickman World Fantasy Award in 1975. It was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1973 before appearing in this collection.
Cold Hand in Mine stands as one of Aickman's best collections and contains eight stories that show off his powers as a 'strange story' writer to the full, being more ambiguous than standard ghost stories. Throughout the stories the reader is introduced to a variety of characters, from a man who spends the night in a Hospice to a German aristocrat and a woman who sees an image of her own soul. There is also a nod to the conventional vampire story ('Pages from a Young Girl's Journal') but all the stories remain unconventional and inconclusive, which perhaps makes them all the more startling and intriguing.

I very much enjoyed the first volume of these Faber reprints of Aickman's collections of short stories.  The stories are decidedly odd and often end with only the vaguest of resolutions which is kind of fun.  This second collection, featuring stories originally published in 1975, is very much more of the same but with the strangeness knob turned way up.

The book opens with 'The Swords' a dark and disturbing story of a young salesman's sexual awakening in the company of an odd young woman from a carnival sideshow.  It's eroticised body horror at it's most disquieting mixing potential metaphor - the men at the sideshow piercing the woman's body with their swords - with the virgin narrators own confused, tumbling, feelings of arousal, confusion and (self)loathing at the situation he finds himself in.

'The Real Road to the Church', 'Niemandswasser', 'Pages From a Young Girl's Journal' and 'The Hospice'  all tell of people out of place.  In the first a young lady relocates herself to a small cottage and has to negotiate the ways of the locals and perhaps losing - or at least putting aside - an aspect of herself.  In the second a self absorbed prince removes himself from the world imposing himself in a part of his world where he previously hadn't belonged and through his arrogance finds himself both literally and metaphorically in the no man's water of the title.  The third is perhaps the story here I found the least satisfying as it tells of a young girl's visit to Europe in the company of her parents and the slow descent into the thrall of a vampire.  Unfortunately she's such a whiney little Anne Rice type that by the end I just didn't care.  The fourth was a much more interesting prospect as another fairly repressed man finds himself stranded for the night at a very unusual hospice where the guests are fed huge quantities of food whilst chained to the table and change their appearance during the night.  It's very much proto-David Lynch and utterly wonderful.

More fun is had with the relatively straight forward weird fiction delights of 'The Same Dog' whose appearance precipitates the death of a young girl  and whose reappearance comes allied with a profound shock.

'Meeting Mr. Millar' is an unusual - and perhaps slightly overlong - ghost story where another of Aickman's characteristically conservative leads is disturbed from his comfortable routine by the comings and goings of the new neighbours downstairs.

The book ends with 'The Clock Watcher', the story of a young wife's obsession with the elaborate clocks of her homeland and of her husband's increasing unease with her and them.  It's a story brimming with potential but unfortunately, for me at least, it never truly found its stride and just didn't achieve any notable level of intrigue or enigma.

I have to admit here that I struggled to find my rhythm with this book but I suspect that was mostly due to the distraction of work pressures.  There are some fun stories here and a few very enjoyable moments but it just didn't hit as immediately as the first volume.  It is however still a very pleasurable trip into a unique imagination. 

Buy it here - Cold Hand in Mine

Dark Entries

Robert Aickman
Faber & Faber

Aickman's 'strange stories' (his preferred term) are constructed immaculately, the neuroses of his characters painted in subtle shades. He builds dread by the steady accrual of realistic detail, until the reader realises that the protagonist is heading towards their doom as if in a dream.
Dark Entries was first published in 1964 and contains six curious and macabre stories of love, death and the supernatural, including the classic story 'Ringing the Changes'.

So, after reading a few short stories and him as the editor of a Fontana anthology I finally get to experience Aickman on his own terms.  'Dark Entries' is one of four newly reprinted collections by Faber & Faber and is the earliest of the works and so the perfect place to start.

The first Aickman story I read is featured here but first we have a biographical foreword before the book properly begins with 'The School Friend'.  The story tells of the unlikely friendship between two women who find themselves thrown back together after many years only for one of them to find that people are stranger by far than the face they present to the world.

The second story is, in the words of the jacket blurb, 'the classic story 'Ringing in the Changes' which is the only story presented here that I'm already familiar with.  It's a brutal and harrowing story that pits a newly married couple against the risen dead in a small coastal town.

Truthfully I have no idea what to make of 'Choice of Weapons'.  For much of it it seems like a straight forward love story until the ending spins everything on it's head and left me a tad confused.

This oddity is followed by probably the most straightforward story in the book in the shape of a haunted railway station in 'The Waiting Room' before the book once more earns its 'strange stories' label with 'The View'.  Here whilst taking refuge on an island a man finds solace in the arms and house of a beautiful woman but in a place where change is constant he finds it hard to do so.

With the exception of a short remembrance of Aickman by Ramsey Campbell the book ends with the folk horror of 'Bind Your Hair' that places a newly engaged career woman amidst her fiances country family and the very odd and unpleasant goings-on up on the hill; a story I felt could have benefited greatly from being given far more space in the telling.

I really didn't know what to expect of these books.  Having read about him and having read two of his stories I was pretty certain I was going to get an old fashioned kind of strangeness and I wasn't disappointed on that score as it was strange to the nth degree.  'Dark Entries' proved to be a most diverting read and I'm very much looking forward to the others.

Buy it here -  Dark Entries