Review of The Yellow Nineties, by Catherine Fisher, pub. Three Impostors 2024

Apr 01, 2024 08:26





What happens to us when we enter a story?
 Where do we go?
 How is time stopped?

A long short story about reading a novella… can that work? Well, yes, it can, because stories are all about the way you tell ‘em, and this one, mirroring the techniques of its model, offers a series of nested narrations and interlinked mysteries that echo the “Chinese boxes” to which the original author compared his tale.

A young man-about-town in 1894 - an unidentified “you”, for the tale is told in the second person and the reader encouraged to identify with him - is leafing through the newspaper in a café (“The Empire seems in good shape - Matabeleland has just been occupied”). His eye falls on a review of a book just published:

“The book is an incoherent nightmare of sex and the supposed horrible mysteries behind it, such as might conceivably possess a man given to a morbid brooding over these matters, but which would soon lead to insanity if unrestrained.”

Naturally attracted, our protagonist rushes off to buy the book: Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan. He is not disappointed; reading in front of the fire he is soon hypnotised first by Machen’s place-description, creating the countryside of the Welsh Border, then by the strange tale of the girl who sees Pan. Pausing to stoke the fire, he begins to muse:

“Of course, Pan is everywhere and, as yet unbeknownst to you, will be extremely fashionable for the next twenty years or so. He is stalking the cities and woods and libraries of Britain, half-man, half-goat, a hybrid being, lord of animals, bringer of madness. He has perhaps come back out of curiosity, because surely there is nowhere further from his sylvan glades than the dark streets of Pimlico and Soho?

And yet his devotees move among the throngs of London.

Fauns, naiads, dryads, centaurs. The architecture of the city is rich with carvings, gargoyles, herms. All these huge new self-important buildings, these offices, museums, department stores are infiltrated by their mocking or spying faces. How often have you glanced up and seen against the sky some secret sphinx or solemn caryatid?”

The young man reads to the end of the book, “tea going cold, the butter congealing, the fire forgotten”. He knows that if he discusses it with his friends later, he will dismiss it as “overheated. Sensational. […] hardly literature”. Fisher is an admirer of Machen and in the paragraph that follows, her own authorial stance comes over very clearly:

“Such books as this are not in the world of literary awards and prizes, of fine criticism, of high-souled and earnest discussion […] Such books and those who write them are not lofty or enlightening, they do not raise the soul.

In fact they take you down. Down into the deepest layers of the psyche, into dread, into fear, into the things that are so terrible they can only be hinted at.

Into Pan’s world of mischief and joy and panic.

Is that not also part of the human experience?”

Our young man later runs into Machen himself in a pub, not entirely by accident, and so do we in the sense that his preface to the 1916 edition of The Great God Pan is appended to this story. Machen is very interesting on how the landscape in which he grew up inspired the novella, and indeed on his ways of working in general: “I had acquired that ill habit of writing, that queer itch which so works that the patient if he be neither writing nor thinking of something to be written is bored and dull and unhappy. So I wrote”.

The publisher Three Impostors Press is a Newport firm specialising in “producing high quality, scholarly versions of interesting, rare and out-of-print books, along with other related new writing”, and as their name implies, their first projects were all connected with Arthur Machen. The series London Adventures, of which this is one, are individual short stories having some connection with London and produced in limited numbered editions of 250 for £10 each, which doesn’t seem a lot in the circumstances.  There are three so far. If you’d like to lay hands on The Yellow Nineties , Iain Sinclair's House of Flies or Xiaolu Gu’s Alice of London Fields, I recommend no delay. I can testify that The Yellow Nineties fulfilled its intended purpose in that, having previously had no special desire to read Machen, I went off to Gutenberg’s handy online resource and read The Great God Pan.

short stories, catherine fisher, book reviews

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