In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

This is one of two books I read in preparation for this Dracula Society trip to Bath in mid-May, the relevance being that the author lived there in later life and there is a museum about him there in a tower which he commissioned. Though the trip hasn't been officially cancelled yet, it's pretty obvious that it will be, which is a pity. Nonetheless, reading good Gothic literature is never a waste, and maybe we'll be able to reschedule the trip for 2021?

It's an Orientalising novel whose title character is loosely based on a real ninth-century caliph named al-Wathiq who had a palace at Samarra (spelt Samarah in the novel), but I would say the relationship between character and namesake is similar to that for Dracula. That is, a name and general setting have been borrowed, but otherwise the character and the story are entirely fantastical. Obviously an 18th-century westerner writing Orientalising literature is indulging in a form of Othering, but it's only fair to acknowledge that there is a spectrum of these things, and that while this certainly isn't the ideal response to or form of interaction with another culture, it is much benigner than some. Unfortunately I haven't read The Arabian Nights, which was the leading inspiration for this sort of literature in Beckford's day, or indeed anything much else in this vein, so I wasn't able to situate it within its wider literary context. But I enjoyed it, and certainly learnt a lot of new Arabic-based words for supernatural beings as I went along.

( Vathek, the lazy glutton )

( The main plot )

( Carathis, Vathek's mother )

( Style and humour )

( Allusions and echoes which I could identify )

Given these fantastical details and the lavish descriptions of splendid palaces and supernatural creatures throughout, I was rather surprised on checking the Wikipedia page that there is no mention there (or anywhere else I can find) of any screen adaptation of it. I guess this kind of Orientalising literature simply went out of fashion before the technical capacity to do that became available, which I would say is when it became possible to do feature-length animations in colour. However, Google tells me that there is a French-language graphic novel, which is something at least.

The General Election put a stop to my book and film review posts (and indeed to the watching of films in particular), so here's a stab at catching up.

This book is a sequel to The Vampyre: the secret history of Lord Byron, which I read a couple of years ago (LJ / DW) and really liked, despite not otherwise having much respect for the author. Where the first book was both about Lord Byron as a vampire and a pastiche of Romantic vampire literature, this one similarly features Bram Stoker as a character, is set in the 1880s, and plays around with a mish-mash of relevant literature and lore, including military memoirs of British India, the goddess Kali, Sherlock Holmes, Oscar Wilde, opium dens and (inevitably) Jack the Ripper. It's not particularly closely connected to the events of the first novel, but its vampiric Lord Byron does feature in the sequel, mainly concerned with tracing his descendants from his mortal life and trying to get unscrupulous doctors to investigate whether any cure can be found for his 'blood disease'. He goes under the pseudonym of Lord Ruthven, and his real identity is supposed to be a great mystery which one of the main characters decodes in a massive revelation - a device which obviously did not work for me, or (you'd think) anyone who had read and appreciated the first novel.

Like Stoker's Dracula, this novel is told via a collection of documents and letters, including Stoker's own journal, and we're obviously meant to understand that its events inspired him to write Dracula. He is the busy manager of the Lyceum Theatre during the period when the novel takes place, but befriends a doctor named John Eliot, who draws him into a web of vampiric goings-on. With Eliot, Stoker visits an asylum run by a Dr Renfield which houses an inmate who rips the heads off doves and smears herself in their blood. They also travel to Whitby to unravel mysteries involving Byron's human descendants, with Stoker's journal at that point echoing some of Mina's language from the novel - it is "a most lovely spot, built around a deep harbour, and rising so steeply on the eastern side that the houses of the old town seemed piled up one over the other, like the pictures we see of Nuremburg." Indeed, towards the end of the novel, we jump forwards in time to a point when he has written Dracula, and his correspondence about it with an Indian Professor called Huree Jyoti Navalkar (who seems to be intended as the in-story inspiration for Van Helsing) helps the other characters to work out what really happened during the main narrative, a decade earlier.

The vampire antagonist-in-chief, taking the place occupied by the Pasha in The Vampyre is essentially all of literature and history's female demon-goddesses rolled into one - Kali, Circe, Lilith - and calls herself Lilah for most of the story. There's an interesting gloss on the Kali-aspect of her, whom we first encounter in a fictional border region of India called Kalikshutra. One of the Indian characters carefully explains that the Kali of Kalikshutra is not the normal Hindu Kali, whom he describes as "a beneficent deity, the friend of man, the Mother of the Universe", but rather a quite different being, the "Queen of the Demons". That reminded me strongly of some very similar comments which I learnt from Kieran Foster's talk at the IVFAF vampire festival last year were made by Anthony Hinds in relation to Hammer's planned vampire film, Kali: Devil Bride of Dracula. Having spent time in India himself during the war, Hinds had realised that it would be quite offensive to portray the real-world Kali as an out-and-out demon, and dealt with this in the draft script by revealing that her apparent cult isn't actually anything to do with the real Kali at all, but rather a fraud perpetrated by blood-cultists. It looks like Tom Holland arrived independently at a similar realisation and solution.

Lilah lives in a massive warehouse in the east end of London, which can only be entered via an opium den in the upstairs room of antique dealership run by a certain John Polidori, her abject servant. Inside, the warehouse itself has an impossible, hallucinatory geography of shifting galleries and stair-cases, which weaves together the artistic and architectural influences of all the cultures in which she has ever been worshipped. Just as I'd found Holland's descriptions of the Pasha's castle with its accreted historical layers one of the strongest elements of The Vampyre, I found this warehouse one of the most striking aspects of its sequel too - though he also did a pretty good job on the narrow, foggy streets of the East End. Lilah is more powerful than the Pasha, though, generating the whole architecture of the warehouse as an illusion in the minds of those who enter it, and she likewise has the power (like Circe) to transform people too into whatever she wishes - usually something which she knows they themselves will utterly despise.

John Eliot, the maverick doctor whom Stoker befriends, starts the novel in Kalikshutra, shunning the ex-pat community and investigating the local blood-born disease, but then comes to London to treat the poor and downtrodden of the East End instead. He is partly Sherlock Holmes, leading investigations into Lilah using logic and deduction, and having been taught at Edinburgh by Joseph Bell, while Stoker is his Watson, making naive observations and suggestions which turn out to be of great importance. The Sherlock Holmes stories evidently also exist as fictional works within the novel, though, as one character recommends them to John, and when he has read 'A Study in Scarlet' he remembers Conan Doyle from his university days and realises he must have taken on board Joseph Bell's methods of deductive reasoning. During the middle part of the novel, John treats and helps women with the same names as Jack the Ripper's historical victims, but this is intended to have a dark pay-off. Eventually he is seduced by Lilah and transformed by her into Jack the Ripper - that is, what she judges the antithesis of everything he wanted to be - and is thus able to go out and murder the very same women he had been treating, because they already know and trust him. I suppose it's not the worst way to deal with Jack the Ripper in fiction, since in between his episodes of murderousness he does indeed suffer, as Lilah had intended, with the knowledge of what he's done / going to do. But I still just don't ever want to read about Jack the Ripper, ever at all, and found it very unpleasant indeed to have to be inside his head (as he was narrating it all in the first person in a letter) during those episodes.

Oscar Wilde features as a patron of the Lyceum Theatre, and indeed the novel's title is (sort of) taken from De Profundis, the long letter which he wrote to Bosie from prison, and which was published posthumously. But the relevant line there, in which he's talking about his association with rent-boys etc., reads: "It was like feasting with panthers. The danger was half the excitement." And indeed Holland evidently knew this, as his character of Wilde speaks more or less the same line during a dinner hosted by Stoker: "I prefer a beauty that is dangerous. I prefer to feast with panthers, my Lord." Given all of that, I really can't explain why the book itself is called Supping with Panthers, rather than Feasting with Panthers. (I should add that it does feature the occasional mention of actual panthers, living in Lilah's warehouse, but they're not a substantial element of the plot.) Meanwhile, Holland can't resist the conceit of sending a little literary influence back in Oscar's direction. At one point, Byron, with the insight of a true immortal, gives Oscar the idea for The Portrait of Dorian Gray by observing: "A face that did not age would be nothing but a mask. Beneath its show of eternal youth, the spirit would be withering, a hideous mess of corruption and evil."

In the end, it is vampire-Byron who defeats Lilah by drinking her blood, after which John Eliot / Jack the Ripper cuts out her brains and heart and the whole elaborate interior of the warehouse disappears, leaving behind only the very ordinary abandoned warehouse building it really was all along. Though we're given to understand that she probably isn't really dead forever, and will resurface some time in another guise, her hold over John / Jack does at least evaporate, so that he ends up as merely a vampire.

Overall, worth reading I guess if you like this sort of thing, but it never quite sang to me in the way the The Vampyre did - especially the earlier parts set in Albania and the Pasha's castle. Much like the latter parts of The Vampyre, it felt a bit too beholden to the weight of Holland's historical research, and probably more so in this case for attempting to weave together a wider range of late Victoriana. I'm kind of glad he didn't write any more sequels.

I haven't caught up on unwritten film reviews yet, but this evening I feel like taking on a book. I read this particular book while on holiday in Cyprus last April with the lovely rosamicula, and enjoyed it so much that I quickly started having to ration it out, as I had only brought one other book with me and was afraid of running out of reading material altogether. It is a collection of what its author referred to as 'strange stories', and the full table of contents runs like this:

'The Swords'
'The Real Road to the Church'
'Niemandswasser'
'Pages from a Young Girl's Journal'
'The Hospice'
'The Same Dog'
'Meeting Mr Millar'
'The Clock Watcher'

All are excellent. They generally feature unexplained and possibly supernatural events, as experienced by a character who either speaks in the first person or whose experiences are the primary focus of the narration. As such, the reader isn't usually given any authoritative 'explanation' of what has happened, and thus gets to feel the same pleasant thrills of mystery and unease as the main character. The difference, of course, is that unlike the character (who is trapped in the story), the reader can choose to succumb to its strangeness, reject it entirely, mull over multiple possible explanations or home in one of their preference. Most are set in what seems broadly to be the UK at the time of writing (some are specific about it, others less so), but 'The Real Road to the Church' takes us to rural France, 'Niemandswasser' to the 19th-century Austrian Empire and 'Pages from a Young Girl's Journal' to northern Italy c. 1820.

It was through this latter story that I first encountered Aickman, and it is the one which made me want to buy this book and read more of his work. I'm pleased to have done so, and may well want to explore further amongst his oeuvre in the future - but for the time being, this remains the stand-out story of the collection to me, and the one I want to focus in on here. It happens (of course!) to be a vampire story, and I read it first when I was about 12 or 13 years old in The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories (ed. Alan Ryan). As the title suggests, it presents a first-person narration, told in the form of diary entries written by a young girl while she is travelling around Italy with her parents on some sort of Grand Tour. We join them as they are arriving into Ravenna, where they stay with a contessa and her family, and the story finishes in Rimini, by which time our young narrator is in quite another world.

At face value, what happens is that the contessa holds a party in her English visitors' honour, where our narrator (who is never named) meets a mysterious man whom she considers "an Adonis! an Apollo!", who perceives great depths in her teenage soul, hints at strange and magical things and tells her they will meet again. Thereafter, he calls to her from afar or comes to her in dreams, speaking to her of love, while she begins displaying all the classic signs of being preyed upon by a vampire. By the end of the story she has become very weak and has a wound on her neck which never heals up, but she is only too eager to depart her mortal life, escape her stultifying parents and meet her destiny. Looking down from her bedroom balcony into the town-square at Rimini, filled with wolves gazing up at her, she records:

I smiled at the wolves. Then I crossed my hands on my little bosom and curtsied. They will be prominent among my new people. My blood will be theirs, and theirs mine.

So, she is about to become a vampire. The story ends at this point because, as she says, "I doubt if I shall write any more. I do not think I shall have any more to say."

That, at least, is how I read it as a 12 / 13-year-old, and believe me I was totally there for a story about a young girl saved from her tedious life by a mysterious and powerful vampire at that age. The face-value reading is very pleasant indeed, and quite a good enough story in its own right. Now that I'm an adult, though, I know about unreliable narrators, and I can see that there are at least four major possible readings of this story:

1. The face-value one: there was a man at the party, he really was a vampire, he really has been turning our narrator into his vampire bride throughout the course of the story, and after the last diary entry that process will be completed and she will go to join him and the wolves as the queen of his supernatural kingdom.
2. There was a man at the party and he talked to her for a while, but he wasn't a vampire. Everything supernatural is entirely in her head. Possibly she is using it to help her cope with any number of other traumatic experiences, including the onset of menstruation, her own sexual awakening more generally (if read this way this definitely includes same-sex attraction towards the contessa's daughter), sexual assault, physical illness and / or mental illness.
3. There wasn't even a man at the party at all. Literally everything was in her head.
4. There was a man all right, he was a vampire and he has been coming to her in her dreams or in a mist to drink her blood as she believes. But he isn't going to make her into his vampire bride. She is just going to die.

I also know a lot more about intertexts than I did when I was 12 / 13, and indeed rather a lot more about Lord Byron and his circle: especially thanks to the DracSoc trip to Lake Geneva in 2016 and some of the reading I did in preparation for it (LJ / DW). So I'm now in a much better position to appreciate the significance of the narrator's interest in Lord Byron. This crops up repeatedly in some of the earlier entries, where we learn that the narrator is very much excited to be in the town where Byron is currently living (he lived in Ravenna from 1819 to '21). We're left in no doubt as to how she feels about him, either:

How well I understand the universal ennui that possesses our neighbour, Lord Byron! I, a tiny slip of a girl, feel, at least in this particular, at one with the great poet!

So, our narrator is of a strongly romantic bent. More specifically, she is clearly familiar with Byron's The Giaour, since she refers to him as such as one point, and thus must know about literary vampires through that at least, if not also through Polidori's The Vampyre (though this isn't mentioned specifically). In other words, I see now that Aickman is playing in that same world, has by doing so provided all the material needed to support the 'it's all in her head' readings, and has certainly left the story open to them quite deliberately by stopping it when he does and not confirming the face-value, vampire queen reading.

This is a story which has grown with me, then. I already loved it when I first read it and the face-value reading was all I saw - enough for it to stay with me and niggle at me and prompt me to look it up again and find more by the same author. But it has rewarded that instinct many times over by proving to have so much more to it when I returned as an adult reader. There are many, many vampire short stories, and I have read a lot of them, but I'm pretty sure I will name this unhestitatingly as my favourite whenever I am asked in the future.

One further note: having read Tom Holland's The Vampyre: the secret history of Lord Byron (LJ / DW), it naturally occurred to me to wonder whether the mysterious man at the party actually was Lord Byron at his most Lord Ruthven-esque. In fact, though, that is one of the few possibilities Aickman explicitly rules out, by having his narrator encounter Lord Byron (and Shelley with him) out riding their horses a few days after the party. She is still quite star-struck at seeing him, but she also notes that both looked "considerably older than I had expected and Lord Byron considerably more corpulent (as well as being quite grey-headed, though I believe only at the start of his life's fourth decade)." So, not the Adonis-like, Apollo-like mysterious secret lover she had met at the party, then; and of course the real human poet falls far short of the romantic image she has constructed for him. Of course.

3. Mary Shelley (1818), Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

I read this in preparation for a trip to Geneva with the Dracula Society, organised to mark the bicentenary of the famous wet weekend in the Villa Diodati which gave rise to it (and to Polidori's 'The Vampyre'). I never wrote about the trip here in any detail, because it came half way through my Mum's final illness, and just at the point when we were really starting to realise that it was final. I spent a lot of the time while I was there worrying and checking my phone for updates, and then all the time after I got back just trying to cope while also carrying a pretty heavy load of work commitments. So the trip itself was a rather strained experience; but what I did get out of it was very much enhanced by my pre-holiday reading. I believe in the case of the novel it was my third time reading it, the first and second times being once in my mid-to-late-teens and another in my mid-twenties. Both well pre-date my habit of book-blogging here anyway, so as far as LJ / DW is concerned this is the first time. That makes it a pity that I didn't manage to do so while it was all fresh in my mind, but I did actually make a few notes about this one while reading it at the time, so I can do a slightly better job than with most of these catch-up reviews.

Obviously, it is a great novel. That isn't to say it's perfect. My mental red pen was particularly exercised by the way Justine was introduced: in the middle of a letter from Elizabeth to Victor, where she takes it upon herself to recount the entire story of how Justine came to be part of their household, even though Victor would of course already know all of this. I could see him as he read it turning over the pages in bafflement thinking "Why the hell is she telling me all this? Get onto something I don't know!" But hey, Mary was only 18 when she began writing the thing, and did it all in longhand while on the road through Switzerland and Italy. Let's cut her some slack. What she created here was innovative, genre-defining, gripping and incredibly cleverly put together.

Reading it now, I'm much more aware of its literary and historical context than I think I've been on previous encounters. Previously I think I have just accepted it as a gothic novel because that it how it is usually marketed, and also viewed it through the filters of its many film adaptations. It certainly is in the gothic arena, as you would expect given that Mary started writing the novel as an entry in a ghost story competition. It draws on established gothic tropes like descriptions of wild landscapes and huge, powerful storms; Victor's great moment of inspiration for how to build his creature happens in a charnel-house (what more gothic?); and he later uses a vampire metaphor to describe the effects of the creature on his family, saying that it is as though he himself had risen from the grave to murder them (exactly what Byron's vampire in The Giaour is condemned to do, as Mary must have known). But I think I understand the Romantic movement better now than I did when I first encountered Frankenstein, and I see now that its central themes of man's hubris, the rejection of technology and the nostalgic glorification of nature make it a Romantic novel more than anything else: again, totally unsurprisingly given who Mary was hanging out with while she wrote it. It's also frequently touted as the 'first Sci-Fi' novel, which of course isn't in the least bit incompatible with the other genres: it can be a Romantic novel which draws on gothic tropes while also sowing the seeds of something new. On the SF front, I was struck in particular coming to the book after many years of film adaptations by how very little scientific detail Mary provides about the creation of the creature. All those big set-pieces with sawing-and-stitching montages, lighting storms and of course bubbling equipment are entirely a product of the movie industry; Mary in fact skims very lightly over the creation process and gets on to its consequences instead. But SF-ness doesn't just lie in sciencey-science and techno-babble. I felt that her use of the creature's perspective to consider what our world might look like to an adult intelligence dropped into it without prior knowledge did justify describing it as an SF novel. In any case, certainly speculative fiction.

I think I was also alert to issues around social class this time in a way I haven't been on previous readings. For all Mary's radical family background, she certainly believes in a strong overlap between high social status and inherent worth. It's noticeable that her idealised family in the cottage turn out to be from a fallen 'good' family, rather than just being normal working people, and her account of how the Frankenstein family 'rescue' blonde aristocratic Elizabeth from the dark Italian peasant family who have taken her in practically slides into eugenics. More interestingly, though, there is a lot of anxiety detectable here. The narratives of the cottage family, Elizabeth and Victor's mother are all about people of once-high status who have fallen on hard times; a theme which must have felt potent for Mary after having thrown in her lot with Shelley at the cost of her father's disapproval and constant financial instability.

As for the characters, have I realised on previous readings what self-absorbed whiny little fuck Victor is? I'm not sure, but I found him almost unbearable this time around. He actually claims his suffering is worse than Justine's when she is about to be executed for a murder she didn't commit, on the grounds that at least she knows she's innocent. Fuck off! I've always known the novel was written to explore both sides of the creator / created relationship, inviting our sympathy for the creature as much as Victor, but on this read I massively preferred the creature, in spite of his cottage-burning anger management issues. I'm sure Mary intended us to find them both flawed, but at least the creature seems to start off with basically decent instincts, only to be drive to murderous extremes by the way other people treat him. Victor has no such excuse that I can see, creating his own woes, exacerbating them by behaving like an absolute wanker to everyone who tries to help him, and crying about how hard-done-by he is all the while. No to that, thank you very much.


4. Andrew McConnell Stott (2014), The Poet and the Vampyre: the curse of Byron and the birth of literature's greatest monsters / 4.5. parts of Daisy Hay (2010), Young Romantics: the Shelleys, Byron and other tangled lives

This was the other side of my pre-holiday reading: historical background about the famous Diodati weekend and the authoring of Frankenstein and 'The Vampyre'. The book by McConnell Stott I bought myself after Googling for something to help me understand the context for our holiday, and I definitely chose well. It is very much focused on the Diodati weekend and what came out of it, but includes plenty on the run-up and aftermath as well. The one by Hay was lent to me by the lovely lady_lugosi1313 and offers a broader general take on the Byron / Shelley phenomenon, so I just read one chapter and a few other snippets which dealt with the relevant material.

I hadn't realised before starting on either just how well-documented the movements of the people concerned actually were. More or less everyone involved was busy writing diaries or letters about what they did, which is why such detailed accounts of the events of the Geneva trip are possible. Stott made really good use of these, quoting from them at length and providing proper scholarly notes at the back of the book which I appreciated. His style is far from dry and academic, though – often his book reads almost like a novel in its own right, and I felt very engrossed and involved with all the characters. I won't try to recount everything I learnt from it, but I will note down the one thing which struck me most powerfully: viz. that Claire Clairmont is an absolute bad-ass! She is so often either left out of accounts of the Villa Diodati weekend altogether, or portrayed as the ditzy one who was just there to fuck Byron and wasn't on the same intellectual level as the others. But her surviving letters and memoirs make it very clear indeed that this was far from the case. Yes, she did want to fuck Byron, but for a girl of her age in the early 19th century to conceive of that goal and travel half-way across Europe to make good on it frankly isn't to be sniffed at. As for her intellect, she was brought up alongside Mary in the same radical intellectual household, and she clearly benefitted from it. Just because she didn't become a published poet or novelist doesn't mean she was thick.

Anyway, Mary and Claire got the last laugh in the end, outliving all the ridiculous, self-obsessed men in their lives by several decades each. Claire even wrote a set of memoirs in her old age hauling both Byron and Shelley over the coals, and not without cause. She was absolutely part of it all, and I'll never stand by and let her be erased from the Diodati story again.


That trip to Geneva

As already mentioned above, I never did write this trip up at the time and I can't now in detail, but I may as well include a few notes about it while I am looking back over the relevant reading material. We were there from the 3rd to 5th of June, c. ten days before the 1816 night of the ghost story competition (16th June), and at a time when the full party had all already arrived in the Geneva area. On the first day we went to the Villa Diodati itself, of course, followed by a bicentennial exhibition about its occupants at the nearby Bibliotheca Bodmeriana which was absolutely amazing: they had portraits of all five of the Diodati contingent, practically the whole of Mary Shelley's manuscript for Frankenstein, absolutely loads of other personal documents and effect of those concerned, and tons of fascinating material about the later impact of Frankenstein - e.g. play-bills for early theatrical versions of it. Then on the following days we went to Chillon Castle at the other end of Lake Geneva, which Byron visited and wrote a poem about, and which had its own bicentennial exhibition focused primarily on him, and then to Gruyères, of cheese fame, which also had a very nice castle as well as a festival going on in the medieval village and cows lounging about on the hillside just outside. These are a few pictures, showing all of us at the Villa Diodati, the boat arriving to take us home from Chillon, and me in the castle at Gruyères with a huge downpour bucketing down behind me.

...keeping me up all night!

Actually, they aren't really owls, but apparently some openings in the roofing of the flats where I live, which make hooting sounds exactly like owls when the wind blows through them. Which was most of last night. Still, it gives me a great opportunity to introduce my latest icon (man, I just love the way us permies get yet another new one every few months!).

This particular owl may be found outside Leeds' Civic Hall, where he and a feathery friend stand as proud emblems of the city - whose patron goddess must therefore logically be Minerva. Now that I actually live in Leeds, I felt the need for a 'Leeds - town' icon to supplement the 'Leeds - gown' aspect represented by my Parkinson building one. So that's his job. Meanwhile, in the background, is Shelley's rendering of the Homeric hymn to his mistress, the first few lines of which run thus:

( I sing the glorious Power with azure eyes... )

Hooting aside, I am having a very lovely weekend, which so far has included:

• Going shopping and buying a very lovely fifties-esque dark purple party frock for upcoming Christmas dos
• Getting the flat properly clean and tidy
• Painting my toe-nails
• Dying my hair (that one's happening right now)
• Doing some very fruitful and rewarding Alessandro Moreschi research
• Making lots of interesting notes (so far in English) for the Italian presentation I have to give on Tuesday
• Some cracking lie-ins

Later on, my_mundane_life will be coming to stay over en route to an interview she has here tomorrow, and we will be going out for dinner with hieroglyphe. And in the meantime, I'd better get this dye off my hair and start turning those notes into an actual presentation, that's actually in Italian...