Friday, August 2, 2019

Book Review: The White People and Other Weird Stories by Arthur Machen


     Arthur Machen wrote a quality novella called The Great God Pan. That story succeeds, not so much because of what it says but because of what it does not say. It is a book of understatement and the most important elements of the narrative are hinted at without explicitly being described. Unfortunately, it is possible that some critics in Machen’s time said The Great God Pan was weak for not saying enough. Maybe that is how we ended up with the sloppy mess of short stories included in The White People and Other Weird Stories.
     In the beginning of this collection we get four quasi-Sherlock Holmes type mysteries with a supernatural twist. “The Inmost Light”, “Novel Of the Black Seal”, “Novel Of the White Powder”, and “The Red Hand” all follow the same narrative trajectory. Two people stumble into some kind of mystery. Each story has a different pair but who these characters are is never fully explained; they are just random people, seemingly petit bourgeois Londoners at the lower rungs of the upper class. The elements of the mystery are explained and then some inexplicable coincidence occurs that acts as the key to explaining the mystery. There is a suspenseful build-up towards the end and then the mystery is solved. Machen uses and reuses the same narrative template each time, simply filling in the blank spaces with different details. In each story the run up to the climax is exciting but the resolution at the end is always disappointing. One man finds a glittering stone while another turns into a blob for no apparent reason; these endings do not actually say anything and seem to be more functional than meaningful. After all, what good is a mysery if the mystery is never solved? In contrast, the experienced reader will recall one of the greatest mystery novels of all time, Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon, which was exactly that: a mystery that remained a mystery at the end. This mystery-by-numbers technique of writing is too formulaic and by the end of the fourth story, it becomes apparent that Arthur Machen was working with a limited imagination. This is not good for an author trafficking in fantasy literature.
     Those first four stories were the best in this collection.
     The same framework of two people discussing strange matters is taken up in the titular story “The White People”. It starts with a couple men discussing the difference between real sin and vulgar stupidity. One man insists his friend read a book he has which is a teenage girl’s diary describing her encounter with the land of fairies. The diary has absolutely nothing to do with the conversation that takes place at the beginning and end to frame the entire story. “The White People” is actually little more than an explication of Celtic folklore which does have the potential to be interesting. However, if you have read Frazier’s The Golden Bough, The White Goddess by Robert Graves, or even the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, Machen’s version seems trite, mundane, and trivial by comparison. He takes the most generic elements of folklore and presents them as if they were something new and spectacular which they might be if you are new to that type of literature. The diary section is even worse because it is written in three paragraphs over a span of thirty pages making it a tiring slog of a read.
     Similar themes are taken up the rest of the stories. “A Fragment of Life” is about a mundane married couple who spend a lot of time talking about buying furniture before a crazy aunt shows up and thinks her husband is cheating on her because he talks to fairies in the park. Then the husband becomes obsessed with a parallel universe fairy land and decides his job at an office is no fun. It had the potential to be a good story but Machen’s poor writing skills ruin it entirely. The pacing is slow and irregular like driving a car with a flat tire. He spends entirely too much time describing the dullness of the couple’s lives and introduces thematic elements, like the aunt’s bizarre church group, that never get taken up again later in the story. Loose plot threads make reading frustrating. Finally, the descriptions of the alternate universe of the fairies is just as plain as the description of the couple’s boring life. And it all goes on and on…
     There are other big mistakes in these stories that make them a terrible read too. One is that they all arrive at the same predictable conclusion: modern life is unfulfilling and a supernatural world exists alongside of it, solely to make our lives more entertaining. Machen uses the same description of the Welsh landscape with the same exact words in every story; cutting and pasting descriptions is a lazy way of writing, even for a late Victorian Decadent author like him. The vocabulary range is limited and redundant: the word “queer”, meaning “strange” or “unusual” is utilized in almost every story as if Machen was not pragmatic enough to consult a thesaurus. In the final story called “The Terror”, the narrative shifts inexplicable between first and third person as if he started writing it, put it away for a long time, and then started it again without going back to read what he had already written. Editing, proofreading, and revision would have gone a long way to make these writings more engaging. Then again, if you are familiar with the pulp horror genre you already know that presenting a polished finished product is not the priority of the publishers.
     Worst of all is Arthur Machen’s tendency to describe too much. His stories have brief events and short descriptions of scenery but the bulk of his writing is explication of those events, sometimes in the form of dialogue and sometimes in the narration. Treating a short story like an essay is a bad idea. And in every story he comes around to trying and failing to prove that science is wrong and the supernatural is the true reality. Machen attempts to demolish science by saying that facts do not mean anything, science is a lie, and scientists only deal with surfaces; these are dumb assertions making the reader wonder if Machen slept through his grade school chemistry and physics classes. He never develops or supports these ideas in any way, proving that he did not have a deep enough understanding of the scientific method to be able to disprove it. Circular logic does his cause no good. It is as if he wanted to be the Arthur Conan Doyle of the occult though his attempts at solving mysteries using fallacious reasoning, tortured logic, massive leaps of faith and clumsy deductive reasoning make him look rudimentary, amateurish, naive, and sometimes just plain stupid. It appears that Arthur Machen did not have the intellectual prowess necessary to comprehend how science works or what it really is so he reacted by indulging in some childish fantasies about supernatural beings. In the end, if you want to write an occult horror story, just write it as a story; don't use it to preach to your audience. A bit of street-fighting wisdom would apply here: if you try to kick someone in the balls, make sure you do not miss because if you do you will lose.
     David Lynch, on the other hand, does a great job of creating mysteries. In Twin Peaks the audience is led into the Black Lodge. The more time we spend there the less sense it makes. The only thing we know for sure is that it is visually interesting and everything about it is very, very bad. The Black Lodge is never explained, though. It remains mysterious and the lack of closure is what makes it unforgettable. Arthur Machen introduces us to an occult fairy land but it represents nothing more than an escapist fantasy for bored adults. His version of the mystery is like a grade school play where kids wear tin foil costumes and prance around in flashing colored lights and smoke made by a dry-ice machine. It is not believable and comes off as hokey.
     Reading Arthur Machen’s short stories proves that having a unique idea is often not enough. The craft of writing counts as much as the substance. If you are interested in this brand of late Victorian and early modernist Decadent literature, spend an evening reading his superior work The Great God Pan. Otherwise leave this stinking bag of crap alone. 

Machen, Arthur. The White People and Other Weird Stories. Penguin Books, 2011.

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