Dark Matter, by Michelle Paver

Dark Matter, by Michelle Paver

Michelle Paver got the idea of writing a ghost story after touring Svalbard; an isolated archipelago in the Arctic ocean. She writes: ‘It was summer so there was this endless rather eerie light [...] What most impressed me was the peculiar unnerving stillness of the place [...] It was as if all the land was watching.’ It appears the Arctic still has its mystery, and remains the last great wilderness of the world. As result it is the perfect place for a gothic tale.

The story follows Jack, a lonely man in London, living on the edges of society. Somehow he manages to secure a place on an Arctic expedition, and its just what he needs in order to get his life back on track. The landscape is beautiful and desolate in equal pitch. Most of all it is empty. After succumbing to illness, one by one his companions choose to leave, and Jack is left to salvage the mission alone. Or so he thinks, for there is someone else lurking on the island: ‘Twilight came [...] when I saw a man standing in front of the cabin [...] round cap, and ragged boots [...] he turned to face me a dark figure against the glare.’ As endless winter sets in and with it, days a of perpetual darkness, Jack descends into insanity, as he struggles to contend with the entity wandering out in the snow. 

I wish I could have liked this story more! On a superficial level it was good, with gothic descriptions, intriguing questions, and pot-boiler tension; it seemed to have all the right ingredients, but for me, it just didn’t work. The hero of the story Jack, didn’t strike me as a particularly interesting. Indeed, he was often unlikeable, because of his downright petulant and aggressive attitude. He can be found saying such things as: ‘I wanted to smash their smug faces,’ or ‘I’ll smash your face in,’ among his other complaints. Beside this, the gothic motifs and themes, despite being understated, remained too obvious and cliche for me. Ghosts haunt on Halloween and fittingly in the Artic ‘tomorrow was the 31st of October.’ Jack notes of the entity, ‘I knew with some ancient part of me, it wasn’t alive,’ ‘rage. Close. Coming for me.’ ‘Intense unwavering, malign. Such malevolence. No mercy.’ Finally there were several questions that were asked in the book, but not answered in any depth. For example, the best horror stories, leave the reader wondering whether the ghost is real, or a product of a disturbed mind. This was hinted at, in Dark Matter, but never truly answered. For me the whole book was too linear and lacked depth. As a result it was largely forgettable. 

What did shine through was the attention to detail. The evocative and precise language which depicts the beautiful landscape of the Arctic:

‘A fierce sun, blazed in the sky astonishing blue [...] dazzling snow capped mountains enclosed a wide bay dotted with icebergs. The water was a still as glass [...] tall cliffs the colour of dried blood [...] shining pavements of pewter rock.’

 The novel, also had that unputdownable feel, keeping the readers in suspense as we follow the hero as he descends into madness. Finally, the ghost itself, was an eerie creation, and like all good stories, appears on the backdrop of Norwegian legends and folklore. Overall though, Dark Matter, was a little too ordinary and obvious for me. Maybe I’m too old for ghost stories :(

Blood Meridian, by Cormac Mccarthy

Blood Meridian, by Cormac Mccarthy

Blood Meridian is Cormac Mccarthy’s other great masterpiece. Never have I personally encountered a work of such hypnotic power, as this. One get’s the sense on reading it, that the Mccarthy may in fact be insane, for the words on the page seem to appear, fully-formed, as if from a delirium. It is a nightmare of such depravity it lacks comprehension.

It is also a classic. What Harold Bloom calls, ‘a canonical imaginative achievement, both an American and universal tragedy of blood [...] Comparable to Melville and Faulkner.’ Indeed, the only other book that I have read which seems even remotely similar is Dante’s Inferno.

‘The Kid’ is the hero of the novel, but Mccarthy pitilessly denies us access to his character, personality or conscience. This makes him a cypher; a pair of eyes, in which a unfolding tapestry of violence can be witnessed. There are no good guys or bad guys in this world, no purpose or motive, message or moral. Everything exists in and of itself, where Mccarthy ‘converts goriness into a terrifying art.’ 

The opening is memorable, for it is, precisely the visual dimension of the work, that takes precedent:

‘See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt [...] Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. [...] his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost [...] Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens.’ 

This is all we learn of the Kid’s life. A mere summary of three pages, before he dwindles into another world. After leaving home, he joins the Glanton Gang, a band of mercenaries recruited by the US government to roam the deserts of the American West and kill indians. Here, the Kid learns that his prior life has been inconsequential, and that only in battle, does he truly live. Out on the killing fields he meets ‘the most frightening figure in all of American Literature,’ Judge Holden. A Nietzschean warmonger who evokes philosophy, law, and religion to justify his bloodlust. His pronouncement on the world is this:

‘The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world’ ‘Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.’

This is the mandate he lives by, and indeed its hard to stomach some of the outrages he incites because of it. 

‘Dragging the victims out, slathered and dripping with blood, hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy. [....] One of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand [....] and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth.’

The indians are no better: 

‘hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream [...] One in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil [...]  Passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs [...] gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs.’

Rape, murder, genocide, infanticide, nothing is beyond limits in Blood Meridian. The story  culminates in a dream like encounter out in the far reaches of the  desert, with the Kid fighting for his survival. Even then there is a sense that this landscape of savagery will never end. War ‘never sleeps [..] and will never die.’ 

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The most amazing part of the book for me, is Mccarthy’s language, comparable only to Milton in stature. The depictions of the landscape are especially beautiful, although the archaic wording, strange syntax and grammar, take some getting use too:

‘The wind blew the white pumice from the crests like the spume from sea swells and the sand was scalloped and fraily shaped and nothing else was there save random polished bones.’

‘Ice had frozen on the rock and the myriad of icicles among the conifers glistened blood red in the reflected light of the sunset spread across the prairie to the west.’

‘Spectra horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat [...] Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings’

Wow, I just love it!

Some critics have argued that Blood Meridian is nihilistic. Others believe that the work is strongly moral, and that ‘judge holden, the prophet of war, is unlikely to be without honour in the years to come.’ To me this all seems beside the point. Mccarthey’s novels, and this one particularly, seem to exist only as visual feasts. He is an author concerned with images alone. This is where he shines.

For me, Blood Meridian, is perhaps the only frightening book I’ve read, for the level of violence can’t be surpassed. Yet the scenes, are not fictional, and can be read in accounts of battle since time immemorial. This is why the work is so powerful. Again, I return to my original point, Blood Meridian doesn’t even seem a work of fiction, nor crafted by human hands, but appears like some demonic testament springing from hell, and perhaps bringing a prophecy for the future.