Nina Antonia: The Greenwood Faun. Foreword by Mark Valentine.
Egaeus Press, 2017.
9780993527876.
182 pp.
It is easy and pleasant to be fascinated by the eighteen nineties, and I for one never
saw any reason to try resisting their charm. The idea of marking the development of popular
culture by the decade, of assigning a distinct character and perhaps even a nickname to each
decade, pretty much got started then. For someone like me, the 1890s are just modern enough
to be daring and exciting as opposed to boring and stuffy, but also early enough to be at
least somewhat intelligible; after them comes the dreaded modernism, from which point all
literature and art becomes completely incomprehensible to me. Not only the arts, but all
of society was changing; people were beginning to throw off the strictures and conventions
of the long, stodgy nineteenth century; with one century coming to a close, it is easy to
imagine a sense of excitement about what the next one may bring, especially as people did not
yet know about the world wars and other horrors that lay in store in the future; and it is
pleasant to indulge in a mindset of decadence, as so many artists of the 1890s did, when it
is done against a backdrop of unpredecented growth and strength which had characterized
western civilization for much of the 19th century — much more pleasant at any rate
than now, when its decline is all too real and apparent. Another turn of the century has
come and gone, but that original fin de siècle remains as fascinating as ever;
it was a period of little more than a decade, but you could spend a lifetime reading about it
and never exhaust it.
Now, you may of course say that this is all nonsense; that history is a continuous
process and does not happen by the decade; that this is all cherry-picking and the benefit
of hindsight; that we are projecting certain preoccupations and inclinations of our own onto
the past. No doubt you would be right. I am reminded of Bertrand Russell's remarks
in an article titled “Pros and Cons of Reaching Ninety” (1962; included
in vol. 3
of his Autobiography): “It is a curious sensation to read the journalistic
clichés which come to be fastened on past periods that one remembers, such as
the ‘naughty nineties’ and the ‘riotous twenties.’ Those decades
did not seem, at the time, at all ‘naughty’ or ‘riotous.’ ”
No doubt he too is right. And yet, and yet — surely there should be enough time and
space for both: the 1890s as they really were, which we may leave to Russell and to sober
historians to write about, and we can read their books when we wish to inform ourselves about
the reality of the thing; and the 1890s as we wish them to have been, a growth of fantasy
arising from the soil of history, an imaginary picture which we may form in our minds when we
wish to be charmed and delighted and entertained. After all, for us non-historians, most of
our notions of the past are at least half fantastical anyway; so why should the 1890s be an
exception to that?
The present volume, Nina Antonia's The Greenwood Faun, falls squarely
into the second camp. This novel is a short but delightful exercise in evoking the
fantastical fin de siècle, written by someone who is clearly fond of that
period and must have read a great deal about it.
One of the book's starting points is Arthur Machen's story The Hill
of Dreams (written in 1897 but first published in 1907), whose protagonist is
a young writer named Lucian Taylor who, while struggling endlessly with the manuscript of a
book that he can't bring himself to finish, sinks deeper and deeper into a dark fantasy world
in which mysterious and dangerous supernatural forces — fauns, witches, fairies and the
like — are present even in a large metropolis like London. He eventually dies of a drug
overdose and his manuscript, which he leaves to his landlady, turns out to be illegible and
worthless.
This is where The Greenwood Faun begins. Apart from being the title of
Antonia's novel here in the real world, it is also the title of Lucian Taylor's manuscript
in the fictional world of the novel. An antiques dealer to whom it is sold has it printed in a
handful of copies and presents them to his friend, a bookseller named Theodore; the book proves
to have a major (and supernatural) effect on everyone who tries to read it.
<spoiler warning>
Theodore is broadly sympathetic to fin-de-siècle trends in literature,
and distantly acquainted with a number of the key players (indeed I have a minor complaint
here: the book is a little too zealous in dropping names in chapter 1; fortunately this problem
goes away after that). Theodore and his wife, Dulcima, have three children: Roger, a prosaic
lawyer with no
interest in literature; Conrad, or Connie, a young dreamer who is perhaps a little too
sensitive for this sordid world; and Violet, who is perhaps the best balanced of the lot.
She is engaged to a friend of Roger's, a well-off critic named Giles, who is by far the
biggest villain of the book. Creatively barren himself, he enjoys tearing down the work
of other authors; and when he comes across The Greenwood Faun, he hatches a plan
to reprint it under his own name and promote it in America where nobody will know any better.
This is another nod to Machen's Hill of Dreams, where a milder form
of literary theft also appears as a subplot: Lucian submits a manuscript to a publisher,
gets it rejected, but later finds a book by another author where about half the text was
taken from Lucian's rejected manuscript. In fact Machen wrote
that something like that had even happened to him in real life, although the book which
plagiarized his own work was only advertised as being planned, but was never actually
published.
The supernatural element asserts itself early in the novel and remains present throughout.
Lucian Taylor's former landlady, Amber, who is in fact pregnant with Lucian's child,
finds her house mysteriously invaded by vegetation and the forces of nature, so that she
abandons it and becomes a housekeeper — where else than in Theodore's family.
It's a bit much to be a coincidence; but if it isn't a coincidence, we don't really get any
clear explanation as to how it happened. But then that may be a nod to Machen as well;
implausible coincidences abound in his stories.
One day Connie gets mysteriously lost during a long walk through London — another
thing that happens in Machen all the time, where a character turns into a side
road and suddenly finds himself in completely unfamiliar territory. He makes friends
with a mysterious stranger who says his name is Lionel Johnson, “just
like the poet” (p. 47);
after a few hints, it soon becomes clear that he is in fact the ghost of that deceased poet.
He is invisible to most people, but Connie is one of the exceptions to that.
Here we have another fine example of the author taking something from the real
fin de siècle and incorporating a fantastical version of it into her novel.
She must have been interested in Johnson for a long time, as hardly a year after The
Greenwood Faun she published a selection of Johnson's verse and prose with an extensive
biographical introduction (Incurable, Strange Attractor Press, 2018;
see my post
about it from a few weeks ago). There we read (pp. 46–48) that around 1901, late
in his life, Johnson claimed that his apartment in Lincoln's Inn, London, was haunted,
and he even moved out because of that; all of which would be easy enough to dismiss as the
delusions of a man by then in the final stages of alcoholism, if not for the fact that
two journalists who subsequently spent a night in the place claimed to have seen doors
opening and shutting by themselves, and the ghost even left bird-like footprints on the ground.
(Antonia wrote more about this ghost in an article titled “A Winged
Malevolence, Fortean Times, No. 353 (May 2017), pp. 30–33.)
But to return to the plot. Giles has a hunting lodge in the country, in an area called the
New Forest, where adherents of the ‘old religion’ apparently abound, witch-cultists
like something straight out of Margaret Murray;
Amber is the head of a local witch-coven and hopes to get Violet involved as well;
the nearby village of Tiptoe stands “on a precipice of Paganism” (p. 149)
and its church and graveyard are beleaguered by unnaturally lush vegetation;
and there are actual fauns and satyrs in the area too, in fact a satyr named Janicot lives “in
the eaves” of Giles's lodge (p. 54). (Janicot is apparently a name used by some
British neopagans to refer to their ‘Horned God’.) I liked that. If you're going
in for the supernatural, you might as well go the whole hog. If we have ghosts in the novel, by
all means let's have witches and fauns as well. Given the strong influence of Machen here, I was
half surprised that we at least avoid having fairies.
Giles and Violet get married and live mostly at his lodge; meanwhile Theodore and Dulcima
go on a vacation to Italy and leave the bookshop in the hands of his brother Algernon, who
is something of an old roué. The story may have been light-hearted so far, but now
everything is set for things to become uglier. Violet finds out about Giles plagiarizing
The Greenwood Faun and confronts him about it; Giles turns violent, Connie (who
happens to be present) tries to protect Violet, and Giles knocks him unconscious. When he wakes
up, he has lost his memory, and Giles has him committed to a lunatic asylum based on false
claims that the lad has lost his mind due to absinthe and decadent literature. In the absence
of Connie's parents, Roger is the closest male relative and is happy to collude with Giles on
this, since he dislikes Connie and his dreaming ways anyhow. Giles's plan is to blackmail
Violet: he promises to have Connie released in a few months' time if she does not tell anyone
about his plagiarism. Meanwhile poor Connie is ‘treated’ with electroshocks
and hot and cold baths.
At Connie's request, Violet brings a copy of The Greenwood Faun to the asylum
for him; but Dr. Blumenghast, who runs the place, disapproves of literature and has his staff
intercept any books that are brought for the patients. So the book ends up in the doctor's
hands, gives him weird dreams, eventually he decides to read it — and goes mad himself.
Soon he is seen running naked through a nearby village, and is caught and becomes an inmate
at his former asylum. At the same time Connie also escapes from the asylum, and we are never
told exactly how that happened; presumably the influence of the book had something to do with
it, and he may have had help from Lionel the ghost. Connie and Lionel manage to evade capture
and are installed in Amber's abandoned house in London.
Giles finally gets his comeuppance in an unexpectedly gruesome way. Trying to find the
source of annoying piping sounds that had frequently been heard around his lodge, he ends up
deep in the forest and encounters a faun who is apparently none other than Pan himself.
The faun holds Giles mesmerized while two stags gore him to death. Earlier we saw Amber and
Violet making a voodoo doll of Giles with the intent of harming him, but it isn't obvious if
or how this contributed to his death.
Meanwhile Connie is lying low in London, knowing that Roger's signature committing him to
the asylum is still in force. He takes up painting as a hobby, and he and Lionel become lovers.
Incidentally, there's also a funny scene where Lionel uses the fact that most people can't see him
to commit some light shoplifting to provide Connie with groceries :) (p. 130).
Blumenghast may be mad, but there is method in his madness; following a carefully prepared
plan, he manages to flee from the asylum and eventually finds out where Connie lives.
Blumenghast may have been affected by The Greenwood Faun, but he is still ambitious
and hungry for fame; he is convinced that if he can get Connie to surrender to the authorities,
this will restore his professional standing and enable him to begin spreading “the way of
the Faun as a healthy new lifestyle” (p. 169). [Which I guess is a nod to actual
trends in medicine at that time — anyone with a white lab coat and a ‘Dr.’ before his name
could devise random treatments and odd lifestyle changes, based on little more than pulling
things out of his ass, and likely enough would actually gain at least some adherents.]
One night while Lionel is away, Blumenghast enters Connie's house; desperate and backed
into a corner, or rather on the roof of the building, Connie jumps to his death. Presumably
he can at least spend the eternity with Lionel now. Thus the book ends on a melancholy note.
Violet settles at Giles's former lodge with Clovis, Amber's brother (and also a member of
the witch-cult); she is also pregnant with his child. Having no one to leave his bookshop
to, Theodore shuts it down and it passes into fin-de-siècle legend,
while he moves to the countryside with his wife and brother so as to be closer to Violet.
Amber's coven keeps going until the mid-20th century, but “the New Forest of today
would be unrecognisable” to them (p. 180).
</spoiler warning>
*
There seems to be a lively scene in Britain of people working on the fin de siècle,
studying it, writing fiction and nonfiction about it, publishing reprints and translations
of literature from that period, and so on. The Greenwood Faun comes with praise
and blurbs from many prominent figures from those circles: in the book itself there's an
introduction by Mark Valentine, a paragraph-long blurb by David Tibet on the back cover,
and on the publisher's website
there are further blurbs from Phil Baker and Brian Stableford. I myself first heard of the book
(and its author) because it was mentioned on David Tibet's website (and the reason why I was
in the habit of checking that website was because I read about David Tibet's work on
Count Stenbock many years ago in vol. 1 of the Strange
Attractor journal; and I first heard of that journal by chance when I noticed a review
of it in te Guardian — interesting how one thing leads to another
across a long series of links).
On the whole I liked this novel a great deal, and would recommend it without
hesitation to everyone who loves the 1890s. I enjoyed the romanticized, slightly
supernaturalized version of the fin de siècle that it evokes (even though, technically
speaking, it takes place a little after the end of the century itself; on p. 175 we
read that it is “half a decade” after Lionel Johnson's death, and he died in 1902).
I liked the fact that Antonia doesn't turn her supernatural world into horror the way
Machen is prone to do (though admittedly he doesn't do it as much in The Hill of
Dreams as in his earlier stories).
I also liked the numerous little details which connect the fictional world of the novel
with the real, historical fin de siècle; you might say that the novel takes
place just a little beyond the border between reality and fantasy. I already mentioned that
chapter 1 drops the names of so many real fin-de-siècle authors that it
almost bothered me; but later in the book such things appear more moderately.
For example, Lewis Yealland, the
sadistic psychiatrist who treated shellshocked soldiers with electroshocks and is mentioned
here on p. 176, was a real person, though I had a hard time finding him at first because
the book misspells his last name as “Yelland” (which led to some confusion with
another WW1-era person, Lewis Yelland Andrews).
Austin Osman Spare, the
“occult artist” influenced by Connie's work (p. 177), is real too.
Domenico Castanese, the young Italian victim of the shipwreck of the Iota (p. 155) is real too;
here in the novel he is buried in the village of Tiptoe, not far from Giles Gorse's hunting lodge,
while in reality he is buried at Tintagel on the north shore of Cornwall. This may perhaps
give us some idea of where Gorse's lodge is supposed to be located, though to be honest, from
the frequency with which characters in the novel move between London and the lodge I had the
impression that it was closer to London than that. Moreover, the area around Gorse's lodge
is referred to as “the New Forest” several times, and there is a New Forest in reality as well, but on the
southern coast of England rather than in Cornwall. This location is also consistent
with the fact that “the oak tree where Rufus the Red was slain” (p. 109)
is located there; “Rufus” is Latin for “the Red” and is the nickname
of William II,
who really was killed in the New Forest. So I guess the simplest explanation is that
Antonia exercised some poetic license and moved the Iota shipwreck to the southern coast
of England.
Also real is The Dancing Faun
by Florence Farr (mentioned here on p. 163), very much a fin-de-siècle novel:
published in 1894 by Elkin Matthews and John Lane as the second volume of the famous Keynotes series,
with a cover design by Aubrey Beardsley. (Incidentally, two of Machen's early stories were also published in
the same series.) Its author, Florence Farr, was
an actress who took an interest in occultism and later wrote several books on the subject.
Another real book mentioned here (on p. 151) is The
Sins of the Cities of the Plain, a pornographic work purporting to be the memoirs of a rent-boy.
I was interested to learn, from its wikipedia page, that it was reprinted
about 10 years ago by an American publisher called Valancourt Books, along with its sequel
Letters from Laura
and Eveline. They also published reprints
of numerous other more or less fantastical late-19th-century works — worth keeping an eye out on.
Dr. Blumenghast's asylum is called Valmouth, which might be a reference to
a novel of the same name, Valmouth (1919)
by Ronald Firbank, where it is the name of a spa. Firbank
himself is a little too young to be part of the fin de siècle, but you might
say that he carried its torch into the 1910s and ’20s. (We have encountered him on the pages
of this blog recently due to his influence on Waugh.)
On p. 49, Theodore mentions a line which he says is “almost” Wilde's:
“Then she wears silver sandals and creeps away with the dawn.” It turns out to
be based on the last few lines of Wilde's poem The Harlot's House.
There are of course also several references to Lionel Johnson's poems,
unsurprisingly since his ghost is a character in the novel:
- “Were we in dreamland, deathland then?” (p. 170) is from Bells (1887;
Poetical Works (1917), p. 134);
- Vinum Daemonum on p. 174 (though sadly misspelt: Deamonum) is
a poem from 1893 (Poetical Works (1917), p. 229);
- “Make my soul thine” etc. (p. 175) is
the last line of Julian at Eleusis (1886–7; Poetical Works (1917), p. 153);
- “Oh welcome death!” etc. (p. 143) is from Brontë (1890;
Poetical Works (1917), p. 105).
Another intriguing passage refers to Johnson's “most famous quote:
‘Life is ritual.’ ” (p. 169).
I can't find this anywhere in his works; its source seems to be Yeats's book
The Trembling of the Veil (1922), which contains his reminiscences
of the 1890s (the Johnson quote appears on p. 179).
I haven't heard of The Trembling of the Veil before, but it looks interesting.
*
When a book contains supernatural or fantastical elements, there is usually a
certain amount of arbitrariness about how these elements work. This always bothers
me a little, and The Greenwood Faun is no exception to that.
I suppose I shouldn't complain too much about it, since an author is obviously
free to decide how magic works in his or her story, and isn't required to present
it as a self-consistent and well-explained system. Moreover, Machen is guilty of
the same thing to a much greater degree, so we can't blame Antonia for doing the
same thing in a novel that partly follows in his footsteps.
Still, I couldn't help wishing that some things were explained a little more
clearly in this novel, for the benefit of readers like me, slow people with our
feet planted a little too firmly in the ground. For example, ghosts. Who does
and who doesn't linger around as a ghost after death? Lionel has apparently been
assigned as a sort of guardian angel to Connie, and will have to complete several
“missions” of this type before he can finally enter heaven (p. 175).
Why exactly he? How common is this, since he doesn't seem to encounter any
other similar ghosts at any point, not even when he looks for them during his
visit to the cemetery on p. 170? We hear that there are
“a few rules to the afterlife” (p. 67), such as not meddling “with the
destiny of the living” (ibid.) and being required to visit one's grave once a year
(p. 166; though Lionel's visit is most perfunctory and nothing really
happens during it). But whence do these rules arise and why are they the way they are?
Moreover, some people can see Lionel but most can't, and he can't control who he is visible
to (p. 166); so what exactly does decide whether someone will be able to see a particular
ghost or not?
Another example: there is apparently an actual satyr named Janicot living
“in the eaves” of Giles's hunting lodge of the same name (p. 54);
we see him laughing in the rafters (p. 118) at Giles's failure
to get the cover of his pirated book to look right. But apart from this, what
exactly does Janicot do? What powers does he have? The witches or pagans believed
that he “protected their kind” (p. 53).
Since Janicot is already around, why exactly did Amber and Lucian feel
the need to invoke Pan into the world as well? One would think that the niche
was already reasonably well covered.
Speaking of this whole business of bringing Pan into the world,
this is never stated quite as openly as I would wish; rather it's up to you
to piece it together from a number of brief scattered allusions, which I only
did on a careful second reading of the book. I suppose you can say that this
is a common enough literary device, but I'm not sure how keen I really am on it.
Amber slept with Lucian at some point before his death (p. 18), and
ended up pregnant, but the child is described as a “changeling”
on p. 26. [Perhaps it runs in the family? Lucian had wondered at one point
whether he himself was a changeling; The Hill of Dreams,
p. 231.]
It is, in fact, not a human child at all, but an incarnation
of the god Pan; “the nature deity reborn” (p. 50),
“an ancient god” (p. 168), “the oldest of all the chimerical
gods” (p. 137).
When she takes a job as housekeeper to Theodore's family, Amber describes herself
as a “widow, whose young son is in the care of relatives in the New
Forest” (p. 56).
But actually Pan, being a god, “had been weaned in a day, attained boyhood
in a month” (p. 50). On p. 55 Giles cruelly beats a trespassing
urchin, but on p. 137 we learn that this was none other than Pan, who now
has no difficulty in mesmerizing Giles and summoning angry stags to eviscerate him.
Why then had he allowed Giles to beat him on that earlier occasion?
Another annoyingly vague appearance of Pan is on p. 106; the pagans are celebrating
a ritual in the forest, Amber says that “Violet would meet him [i.e. Pan] tonight”,
and subsequently he apparently just sort of materializes: “Through the intoxicating
mist, Amber's cloven progeny took substance [. . .] Pan Sublime”. But
then Violet sleeps with Clovis, Amber's half-brother, and it isn't obvious what exactly the
role of Pan is in the proceedings. Would Pan somehow inhabit Clovis's body and make sure
that the child that Violet ends up pregnant with (p. 150) is a changeling? (Is that
what had happened when Lucian slept with Amber?) This possibility would appear to be
supported by the fact that Clovis's role in that ritual was as “the emissary of the Horned One” (p. 105),
i.e. of one of the two principal deities of the neopagans. Is the Horned One the same thing
as Pan, or if not, what is the relationship between them? So many possibilities, so few
certainties.
And speaking of Clovis, he is something of a mystery too. He is Amber's half-brother
(p. 150); their mother, Esme, seems to have been a witch like Amber after her
(pp. 27, 69).
Clovis's “father had been no more than an illusion” (p. 164); that's
the only piece of explicit information we have. Obviously you can't help wondering if Clovis's
father was some sort of horned (and horny) deity himself. When Edith,
the old housekeeper
of the late Giles Gorze, refers to Clovis as a “cloven-hooved fancy man” (p. 150),
is that just a malicious remark of an anti-pagan religious zealot, or did she chance upon
a truth? After all, his very name Clovis looks like a hint at cloven.
(Otherwise, Clovis seems like an odd choice of name for a pagan. The main thing that the
historical Clovis
is remembered for is converting from paganism to christianity...)
*
But to go back to Pan, I wish we were told a little more clearly what he does
and why Lucian and Amber have invoked him in the first place. It seems like a very
risky move since we read, on p. 168, that “[b]y calling
upon Pan, rather than waiting for his return, an unpredictable vortex had been
created” and that “no human has the power to control such a profound force”.
But admittedly, most of the time Pan doesn't seem that active in this book; the occasion
when he gets Giles gored by stags (p. 137) is more the exception than the rule.
Most of the time his methods are subtler than that. He is responsible for the piping sounds
heard around Giles's hunting lodge (pp. 55, 135, 137, 149). [It is probably no
coincidence that the piper as a metaphor occurs at several other points in the book:
the mad Dr. Blumenghast running through the village “in a grotesque parody of the
Pied Piper” (p. 111); “the piper would have to be paid, eventually”
(p. 152).] “Pan had returned to the forest and, misplaced in modernity,
was playing for the last of his kingdom” (p. 75). [Is that why Amber summoned
him? To protect what was left of the pagan world from modernity which was now threatening
it too seriously?]
Dr. Blumenghast hears Pan's piping even in the middle of London. It is a call:
“the faun played for anyone able to discern his tune. How they danced was a matter
of free choice; some discovered magic like Conrad and Violet, but others, such as Giles
Gorse or George Blumenghast, found only mania.” (P. 166.) This is probably
the best statement of Pan's mode of operation in this book.
Another thing that works in the same way is Lucian Taylor's book, The Greenwood
Faun — perhaps unsurprisingly, since that book had a big role in summoning Pan
in the first place. I suppose you could say he now works through that book just like he
does through his piping. Just compare the following passage with those cited earlier:
“The Greenwood Faun was more than just a book; it was an invocation.
‘Strange things happen when you read it, [. . .] It affects each person
differently.’ ” (P. 77.) Indeed as we saw it was really the book
(rather than the piping) that drove Giles to adopt his nefarious plan of plagiarism and
piracy, and that drove Blumenghast to madness when he “answered Pan's calling”
(p. 153). “A book comes alive when it is read,
until then it remains dormant yet restless” (p. 35).
“That was the trouble with books; you never knew where they might lead” (p. 87).
Pan “was the freedom humanity denied itself, from before pyramids, synagogues,
temples, churches, mosques, cities, banks, rules, guilt or sin.” (P. 75.)
This sounds intriguing and almost charming, until you remember that even the most primitive
prehistoric hunter-gatherer tribe has plenty of rules as to how its members should
conduct themselves; humanity has *always* been denying itself freedom, because otherwise
we wouldn't be able to form communities and survive :( Don't get me wrong,
I like freedom as much as anyone, I just don't think humankind has ever been anything close to free.
Moreover, I guess that the line about Pan being the freedom humanity denied itself was
meant to be inspiring, to make us regard Pan favourably; but do you know who else stood
for freedom? Cthulhu, of course: “mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones;
free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men
shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them
new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame
with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.” (H. P. Lovecraft, The Call
of Cthulhu; Weird Tales, Feb 1928, p. 170).
As I said, don't get me wrong, I like freedom;
it just isn't such a very cuddly concept as it appears at first thought.
But I guess it is simply a matter of what you take freedom to mean.
When the still-mad Dr. Blumenghast backs Conrad into a corner, intending to get him back
into the asylum, Conrad shouts: “Did you learn nothing from The Greenwood Faun?
Freedom is everything.” (P. 174.) But he doesn't follow that up by, say,
killing Blumenghast; he simply commits suicide (while thinking of his beloved Lionel
so that they will still be connected in the afterlife — the metaphor of the
silver cord; pp. 171, 173).
Another intriguing thing about Pan is the idea of him *returning* to the world.
We saw that Amber and Lucian invoked him “rather than waiting for his
return” (p. 168), and he thereby “had returned to the forest” (p. 75)
presumably earlier than he would have done otherwise. When then has he left and why?
I guess this is an allusion to the idea, already present in ancient times, that he died around the time when christianity emerged.
But when did he intend to return, had he not been invoked earlier by Amber and Lucian?
Perhaps we get a hint at that at the end of the book, after a grim picture of the further
encroachment of modernity upon the New Forest: “When man has finally fulfilled his
death wish by wiping out anything that breathes, including himself, Pan will return to a
world made innocent again.” (P. 180.) This emphasizes Pan as the deity of
nature; he is keeping away because man has detached himself from nature, and will be back once
this state no longer applies.
*
Another thing I greatly liked about this book is its physical appearance.
Very appropriately given the title and contents of the book, green tones predominate on
the covers and endpapers. The front cover is beautifully illustrated, with a nude woman
reclining in the arms of a faun — we may imagine it is Viola and Clovis —;
with butterflies (a recurring image in the book) and inkwells — these latter are
also very appropriate since so much in this novel revolves around writing as a creative act.
We see how difficult it is; Lucian put all his life into it, and died as a result
(“To leave anything of worth to posterity, the artist has to shine a light in
death's unblinking eye”, p. 34), while
the weaker Giles is completely incapable of creating anything original; and once Lucian's
book was written, what a power it had! It helped call Pan back into this world, and once
here it helped him send out his appeal to people.
The illustrated cover is a nice touch for another reason too, namely because it brings
the book a step closer to fin-de-siècle standards, when such covers were
routine. There is no dust jacket, which is probably a good thing since it would prevent
you from seeing the cover; though on the other hand you also can't help wishing that there
were something to protect the cover.
The book also contains a few illustrations, not made specially for it but selected
“from vague or uncredited publications of the late 19th and early 20th century”
(p. 4). On the one hand, they are very appropriately chosen to go well with the text
and I liked them, but on the other hand, that line about “vague and uncredited
publications” makes me furious. They wouldn't be vague if you hadn't deliberately
chosen to be vague about them, you numpties! They wouldn't be uncredited if you had taken
the trouble to credit them! They didn't, after all, slip into the book behind your backs
while you weren't looking. You got them from somewhere, and you knew what you were doing.
This kind of coyness is really enraging.
One way in which the present volume falls short of 1890s standards, however, is the
quality of its proofreading. The 1890s played at being decadent, but now the decay of the
publishing industry is all too real. The text has much too many errors and misprints for
such a short book, which makes for a sad contrast with the loveliness of its design and the
beauty of its writing. Here are a few I've noticed:
- “The room span” (p. 37) should probably be “spun”.
- On p. 56, Amber presents herself as a widow and yet is referred to as
“Miss Seabrook”. Surely a widow would have been addressed as Mrs.; to become a widow
you must first be married, therefore a Mrs., and you remain
a Mrs. even after your husband dies.
- “his parent's friends” (p. 58) should probably be “parents'”.
- “he and the faun where its kin” (p. 69) should be “were”.
- “too long a day that was all” (p. 97) is missing a comma or some
other punctuation mark after “day”.
- “Not in front Giles” (p. 132) is probably missing an “of”.
- “as real every day” (p. 143) is probably missing another “as”.
- “seasonal poesies” (p. 155) should really be “posies”,
though etymologically the two words are the same.
- “flowers, laying prostrate” (p. 169) should be “lying”.
- “Vinum Deamonum” (p. 174) should be “Daemonum”.
- “Lewis Yelland” (p. 176) should be “Yealland”, as we already mentioned above.
But “the garden provided a safe arbour” (p. 26) is probaly a clever
pun and not a misprint for “harbour”.
I was intrigued by the use of “x” to represent a kiss, in a note from
Lionel to Connie on p. 167. At first I thought that this must surely be anachronistic,
but then it turned out that the OED has examples from 1763 and 1894.
ToRead:
- Florence Farr: The Dancing
Faun (1894). A novel, mentioned here on p. 163.
- W. B. Yeats: The
Trembling of the Veil (1922). His reminiscences of the 1890s.
It contains Johnson's phrase that “life is ritual”, mentioned in
The Greenwood Faun on p. 169.
Labels: books, fiction, fin de siècle
