These Our Monsters Read online

  As Graeme Macrae Burnet shows us, folklore can transform even history’s most solid and prosaic artefact into gateways to other worlds and dimensions. Whitby, the unlikely and ‘tranquil’ town where Bram Stoker discovers his vampiric anti-hero, becomes ‘no less than a portal: a gateway to these islands for those shape-shifting blood-suckers designated around the globe as Strigoi, Estries, Jiangshi or Vampyres’.

  These different ways to account for Truth are explored by Alison MacLeod in her story ‘Great Pucklands’, whose opening fuses the language of fairytale with cutting-edge science: ‘At the tangled edge, where bright meadow meets dark wood, hunchbacked fairies stitch the fabric of life … Bent over their work, they cut, splice and sew with algorithmic speed. Chromosomes split, fray and are re-stitched.’

  MacLeod’s story is itself a crazy paving tangle of stories, each with its own very different claims on truth. Charles Darwin’s developing theory of evolution, which can be summarised by the recognition that ‘We are all netted together’, sits fondly beside the vivid, fairytale imagination of his nine-year-old daughter Annie, who daydreams that ‘hunchbacked fairies stitch the fabric of life’. These ideas can be weighed beside the Christian beliefs of Darwin’s wife, Emma, before being set against the poignant biography of the family as a whole.

  The resulting hotchpotch map of the many ways in which humans account for their inheritances and heritage is present in Annie Darwin’s ‘Equations of Ancestry’, drawn in imitation of her father’s ‘lines of inheritance’. So, a brief encounter with ‘old carpenter’ Alfred Greenleaf, who has ‘what looked like a treeburr growing from his cheek’, inspires this equation: ‘Conifers – woody flowering plants – Oak Trees – Alfred Greenleaf.’

  Annie’s hope that fairy wings beat among the bees in Great Pucklands meadow, besides her home at Down House, prompts this observation: ‘‘‘Larva – Pupa – Slug – Winged Insect – Winged Fairy – Hominin – Human.’’ Fairies and people shared a line of inheritance. Her Equation proved it.’

  MacLeod’s smart joke is that the amused jolt most readers feel on reaching ‘Winged Fairy’ would be mild when compared to the utter disbelief that Darwin’s Origin of the Species would have engendered in 1850, when MacLeod’s story is set.

  What is more outlandish: the idea that bees have fairy ‘bodies sticky with pollen’ or the notion that ‘The bat’s wing … was related to the porpoise’s fin and the horse’s leg, and all three were related to the human hand’? A full 70 years later, Arthur Conan Doyle was happy to believe the photographs of the so-called Cottingley Fairies, while Darwin’s theories are still disputed by many as fiction, much as his wife did at the time: ‘Her [Annie’s] mother had explained to her that God made all the animals on the Sixth Day of Creation.’

  The search for Truth now presents an obstacle. One interpretation of MacLeod’s nicely ambiguous conclusion is that fairytales offer a fantasy evasion of, if not an escape from, the difficult human truths Darwin was investigating – the ones that lead him to write secretly, ‘Old Testament God, vengeful tyrant. Not First Cause’, and that prompted ‘palpitations and cold, sweaty skin’ and possibly undermined his marriage.

  This presents a turning point in the reader’s quest. In one direction, folklore offers humanity a glimpse of perfection. In the other, it beats a retreat from the contemporary, the modern. In one direction: ‘Revolution or Evolution.’ In the other: ‘Re-evolution.’ One might turn again to Tolkien’s ‘Mythopoeia’, whose most conservative declaration takes an explicit swipe at Darwin:

  I will not walk with your progressive apes,

  erect and sapient. Before them gapes

  the dark abyss to which their progress tends –

  if by God’s mercy progress ever ends,

  and does not ceaselessly revolve the same

  unfruitful course with changing of a name.

  Anyone looking for evidence of Tolkien as a conservative, fuddy-duddy luddite, hopelessly nostalgic for remote antiquity, need look no further. Having blessed the ‘legend-makers with their rhyme/Of things nor found within record time,’ he says:

  It is not they that have forgot the Night,

  or bid us flee to organised delight,

  in lotus-isles of economic bliss

  forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss

  (and counterfeit at that, machine-produced,

  bogus seduction of the twice-seduced).

  One hears echoes of this voice in the narrator of Kingsnorth’s ‘Goibert of the Moon’ as he gazes across Salisbury Plain: ‘In my mind’s eye I see the plain in the times before industry. The hills of yellow grass and green, rolling to a far horizon. The skies clear, the only sounds the birds, the sheep, the wind. Sometimes I curse my mind’s eye for what it shows me. All of the unreachable things.’

  Unreachable, that is, except through folklore’s visions of the hare goddess dancing beneath the moon near Imber, on Salisbury Plain. Such access occurs through a cloud of unknowing, by forgetting the conscious and intellectual mind. Kingsnorth’s narrator defines his childhood attraction to ‘Anything primitive or superstitious, any pre-modern notion which cannot be doubleblind tested’ as ‘anything dismissed by the educated as whimsy, stupidity, foolishness’.

  Compare this again to Tolkien describing his own faith in folklore: a ‘basic passion of mine ab initio was for myth (not allegory!) and for fairy-story, and above all for heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history, of which there is far too little in the world (accessible to me) for my appetite’. As Tolkien argued in 1936, this passion and appetite were beyond intellectual understanding: ‘The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning … For myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected.’

  This too resounds in the voice of Kingsnorth’s speaker: ‘The more educated a person is, the less they can really see. When the educated look at hares, if they ever do, they do not see the dance under the moon.’ The ‘educated’ are not alone in the narrator’s derision – he pours scorn on the mother reducing the hare to an infantile ‘bunny’, on chocolate rabbits at Easter and on modern Pagans wandering the Downs waving ‘their incense sticks and magic crystals’.

  Beneath this pomposity is a deep emotional attachment to this particular folklore and its own attachment to this place. Kingsnorth dramatizes this through a later version of the myth, in which Albert Nash, the last blacksmith at Imber, has been forced to vacate the land his family inhabited for generations. On the eve of his departure, Albert sees a vision under the full moon, whose desolate beauty provides a form of release. There is only the narrator’s word for any of this: ‘I can prove nothing.’ But this conviction itself proves how the dancing hare has become something like an article of faith: ‘I believe that the hare appears to the grieving, to the worthy, to the lost in soul and body. I believe it comes when it is needed.’

  The worthy, it hardly needs adding, just happen to include anyone excluded from society’s ‘educated’ mainstream: ‘The lost in soul and body,’ which even includes those silly modern Pagans who ‘are lost like everyone else’, he says in a moment of fleeting charity. ‘But why is it necessary to dress up like vampires?’

  Again, one can find in Tolkien the same deep solace and even salvation that Kingsnorth’s narrator finds in folklore. After the death of his wife, Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher to explain why he inscribed the name of his own mythical character Lurien on her grave. ‘I shall never write any ordered biography … It is against my nature, which expresses itself about the things deepest felt in tales and myths.’

  But what kind of consolation is being provided? Ageing, lonely and increasingly out of step with the world around him, Kingsnorth’s narrator is happy to proclaim himself one of the lost. Yet does folklore achieve anything other than estrangement from modernity? ‘There is a darkness about this world. It is wiser to live alone. Stay silent, walk with your head down. Speak only when spoken to. That way, ma
ny of life’s arrows may miss you, if you are lucky.’

  To be fair to Tolkien, ‘Mythopoeia’ is an expression of private feelings expressed in a private conversation: the poem wouldn’t be published until 1964. Its boldness and even defiance was inspired by a debate between Tolkien, fellow academic Hugo Dyson and fellow academic/fantasy-superstar-in-waiting CS Lewis. Despite his recent conversion to Christianity, Lewis was still struggling to understand, among other things, the meaning and purpose of the Crucifixion. Tolkien countered by noting Lewis had no such qualms over similar sacrificial stories in, say, Norse myth, which prompted Lewis to make a famous counter-counter: ‘But myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver.’

  ‘Silver’ is striking. It conveys the beauty Lewis admits to finding in folklore, while also hinting at its treacherous seductions: a nod perhaps towards Judas Iscariot, not inconceivable given the subject at hand?

  The reader’s quest presents another trial. For folklore’s siren call runs through this present collection too. Moss captures its disorientating allure in those who yearn to hurl themselves from Berwick Castle: who ‘long, privately, at the backs of their minds, for a little breakynecky. The general public who yearn, just occasionally, for the vertiginous, for gravity, who crave a slip, a flight, a final snap and smash, whose feet know the way to the edge.’

  The superstitious villagers in Edward Carey’s ‘These Our Monsters’ fear their own superstitions but cannot help but sneak a peek: ‘Of a general we say no to magicals and satanicals both. True, it does come dark here longtimes and we sit in in the blackness with our little firelights and our weak candlesuns and then sometimes we do wonder about those other things but then in the mornings we always come straight again.’

  The pregnant potential of Carey’s ‘True’ is picked up by Hall in ‘The Hand Under the Stone’: ‘Sometimes it’s better to not know when something is true. People, including grown-ups, spend a lot of time pretending, to make life easier.’ This is Monica, whose preference for writing her name backwards characterises her own folkloric estrangement from her reality. Only, what she believes as ‘true’ are the myths surrounding the nearby stone circles, which are not simply ‘like a person’ (my italics) but actually are a group of women, who were punished by a ‘wizard who also believed in God’ for having a party when they should have been in church. Monica can hear the stone-women whisper to her, something even her Aunty Ro, one of the ‘circle-worshippers’ who leave ritual offerings in the circle before Christmas, smirks at.

  For Monica, an outsider like Paul Kingsnorth’s narrator, this capacity to beggar orthodox belief is initially central to folklore’s attraction: ‘You think about the magical stories, men and women changed, because something in them was different, and they wouldn’t follow rules, because they upset people.’

  Hall’s moving twist is to wonder whether Monica is sublimating her complicated feelings about her brother TJ, whose fragile mental health has cast him further and further to the margins of society. Her belief in the power of the stone circle expresses her increasingly futile hope that TJ can return as the brother she dimly remembers.

  Like Macrae Burnet’s Bram Stoker, Hall’s story deftly mediates between the present and the past, the mind and the body, pretence and cold reality. Hall’s crushing final note of almost literal disenchantment is present from the start of Moss’s ‘Breakynecky’, which is perhaps unique in demythologising any form of redemption or even consolation from her admittedly menacing choice of myth. Moss’s 21st-century version of the Redcaps who terrorised anyone trespassing the Anglo-Scottish borders starts with a warning fit for a Redcap: ‘If you are thinking of leaving, you should probably go soon.’

  This, it’s soon clear, is no evil sprite, but Mary, a grieving soul stranded far from her homeland: ‘It’s not my sea. Between the passing of trains, it can sound like home.’ Together with her husband, Séan, she fled Ireland destroyed by famine (‘There will not be many memorials, at home. Starvation is not heroic.’) to find work building ‘Mr Stephenson’s’ bridge across the Tweed.

  Granted, there are intimations that the borders exert a special, almost otherworldly appeal for what Kingsnorth called ‘the lost in soul and body’, like Mary and Séan: ‘We restless ones mass, sometimes, there at the hinge point, the portal where the sea touches the river and the bridge strikes the land.’ There are hints too of folkloric transgression of ancient sensitivities. Mary frets about ‘disturbing, the ancient ones who were still there when the navvies came with their dynamite and picks’. To which Séan replies ominously: ‘sure these are men of science, Mary, none of that’, before marvelling at the trains that will make return journeys between Edinburgh and London in a single day.

  But Mary now knows better. Experience has taught that the frightening folktales about the ‘old man in the tell-tale red cap who lures travellers to his cellar in bad weather’ are simply a cover-up for English xenophobia: ‘They consecrate their homes with strangers’ blood in this land.’ Moss’s blunt depiction of how an empire remembers its own dead, while exploiting the migrant workers, refugees and slaves who increase its profits, removes any varnish the Redcap fable might provide: ‘The English made our men build roads, even when they could barely stand for hunger and it took hours to move a few rocks.’ Mary’s terse, bitter conclusion seems an act of folkloric atheism that transforms myth into allegory: ‘Stones should not fly. Rock is not meant for the air.’

  This might be the bleakest moment on the reader’s quest, but it isn’t over yet. What Moss’s story does suggest is a complex and unstable relationship between history and folklore. In CS Lewis’s The Last Battle, Jewel the unicorn gives a little Narnian history lesson to Jill: ‘He said that the Sons and Daughters of Adam and Eve were brought out of their own strange world into Narnia only at times when Narnia was stirred and upset, but she mustn’t think it was always like that.’

  Lewis’s implication, that myth is of most use during periods of national or global turmoil, is borne out by the story of Lewis’s friend Tolkien. Born in South Africa at the end of the 19th century, Tolkien was shaped by family tragedy (the early deaths of both parents), constant relocations, religious schism (his Baptist mother’s controversial conversion to Catholicism) and two global conflicts: the First World War, which he experienced first-hand at the Somme, and its sequel, which is more or less the period during which he produced both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

  Take 1936, the year in which Tolkien delivered the British Academy’s annual Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture. Entitled ‘Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics’, this was his boldest public articulation of his faith in folklore. One can imagine Tolkien as a dashing knight, shinning down his ivory tower and riding single-handed to save a poem-in-distress (Beowulf) from a horde of nasty scholar-beasts, otherwise known as Tolkien’s fellow Anglo-Saxon academics.

  The specific cause of Sir Tolkien’s dispute with the Anglo-Saxon scholars was their savaging of Beowulf’s subject matter. While even his most demonic foe (Tolkien respectfully names WP Ker) praised the ‘dignity’ and ‘loftiness’ of Beowulf’s prosody, his complaint was that it was squandered on such a trashy tale: ‘The thing itself is cheap,’ Ker concluded primly. Ker and his fellows believed that ‘the heroic or tragic story on a strictly human plane is by nature superior’.

  But this rather begs the question, superior to what? Enter Tolkien, defender of myth, legend and fairytale: ‘Correct and sober taste may refuse to admit that there can be an interest for us – the proud we that includes all intelligent living people – in ogres and dragons; they perceive its puzzlement in face of the odd fact that it has derived great pleasure from a poem that is actually about these unfashionable creatures.’

  The significance of Tolkien’s Beowulf lecture owes something to its proximity to the completion of The Hobbit, which also climaxed with a battle between men (and, yes, Elves, a Wizard and a Hobbit) and a dragon. But 1936 was unusually volatile even by the standards of that m
ost volatile decade: the Spanish Civil War, Hitler’s annexation of the Rhineland and Italy’s of Ethiopia, Stalin’s Purges, Japan’s increasing militarism, the anti-comintern pact with Germany and Italy, the Berlin Olympics, the death of George V and Edward VIII’s abdication crisis.

  Such an apocalyptic context might pose a rather different question about folkloric escapism, which is: why not? Or as Dickens wrote, in a light-hearted, but serious admonition to the caricaturist George Cruikshank: ‘In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected’ (Frauds on the Fairies, 1853). Dickens’s beef with his old friend concerned Cruikshank’s injecting of Temperance propaganda into a series of fairytales, a form that above all others should be free of such worldly sermonising: ‘The Vicar of Wakefield [in Oliver Goldsmith’s novel] was wisest when he was tired of being always wise. The world is too much with us, early and late. Leave this precious old escape from it, alone.’

  One can find a Tolkienesque parallel in the American hippies who flocked to The Lord of the Rings in the 1960s and found the ‘pipeweed’ of the Hobbits conducive to dropping out of mainstream society. But what made Tolkien’s work such a cultural force as well as a commercial success was its simultaneous appeal to the politically engaged: the feminist, civil rights and anti-Vietnam movements which tuned into Tolkien’s portrait of a small, pastoral, anti-capitalist rebellion defeating a vast, industrialised war machine. ‘Frodo Lives!’ and ‘Gandalf for President!’ became favourite slogans of the Counter-Culture, much to Tolkien’s public disapproval: ‘Many American fans enjoy the books in a way which I do not.’

  Similar instability would be reproduced just in time for Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring, whose first screenings occurred only weeks after September 11th. Writing about this experience a decade later, Christopher Borelli of the Chicago Tribune recalled the ‘queasy jolt of immediacy, a chill of recognition’ delivered by Cate Blanchett’s mournful recitation of the film’s opening lines, ‘The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air.’