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HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life HP Lovecraft, author of At the Mountains of Madness, was - according to your taste - either a visionary genius or one of the most ridiculous writers ever, with a fatal weakness for piling on adjectives such as ‘eldritch’ and ‘gibbous’. Cosmic horror was his stock in trade and he invented his own mythology of the indescribably ancient ‘Old Ones’ such as the great Cthulhu - a tentacle-faced, bat-winged, humungously-dimensioned ugly-bugly - who lurk under the deepest oceans and beyond the furthest stars, just waiting. American critic Edmund Wilson described the only real horror in his work as the ‘horror of bad taste and bad art’. Other readers have rated Lovecraft more generously, among them Borges, Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates, but he’s never had a champion like Michel Houellebecq, himself one of the most vital contemporary novelists. For him, Lovecraft is among the 20th century’s most important writers. It is Lovecraft’s uncompromising negativity that Houellebecq responds to, and the title of his own book has the swingeing quality of the old Spanish Fascist slogan: ‘Long live death!’ For Houellebecq, Lovecraft’s ‘magnificent’ tales ‘vibrate like incantations’. He even praises Lovecraft as a stylist, a bold move that may not be unrelated to the fact that English is his second language. Lovecraft’s style isn’t just fantastically inflated, as Houellebecq acknowledges, but shot through with a creeping genteelism that was bound up with his delusions of being an 18th-century gentleman. Still, it is very possible that in a hundred years’ time, when the nuances of 20th-century English have been lost, people will read Lovecraft with the same pleasure they get from Romantic poetry. One of the things that makes Lovecraft so distinctive is the horror he finds in the idea of infinitely deep time and space and the knowledge of a monstrously indifferent universe alien to our little world of humanist values. Contemplating it offers ‘sublime’ thrills, in the old sense of the word: the sort people used to get from gazing at mountains, and now get from reading the likes of Stephen Hawking. Tentacles and bat wings notwithstanding, the real dark side of Lovecraft is his ethnic hatred: it is jaw-dropping in its intensity and Houellebecq rightly makes no attempt to whitewash it (in fact, from some of his own work, it’s evidently something he can imaginatively empathise with). This isn’t some unfortunate peccadillo but intrinsic to Lovecraft’s vision. Raised in New England, Lovecraft never recovered from the shock of his poverty-stricken time on the streets of New York and it left him with the conviction that in the long run ‘sensitive persons’ would be trampled by ‘greasy chimpanzees’. This is the human subtext of Lovecraft’s pessimistic cosmology, where sanity and civilisation are doomed to be overwhelmed by unnamable malignities. The Old Ones - like Shub-Niggurath ‘the black goat with a thousand young’, Nyarlathotep ‘the crawling chaos’, the idiot god Azathoth, and, of course, Cthulhu himself, sleeping like Tennyson’s Kraken in the submerged city of R’lyeh - are supposedly still worshipped by ‘primitive’ people in secret across the world, and Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is inseparable from his feelings about the decline of the West. Houellebecq’s superb discussion of Lovecraft offers deep insights into what drives his own writing, as well as into the reactionary tendencies of the horror genre: ‘Horror writers are reactionaries in general simply because they are particularly, one might even say professionally, aware of the existence of Evil.’ One of the truly great bad writers, Lovecraft is certainly here to stay. Bizarrely, the invented mythology he always insisted was not only evil but fictional (he was a convinced materialist) is now followed like a new religion by large numbers of occultists, offering a modern alternative to Satanism. What with the religion and the fact that the Old Ones have become available as cuddly toys - there is a ‘Plush Cthulhu’, no less - you can’t help feeling Lovecraft’s vision has been subverted and diluted. Not by Houellebecq.
by Michel Houellebecq, with an introduction by Stephen King
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
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HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
- The Observer, Sunday 16 July 2006
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I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain. -
Cambridge nel quarto inverno di guerra: una città fantasma.
Un vento siberiano incessante, senza nulla che ne smorzasse la crudezza per milleseicento chilometri, soffiava dal mare del Nord e spazzava i Fens. Faceva tremare i cartelli che indicavano i rifugi antiaerei in Trinity New Court e batteva contro le finestre sprangate della cappella del King’s College. Spirava nei cortili e sulle scale e confinava nelle loro camere i pochi insegnanti e studenti che ancora restavano. A metà del pomeriggio, le strette vie selciate erano deserte. Al cadere della notte non si scorgeva una sola luce e l’università ritornava a un buio che non aveva più conosciuto dal Medioevo. Una processione di monaci che fosse avanzata lentamente sul Magdalene Bridge per andare ai vespri non sarebbe apparsa fuori posto.
L’oscuramento del tempo di guerra aveva disperso i secoli.Robert Harris, Enigma, traduzione di Roberta Rambelli, Mondadori, 1996.
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A.S. Byatt on The Children’s Book
‘A whole world of secret stories …’ Claire Armitstead talks to the Booker-winning novelist about her new novel, a magical exploration of childhood and storytelling
The relationship between writers and their children has always been a troubling one, and it sits right at the heart of AS Byatt’s new novel. Set largely in Kent around the turn of the 20th century, The Children’s Book centres on a community of artists and writers whose experiments in bohemian living take a terrible toll on their families.
In a reading from the first chapter, Byatt introduces the three boys at the centre of her story. She discusses the power of fairytales, the challenges of weaving history and fiction, and explains why the offspring of children’s writers often have the worst time of all.
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All of my means are rational, only my ends are insane.
— Captain Ahab, Moby Dick by Herman Melville
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Philip Delves Broughton
The author of Ahead of the Curve – Two Years at Harvard Business School, which is published outside the US as What They Teach You at Harvard Business School.
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The Dervish House by Ian McDonald
It begins with an explosion. Another day, another bus bomb. Everyone it seems is after a piece of Turkey. But the shockwaves from this random act of 21st century pandemic terrorism will ripple further and resonate louder than just Enginsoy Square.
Welcome to the world of The Dervish House; the great, ancient, paradoxical city of Istanbul, divided like a human brain, in the great, ancient, equally paradoxical nation of Turkey. The year is 2027 and Turkey is about to celebrate the fifth anniversary of its accession to the European Union; a Europe that now runs from the Arran Islands to Ararat. Population pushing one hundred million, Istanbul swollen to fifteen million; Turkey is the largest, most populous and most diverse nation in the EU, but also one of the poorest and most socially divided. It’s a boom economy, the sweatshop of Europe, the bazaar of central Asia, the key to the immense gas wealth of Russia and Central Asia.
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Kraken by China Mieville
British fantasist Mieville mashes up cop drama, cults, popular culture, magic, and gods in a Lovecraftian New Weird caper sure to delight fans of Perdido Street Station and The City & the City. When a nine-meter-long dead squid is stolen, tank and all, from a London museum, curator Billy Harrow finds himself swept up in a world he didn’t know existed: one of worshippers of the giant squid, animated golems, talking tattoos, and animal familiars on strike. Forced on the lam with a renegade kraken cultist and stalked by cops and crazies, Billy finds his quest to recover the squid sidelined by questions as to what force may now be unleashed on an unsuspecting world. Even Mieville’s eloquent prose can’t conceal the meandering, bewildering plot, but his fans will happily swap linearity for this dizzying whirl of outrageous details and fantastic characters.
Miéville acquired a B.A. in social anthropology from Cambridge, and a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics.
Miéville played a great deal of Dungeons & Dragons and similar roleplaying games in his youth, and includes a specific nod to characters interested “only in gold and experience” in Perdido Street Station as well as a general tendency to systematization of magic and technology which he traces to this influence.
