Review: Things in Jars

KIDD, Jess, Things in Jars, Canongate Books Ltd., Edinburgh Scotland UK, 2019.

Octavo; paperback; 404pp. Mild wear; covers a little rubbed and edgeworn; spine creased; some mild scuffing to the front cover. Good.

Way, way back in the day, when I was stupid, I spent a bunch of time in the SCA (the Society for Creative Anachronism) pretending to be a medieval person. In my defense, it was the only way at the time that I could easily and cheaply explore two skillsets that I held in particular interest, namely heraldry and archery, but it also meant that I spent far too much time amongst petty politicians with enormous egos fighting over stuff that meant nothing at all. In the SCA, the goal – often stated, rarely achieved – was to re-create the Middle Ages, not as it was but how it should have been, but for the absence of enlightened social attitudes, antibiotics and personal hygiene. Moments when anything at all like this occurred (especially in a place like Australia, with gum trees, for chrissakes!) were few and far between and usually shattered by someone putting their open can of Coke down next to the boar’s head during a feast. It bewilders me now that anyone in the SCA – or any comparable organization - still thinks that a long term recreation of the past is possible when so many people are involved, with wildly varying levels of commitment, but those fleeting moments when it does work must truly be worth the teeth-grinding idiocy that takes place along the way. How easy then, to just write a book about this stuff?

Long-time readers know that I enjoy reading fiction from the past. For preference, I like to read stories that were written in the time in which they were set. The reasons for this are legion but mostly devolve upon the personal belief that only those who have lived in the time of which they speak can truly write about it. This is not to say that there are not any great writers of historical fiction out there today, or that no-one has ever been able to project themselves and their readers into another time and place in order to relate a compelling narrative; anyone who’s ever read a Georgette Heyer novel can tell you otherwise. It’s just that, as a particular writing style, it’s a high-wire act – one misstep and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

Sometimes the point of the exercise is to conflate two disparate genres of writing, for the purposes of humour, or intellectual discussion. Thus, we have Lindsey Davis’s Marcus Didius Falco novels which place a Raymond Chandleresque private detective on the streets of ancient Rome; or Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose which inserts an investigative monk with staunchly Twentieth Century attitudes deep within the Medieval Church. These are deliberate points of departure away from the realms of straight Historical Fiction, which more traditionally include such titles as the Horatio Hornblower series of novels by C.S. Forester, Patrick O’Brian’s oeuvre, or – as mentioned - the Regency novels of Georgette Heyer. However, as anyone who’s ever visited Lindsey Davis’s website can attest, attention to historical detail is paramount because, despite the purpose behind the work, one false anachronistic note ringing out in the background will derail the entire exercise.

Many modern writers have chiseled out niche sub-genres of the Historical Fiction format meaning that we now have Historical Crime Fiction and – fuelled mainly by notions of Steampunk – Historical Fantastic Fiction, usually set in a pseudo-Victorian era. There are also further refinements and blendings of these into sub-sub-genres, such as Victorian Occult Detective Fiction, to name but one. Jess Kidd’s book Things in Jars falls squarely into this latter category. Punctilious historical accuracy is still the key issue here however, despite the liberties taken with the scenario and a crucial point, often overlooked, is the audience.

We are wired for genre. Due to our exposure to Cinema and Television and the way these things are marketed (along with Books these days, because the marketing model has been adopted in that sphere also in order to shift units), we have become instinctual recognisers of genre formats. Moments after the opening credits, we automatically spot The Girl; minutes later we’ve copped The Guy; now we know that, but for a Meet Cute, some Screwball Comedy and an almost Tragic Misunderstanding, the rest is Happily Ever After. We don’t even have to think about it. It just happens. If it didn’t, we would feel gypped and we’d complain. A lot. However, that’s just us; what about books written ages ago; what about the impact on their contemporary audience, one without our social programming? Let’s take a look at a sadly misunderstood and poorly treated classic:

Pride and Prejudice is not a novel written for a modern audience. Jane Austen’s concerns were very particular and her reasons for writing the book have been discussed at length by better commentators than I. It has been made into cinematic and televisual iterations time and again and each of those versions is predicated upon the demands of a modern audience and what it wants to experience. Moments after the opening credits, we are introduced to Elizabeth Bennett; shortly thereafter Mr. D’Arcy is revealed. Now we know that it’s just a Meet Cute, some Screwball Comedy and an almost Tragic Misunderstanding along the way to blah, blah, blah. This is what Pride and Prejudice has become: a schmaltzy swoon-fest. But it’s not.

One reason for the novel’s enduring popularity is that it can be streamlined into a Hollywood blockbuster in the manner outlined. It has good bones, in the sense of it being a love story, and a devastating understanding of human and social psychology which allows it to be layered over many social scenarios. Austen was incredibly good at this stuff – the fact that Emma could be re-made as “Clueless” shows just how adaptable her material can be. But being able to do this with the book drags it away from what it originally was – a Regency novel for Regency readers. If you de-purpose Pride and Prejudice, you can do almost anything to it – set it in space; stage it as a puppet show; even cast F***ing! Keira! Bloody! Knightley! (Ahem.) as Lizzie Bennett (unbelievable!), but then you turn it into a Mills & Boon knock-off and that defeats the author’s original intention.

This book is about a woman without any traction in the matrimonial stakes of her culture. We are explicitly told that – in a world where a good marriage is crucial – Elizabeth Bennett has only two things on her side: wit and a pair of fine eyes. Everything else stands in her way. D’Arcy, on the other hand, has and is everything desired in a husband, but there’s no way that he’s going to even consider Lizzie Bennett. We are told in no uncertain terms that the possibility of Lizzie becoming Mrs. Fitzwilliam D’Arcy by the last page is so remote as to be functionally impossible. And yet, it is the magic of this work that it happens, and that we believe in it happening. For us it’s just “Aww – another happy ending!”; for Regency readers it would have been outrageous; a veritable call to arms.

Think about Wickham. He is set up as the villain of the piece, although initially, he is presented to us as Elizabeth’s more realistic option in the property distribution game. He is good-looking and has a solid career and income; his background is a little shady but then so is Elizabeth’s, with many socially awkward details for anyone who cares to scratch the surface. Nevertheless, Wickham is on a roll; he’s making his way; and Lizzie recognizes this. So too, does a Regency reader – we may think of Wickham as a sleazebag on the make, but we’ve been educated to think of him that way. No Regency reader would think badly of him for dropping Lizzie in order to court Mary King and her 10,000-pound inheritance. For us, it’s a sharp stab of betrayal: “you scumbag!” we cry; ‘How could you?” But for a contemporary reader it’s a bone saw chill reminder to them and to Lizzie of her place in society, and the fact that she should not over-reach herself in the purely business world of matrimonial attachment. They would simply nod sagely – as does Elizabeth – and turn to the next page. Even at the end when Wickham becomes Elizabeth’s brother-in-law there’s very little acrimony from her about how it came about – it’s the price of doing business and maybe Elizabeth recognizes that Wickham was just as she was, only less idealistic, more open to getting his hands dirty and quicker to seize the nearest option. This is not to say that Wickham isn’t the “bad guy” of the piece; of course he is, but our perception of him has been heightened by our need for genre and we put him up there along with Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter and Hans Gruber; contemporary readers dealt in many more degrees of subtlety than we do.

On purely functional levels, Austen’s fiction is securely anchored in its milieu and for modern audiences some references have slid away from us to become hard to understand. In Sense and Sensibility Colonel Brandon confesses to Elinor that he had previously engaged Mr. Willoughby in a duel, although that word is never used and the whole event is so glossed over as to render it practically opaque to a modern reader’s perusal; Regency readers would have spotted it a mile away, however. It’s the same with Shakespeare – many of his jokes, designed to entertain an audience of his day, are now lost to us and only the long-pondered stabs at meaning provided by academics can give us a vague window onto them.

So, what does all of this mean for Jess Kidd and her novel Things in Jars?

Let me say, right from the start, that Ms. Kidd is a fantastic writer. Her prose cracks and spits with all of the verbal pyrotechnics you’d expect of a writer of (so-called) Literary Fiction. There’s a joy in this writing that is completely engaging and a palpable love for the characters that effusively spills off the page. It has many things to recommend it and it’s clear to see why she won the Costa Short Story Award in 2016.

The book retails an investigation in the career of Bridie Devine, the most renowned female detective of her time, set in and around London in 1863. The crime is the abduction and possible murder of a strange child, born with some unusual physical differences, possibly by circus folk looking for a new attraction, or by anatomists desiring an unusual specimen for their collection. The knot of the investigation is a Gordian one, complicated by the fact that Bridie is being haunted by the ghost of a famous boxer – Ruby Doyle – who is hopelessly in love with her.

There are many things to enjoy about this narrative. The sinister villains are truly sinister and villainous and the dark gloomy descriptions of London with its graveyards, slums and rank laboratories filled with the titular jars all lend the appropriate tone. My only problem is that I don’t believe it. Further, no Victorian reader would buy it either.

Bridie Devine – and her towering maidservant and everyone else around her - is presented to us psychologically as a completely modern person with Twenty-first Century values, determined to brush aside obstructions along the way to obtaining her goals. She smokes, she drinks, she looks men straight in the eye – this is all fine; call me a fan. But this isn’t Victorian London. What this reminded me of mostly, was Caleb Carr’s The Alienist. That novel posits a post-Victorian scenario and peoples it with late Twentieth Century players too, for no good reason. The jarring (sorry!) contrast between such characters and the times in which they’ve been set is a problem that I can’t get across. It’s just like that Coke can suddenly balanced on the roasted snout of the boar’s head at the SCA feast – it knocks down the whole house of cards.

And it’s not as if these kinds of constructions can’t work, and work very well indeed. Anyone who has read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark will know exactly what I mean. The blending of history and fantasy there is downright perfect; nothing leaps out to break the illusion of reality and all of the characters remain faithful to their narrative arcs and their zeitgeist. My takeaway is that stories like Things in Jars are written by Twenty-first Century authors for Twenty-first Century readers and that’s okay; I just wonder what’s the point of setting them in these far-distant places in time when a single misstep can undo everything that the writer is trying to achieve? Reference Lindsey Davis’s constant online arguments with people who tell her that she can’t use the word “corn” when talking about grain in her Ancient Roman crime potboilers (“corn” is a collective noun for grain of any type, a word which pre-dates the discovery of the New World and the introduction of maize – colloquially known as “corn” – into Europe).

In the final analysis, this is a fun read and a refreshing breath of air in a world too often bogged down with bad writing. The pace is cracking, the characters delightful, the story twisty, murky and engaging. Narratively, it’s a little wayward, and I have to admit that I was more interested in the ghost than the unfolding mystery, but then I kind of felt that the writer was too: Ruby Doyle alone is worth the price of admission here. It’s not a perfect book, but it’s a (literally) bloody fun one and you won’t feel as though you’ve wasted your time.

Three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors from me.

Review: "Doctor Who" 2020

CHIBNALL, Chris (Producer), “Doctor Who”, BBC TV Enterprises, 2020

I’m not a huge Whovian but, due to circumstances outside my control, I’ve spent my evenings home and inside, so I decided I may as well catch up on current events. I have to say that I’m not overly impressed.

Right from the start I have to say that I like Jodie Whittaker as the new incarnation of the Doctor. I have no issues with a female Time Lord – it just makes sense to me and I kind of wish that they’d taken the plunge sooner: legitimizing the cross-dressing through backstory references is going to be a massive headache for “Doctor Who” writers in the future but that’s their cross to bear. Whittaker is quirky and fey enough to fall into line with fan expectations of how a Doctor ought to behave and she wields a sonic screwdriver like a boss. No problems with the portrayal; it’s her writers who are letting her down.

Let’s get some history here: everybody – as they say – has their own Doctor. Back in the early 1960s, the TV show was launched in the wake of a huge (for the time) BBC marketing campaign. It was posited as a somewhat edgy children’s show designed to expose kiddies to ideas about science and history. William Hartnell’s Doctor (1963-1966) was saddled with a precocious “grand-daughter” – Susan – and his companions were two British schoolteachers specializing in – you guessed it – history and science. The edginess soon took over though and the kid’s aspects of the drama went by the wayside in favour of Daleks and nightmare-inducing storylines. The Beeb soon realized that they had an unexpected money-spinner on their hands.

Patrick Troughton replaced Hartnell as the Second Doctor (1966-1969) and – due to 60s hippiness and anti-establishment sentiment – entrenched the quirky rebel attitudes that became a hallmark of the character, underscored by his annoying recorder. I have only vague impressions of this run – cost-saving measures at the BBC saw all of the original tapes containing the series wiped and re-used to assuage Tory austerity ideals; Troughton only existed in fans’ memories thereafter, until he was brought back by a time glitch (along with Hartnell) in the 70s tale “The Three Doctors”. Serendipitously, tapes of the original Second Doctor series were found in a vault in South Africa in the early 2000s and so some of Troughton’s work has been restored to us and he’s no longer just the crazy priest who gets impaled on a lightning rod in “The Omen”.

(Cost-cutting at the BBC has long been a bugbear of British TV fans and “Doctor Who” wasn’t the only series to fall victim to it, although it’s the most notable. In the Hartnell seasons, film stock was rationed to each episode and, often, bad takes had to be used because there was simply no more film for a do-over: a hallmark of the Hartnell years is the Doctor repeatedly fluffing his lines. Offsetting this were shows where too much film stock had been allocated and there was pressure on the producers to ensure that none of it was wasted – a case in point was the dreary “Sapphire and Steel”, the episodes of which are interminably drawn-out for no good reason other than to waste film. Still, a tight budget can be the making of a piece and – despite a few egregiously laughable missteps – “Doctor Who” has mostly risen to the challenge.)

The show fell more squarely onto my radar during the Jon Pertwee years (1970-1974) and he, for me, is my Doctor. The quirky rebel was still there, albeit with a somewhat foppish overtone, but there was now a core of steel and the Doctor was no longer just a crazy old kook that the bad guys could push around – the Doc’ could now push back. Bond was in the air, so the Doctor had gadgets and a naff martial arts array on call (which, thankfully, didn’t get too strong an airing) and he became more purposeful and proactive in his efforts. The avuncular traits established by Hartnell were retained in his dealings with the new companions, Jo Grant and later, Sara-Jane Smith.

By this time, BBC sci-fi wünderkind Terry Nation had taken hold of the concept and had streamlined the show more in line with his own ideas of how it should proceed. He grounded the Doctor, sabotaging the TARDIS so that the Doctor could move through time and space but only in the vicinity of Earth, providing more focus to the titular character’s rescue efforts. It also allowed him to be somewhat grudging in his attitudes towards humanity in general. On top of this, Nation honed the United Nation’s Time Lord oversight agency – U.N.I.T. – into a useful framework for containing and explaining the Doctor’s activities. Essentially, Nation brought scaffolding to a TV show that had been episodically showcasing a Monster-Of-The-Week vehicle, allowing it have externality, self-reference and to become its own story generating engine.

As good as all this was, it couldn’t last. Changing line-ups in production staff (read: egos) meant that no-one was content to leave alone the thing that wasn’t broken. Enough cohesion had been generated and there was still enough sense on board the production staff to ensure that the Tom Baker years (1974-1981) didn’t go completely off the rails, and there are quite a lot of stellar story-arcs and performances (with the exception of that last episode of “The Talons of Weng Ch-iang”). There were some cringe-worthy moments – Leela – but on the whole the show had built enough DNA that it rolled along almost effortlessly. Then came a problem – money.

By the 80s, the BBC finally worked out that “Doctor Who” was a solid 24-carat cash cow which was making them rich. Budgets for the show had been growing, but now they went through the roof (relatively speaking) and the ease of production saw the show’s charm vanish under a slick sheen of over-production. The later Tom Baker eps are all so veneered and tend to blur into each other, so characterless are they. Too, the stable of writers and designers had just started to burn out – along with the actors: things were grinding to a halt. So, they switched gears (and Doctors) and signed on for another round, although not with as much cash: BBC executives – dour lot that they are – had prophesied the End Times for the show.

Peter Davison was likable enough as the Doctor (1981-1984), what with his cricket flannels riffing off Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey character, but the writers obviously felt that more time should be spent with the companions. Bad move. This Doctor gave us – in what was possibly a revenge move for “Neighbours” and “Home & Away” – Tegan the flight-attendant with the Aussie twang and the ability to “speak Aboriginal” – that was a moment when an entire nation cringed as one. It also gave us the ickily-syrupy Adric (boo!), the first companion to die (hooray!) while conveniently showing us how to kill Cybermen. Of course, we now know that killing-off a character is code for a ratings drop, and soon “Doctor Who” was in free-fall.

Flailing wildly, the writers and producers decided that what we obviously wanted in a Time Lord was someone less ethically and morally upright. No more white-knights; it was time for a Doctor moulded more along the lines of the Master. Along came Colin Baker (1984-1986) and the less said about that the better.

Sylvester McCoy wrapped up a long line of creative misfires indicative of the producers not having a clue about what the fans were after. This Doctor (1987-1989 and 1996) was literally a hodge-podge of previous incarnations, surrounded by too many companions, turning the entire show into almost a ‘Doctor by committee’. In desperation, the show was part-sold off to the Yanks to turn into a movie starring Paul McGann (1996) – not a new concept: a Doctor Who movie starring Peter Cushing appeared in 1965 - which added new layers of horror to the franchise before pulling the plug…

In 2005, the BBC felt that the stars were right and they ponied-up for a re-boot season of the show. The devilishly-handsome Christopher Eccleston stepped into the Doctor’s shoes with a much more urbane metrosexual look and - given the precedent set by the McGann film – embarked on (gasp!) a romance with Billy Piper as the new companion. This iteration was more firmly grounded in the current British zeitgeist and carried touchstones to current events and tropes which viewers could relate to. Companions were no longer Scottish Highland chiefs, warrior-women from abandoned space communities, or interstellar super-geniuses – they were people that average Londoners would run into every day. Everypeople, in short. Add to this the fact that most of the monsters were actively staging incursions into modern European – if not international – affairs, then we could all see that the Beeb had re-discovered its mojo, at least as far as the Doc’ was concerned.

David Tennant showed up next (2005-2010) – after Eccleston decided he was getting typecast and because an upcoming gig as a prosthetic-clad space elf was in the offing – and like Hartnell and Troughton before him, consolidated the role and structured the aesthetics and storylines eventually becoming his own Jon Pertwee by the end of his run. Along the way he introduced the notion of famous guest stars slumming through the narrative arcs and the now-standard Christmas specials. Business was booming, Time Lord-wise.

Matt Smith (2010-2013), seemed set to continue the good times. Unexpectedly though – and Chris Eccelston’s early departure should have been a giveaway – playing the über-Time Lord had become something of a poisoned chalice. Actors began to worry that they would become typecast, or that commitment to the show would mean that they would be forced to abandon other more lucrative gigs. Being the Doctor was a calling, a vocation, rather than just a role, and many of the players called to the part felt that, in these gig-economy times, such a tied-in situation would signal career death. Thespians began to wonder, how long is a reasonable stint as the Doctor? What’s the trade-off? And so, after only three years and with some great narrative arcs behind him, Matt Smith said “toodles”.

Peter Capaldi’s run (2013-2017) seemed a return to form and presented the viewers with some solid fan service, a steampunk edge and some unexpected twists and turns (mainly of the Master variety). However, at the end of his run, Steven Moffatt, who had been valiantly holding things together as producer, decided to call it a day. This major change seemed like a natural jumping-off point to introduce a new Doctor so, with Chris Chibnall producing, the new Doctor – Jodie Whittaker – accepted the keys to the TARDIS.

Of course, the proposal to make the Doctor a woman was met with the usual outrage from the peanut gallery. In a flashback to “Ghostbusters 2016”, there was a great outpouring declaring that ‘the Doctor can ONLY be a man!’; however, by this stage of the game I think it’s pretty clear how much bollocks that position is. Jodie Whittaker has crafted an excellent persona which falls nicely in line with the other incarnations of the character, the only problem is that she isn’t being well-served by her writers and producers. Which brings us to the present:

Once more there’s an unhealthy obsession with the Doctor’s companions. Someone has obviously made the comment that these characters are the gateways for the viewing audience, allowing sympathy with them and the events that surround them; however, this is a dud lot. Graeme is lots of fun to watch and is obviously there for comic effect, but Yaz effectively looks like Tegan in a different frock and Ryan is just TARDIS clutter – why has he stuck around for this long? Surely his Adric moment was due long ago. The focus on these three means that the Doctor is necessarily pushed into the background and she becomes a piece of the furniture rather than a pro-active element of the narrative. She doesn’t act; she reacts; she’s always the last to see the danger rolling off the assembly line and that – to be blunt – ain’t the Doctor.

It feels as if, at the beginning of the planning for this last season, a meeting was held and everyone was asked to nominate something that they felt was “cool”, either location-wise, in a sci-fi sense generally, or in terms of the Doctor. Then they were told to go and write a framework around all of those tentpoles and try to pull it altogether into some kind of shambolic narrative across twelve instalments. Thus, we have Nikolai Tesla for no good reason other than that the Doc wanted to say “hello!”; the gathering of Lord Byron, the Shelleys and Dr. Polidori at the Villa Diodati because…why not?; and a two-part, budget-blowing James Bond riff that meant the sets and effects for the Gallifrey-based conclusion looked more than a little anaemic. None of the stories in this season spring naturally from the substrate and nothing leads organically from the preceding material. It’s all choppy and indulgent, although – I’m relieved to note - the grinding of axes in the background has minimized somewhat from Whittaker’s first season.

Even the opponents are re-works and re-hashes. First there’s the Master, completely ignoring the fact that there was a thundering plotline involving him/her at the end of the Capaldi era narrative. Then there’s the Judoon tromping up the joint because apparently some of the writers like to say the word “Judoon”. And - speaking of tromping – we have Cybermen. Again. And next year they’ve promised us Daleks. Again. You can put a frilly collar on a Cyberman and have him stomp through Gallifrey-as-was, it’s still nothing new. And you’d suppose (and you’d be right) that what the fans want is something new. We even got a Captain Jack Harkness cameo for chrissake! Chris Chibnall is starting to look like the J.J. Abrams of the Whoniverse*…

Most seasons of “Doctor Who” post 2005, have tried to craft an over-arching plotline to be resolved by the season’s end; the 2020 season’s über-plot – the mystery of the Timeless Child – got completely lost in all of the shenanigans of the Doctor’s companions. To the extent that, as the Doctor was prepared to look momentarily bemused by mention of it then brush it off and get back to things, so too were we. Story complications like Ruth Clayton and the immortal Irish policeman who gets mind-wiped in the final episode became moments to go to the loo, or to make a cup of tea, rather than events of any consequence. And the pace was frenetic: there was no time to relax in all of this. In fact, most of the time I was wishing that some 1960s Beeb exec. would step out of the woodwork and say, ‘Here’s another 50,000 kilometres of film stock; make sure you use it all up before the season ends, just like “Sapphire & Steel”’.

So, in the final analysis, it seems that “Doctor Who” is a product of a boom-and-bust popularity tied to network budgetary policies, fan peccadilloes and ebb-and-flow tides of creative helmspeople. When it’s good it’s very, very good; when it’s bad… not so much. The Thirteenth Doctor has had a rocky start, a victim of the very same ‘blue sky thinking’ that re-created her as a woman this time around and which should have been done previously and which should be regarded as a thing of no consequence nowadays. The Doctor is the Doctor, no matter what meat-suit they’re wearing. We have a great Doctor at present; sadly, we also have a dearth of creativity on the scripting and production side of things, a companion overload and the imminent death of at least one of them in the Christmas special ahead. We don’t need a TARDIS to know that we’ve seen all of this before and that we all know to where it leads.

*That’s not a compliment, by the way. In the same way that Abrams only ever re-makes franchise material that has already been done (although, arguably, he does it better) - Star Wars; Star Trek – so too, does it appear that Chibnall is simply a do-overer.

Player Handouts: “The Madman”

This is the third scenario from the sixth edition of Chaosium’s “Call of Cthulhu” roleplaying game. It’s a relatively straightforward narrative – strange things are reported in the press from a remote area in Vermont and a trail of evidence leads right to the heart of the matter, via an alcoholic backwoodsman in the thrall of Mythos entities. In terms of handouts, everything is fairly upfront – a bunch of newspaper articles forms the background of the mystery and then it all boils down to talking to the locals. There is a pretty stiff fight at the end against the invaders of Strafton Mountain, which could lead to some party fatalities if not approached with forethought.

The bulk of the evidence can be found in the pages of the “Brattleboro Tattler”:

(This is based on an actual image of the ‘Tattler from July 1911 – I’ve obscured the date somewhat so that you can fit it in better with your own campaign timeframe.)

The only other piece of physical evidence which the scenario calls for is a piece of crumpled paper with a name written on it in pencil. This may or may not be discovered in a wastepaper basket in the missing journalist’s home.

And that’s it! From here on it’s all over bar the shouting!

(All information presented here is copyright Chaosium Inc., taken from CALL OF CTHULHU 6th Edition, 2004.)

Long Lankin...

I plundered the folk section of our store’s CD range the other day, in order to provide some tunes for the clients and I discovered a Steeleye Span collection that I had not seen before. I hadn’t listened to this group in an age, so – if nothing else - it promised to be a good run down memory lane. There were the inevitable mainstays – “All around My Hat”; “Cam Ye O’er Frae France” – but then I heard one song that I’d completely forgotten about: “Long Lankin”.

The song is based on a story first published in Kent by Bishop Percy in 1775 and concerns the lord of a castle who, being summoned to London, must leave his wife and newborn child behind:

“Said the Lord unto his Lady as he rode over the moss

‘Beware of Long Lankin that lives amongst the gorse.

Beware the moss, beware the moor, beware of Long Lankin;

Be sure the doors are bolted well

Lest Lankin should creep in.’

“Said the Lord unto his Lady as he rode away

‘Beware of Long Lankin that lives amongst the hay.

Beware the moss, beware the moor, beware of Long Lankin;

Be sure the doors are bolted well

Lest Lankin should creep in.’”

So far, so good. These two verses are delivered by Maddy Prior to a slow and mournful accompaniment of fiddles and pipes (with the usual Steeleye Span electronic input which irritates so many purist folkies). The scene is quickly established – the lord of the castle has left, and the presence of some wilderness-dwelling being is highlighted as a possible threat.

“‘Where's the master of the house?’, says Long Lankin;

‘He's 'way to London’, says the nurse to him.

‘Where's the lady of the house?’, says Long Lankin;

‘She's up in her chamber’, says the nurse to him.

‘Where's the baby of the house?’, says Long Lankin;

‘He's asleep in the cradle’, says the nurse to him.”

Suddenly, the tempo changes: everything gets sharp and angular and we get one of those jarring time-signature changes that Jethro Tull is so renowned for. Suddenly, Lankin is with us and another character – that of the Nurse – is introduced. We quickly discover that the two are in cahoots, and that they have an evil plan:

“We will pinch him, we will prick him,

We will stab him with a pin;

And the nurse shall hold the basin

For the blood all to run in.”

And they waste no time going about it:

“So they pinched him and they pricked him,

Then they stabbed him with a pin;

And the false nurse held the basin

For the blood all to run in.”

The basin is an interesting sidelight on these horrible events. The story has travelled widely across England and America and was well known even before Bishop Percy committed it to print in the late 1700s. Other re-tellings have Long Lankin named as “Lambikin”, or “Lamikin”, and this has led some commentators to think that perhaps our villain was afflicted with leprosy, giving him an obvious pallor (and probably forcing him to live in the wilderness, away from others). An old folk treatment in grimoire circles for the disease – probably not widely used – was to bathe in the blood of a newborn child. What we’re seeing here then, is less of a Nurse and more of a Witch. But there’s still more villainy to come:

"‘Lady, come down the stairs,’ says Long Lankin;

‘How can I see in the dark?’, she says unto him.

‘You have silver mantles’, says Long Lankin,

‘Lady, come down the stairs by the light of them.’

Down the stairs the lady came, thinking no harm;

Lankin, he stood ready to catch her in his arms.”

The song skips over some of the salient points of the original legend. In that version, the Lady of the House, bothered by the sound of her child screaming downstairs, calls out to the Nurse to do something about it (go parenting!). The Nurse responds, offering a list of things that she claims to have tried to stop the baby’s cries and then says that nothing but the presence of its mother will calm it down. The Lady is stymied by the lack of a light to guide her down the stairs but is persuaded to use the light provided by her “silver mantles” in order to find her way. Rather than a fireplace accoutrement, this is in fact her expensive outer robe – a kind of cloak worn indoors in order to provide warmth. Using the reflected light provided by this garment, the Lady proceeds downstairs to her doom:

“There was blood all in the kitchen,

There was blood all in the hall;

There was blood all in the parlour,

Where my lady she did fall.”

The jaunty tone adopted for these verses is quite at odds with the nature of what is happening and reminds me starkly of the short story “Frolic” by Thomas Ligotti. Both works display the evil doings of a gleefully capering psychopath on a rampage. The tone continues on into the next verse as well.

“Now Long Lankin shall be hangéd

From the gallows, oh, so high;

And the false nurse shall be burnéd

In the fire close by.”

And so, our villains are destroyed, and Justice is seen to be done. Or is it? Certainly, given all of the preceding awfulness, it’s a relief that the source of the horror has been removed, the role of the False Nurse here as Witch is underscored by her being burnt at the stake. But has every aspect of the story been truthfully retailed up until this point? A few scraps, it turns out, have been carefully omitted:

The story upon which this song is based is often referred to as “Lord Wearie’s Castle”. It tells how Lord Wearie contracted a down-and-out Mason to build for him a castle appropriate to his current standing. The Mason – Lankin – did as he was bid and, when it came time for Lord Wearie to pay up, he was surprised to be turned down. ‘I haven’t the cash to pay you,’ says the backstabbing Lord, ‘unless I were to sell some of my lands and I certainly won’t be doing that.’ Lankin shakes his fist and storms off, telling the Lord he’ll rue the day that he reneged on his contract. Later, Lord Wearie is summoned to London, and he gives his wife explicit instructions to seal the castle against an incursion, specifically by Long Lankin; however, Lankin had the foresight to install a small window in the castle at a point where it would be overlooked (such chinks in the security of a grand building were often created by medieval builders, mainly as last-resort escape routes, but also for nefarious reasons). Consequently, when the castle staff were bolting the windows, they missed one of them.

We might conclude that Long Lankin’s response to being cheated by the ruling class was a trifle extreme, but can we really say he didn’t have cause? It starts to look like this is a snow-job, to prevent any ignominy falling upon the ‘noble’ classes and to paint Lankin as a mindless serial killer, or some kind of goblin. The song concludes with a coda back to the starting verse, adding a peculiar hint of possible repetition to the narrative:

“Said the Lord unto his Lady as he rode over the moss,

‘Beware of Long Lankin that lives amongst the gorse.

Beware the moss, beware the moor, beware of Long Lankin;

Make sure the doors are bolted well

Lest Lankin should creep in.’”

This might be interpreted as not so much a general warning about marauding home invaders, but also about scheming Lords who might’ve tired of their current spouse and who are looking for a way to dispose of them.

Thus, a disgruntled workman with anger management issues is transformed into a bogeyman of legend and is committed to folklore. The Steeleye Span song is perhaps the best-known and most easily obtained version of the story – available on their album “Commoner’s Crown” (1975) and reinterpreted by them on their ‘best of’ album Present (2002), a selection of fan favourites re-recorded by the band’s current lineup. Martin Carthy, Dave Swarbrick and Alasdair Roberts have all recorded versions as well (along with many others).

Naturally others have toyed with the ideas promoted by this narrative. British author John Banville’s early collection of short stories is entitled Long Lankin (1970) and explores ideas of destructive relationships and the things that can tear people apart – in a relationship sense: it’s not everybody’s cup of tea and it plays heavily off the notions implicit in Lord Wearie’s perfidy. Lindsey Barraclough, on the other hand, has taken the supernatural elements further in her dark fantasy novel Long Lankin (2011), firmly entrenching the titular character as a paranormal entity preying upon a family and its grand estate. And a character called “Lankin” appears as a retainer of an amoral fairy court in the Terry Pratchett Discworld novel, Lords and Ladies (1992).

*****

In terms of gaming and especially Call of Cthulhu roleplaying, this premise can be pillaged in all kinds of interesting ways. The poem – or a performance of it by one of the many folk bands out there – can form a handy touchstone for your party of adventurers, as well as being a nice piece of mood-setting music to play in the background. The setting, of course, would have to be one replete with moors and bogs, especially of the peat variety.

First of all, you need to decide if this is a Mythos event taking place; some other type of paranormal happening; or a scubidüberism. Let’s take them one-by-one:

Mythos Event: there are quite a few Mythos entities that conform to a notion of Long Lankin as bogeyman. His defining traits would seem to be paleness; bloodthirstiness; and an ability to creep in to places undetected. Spawns of Abhoth; Crawling Ones; Broodlings of Eihort; Trolls; The Worm That Walks; Worms of the Earth; Xo Tl’mi-Go; the Lesser Old One, Lam; the Roman deity Summanus; any of these may be used to represent the villain from the poem. It might take a little bit of massage, but any of these might be a way of embodying the legendary bogeyman in a real, Mythos-affected reality.

Paranormal Event: Here we can turn to folklore for some inspiration. We know from the song that Lankin and his pal, the False Nurse, were executed together; from years of reading “Hellboy”, we know that a funeral pyre curse issued by a witch at the moment of her death can lead to all kinds of demonic consequences. Given her willingness to catch blood in a basin, the witch may well have been allowed to return to the world as a Vampire; she, in turn, may have resurrected her partner-in-crime, Long Lankin, as a Ghost, a Skeleton, or, better still, a Scarecrow made from hay and moss and gorse (and possibly some of his bones).

Scubidüberism: Obviously, with this kind of tale, there needs to be a reason as to why someone would go to all the trouble of impersonating an entity who died in the distant past, but which now has resurrected itself to continue its depredations. Perhaps Lord Wearie’s castle stands in the road of a new highway development? Or has the land been ear-marked for a new suburban offshoot of the local township? As usual with these takes on the supernatural, the Investigators should immediately ask themselves “cui bono?” How the perpetrators go about faking the existence of Long Lankin – and how far they are willing to push it – is entirely up to the Keeper. Alternatively, perhaps there is simply a serial-killer out there who has decided to adopt the mantle of Long Lankin, becoming his new incarnation…

*****

Horror can be found anywhere (even in the folk music section of your local music store! In fact, especially in the folk music section of your music store, given some of the vicious peccadilloes of that musical form…). Oftentimes, the more benign-seeming a cultural tradition appears, the more sinister can be the things that it codes for – look at the sources for many of the world’s so-called Fairy Stories (and keep in mind that these are meant for children!). If you’re looking for inspiration for your next Call of Cthulhu session, try taking a trip through the nursery…

Japan Supernatural Exhibition, February 2020

“Japan Supernatural: 1700s to Today”, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Domain, Sydney NSW, November 2^nd 2019 – March 8^th 2020

I had been waiting for this for awhile. The Japanese approach to the supernatural is quite unique and this exhibition promised to get right to the bottom of things Japanese going bump in the night. The scope for this show ranges from 1700 through to the present and offers a good selection of material, covering woodblock prints, paintings, sculpture, books, film and installations – definitely something for everybody.

My reservation going in was coloured by my attendance at the “Alexander the Great” showing at the Australia Museum some years ago. That whole experience for me was ruined by the plague of small children washing around the place being ‘monitored’ by a decidedly lacklustre display of ‘parenting’. Witnessing the proud relics of history to the earsplitting background cacophony of sugar-jonesing, badly-behaved children and the murmured inconsequence of their un-engaged parents was not an experience I wanted to repeat, so I decided to wait until the school holidays were over before going anywhere near this event. Once I had determined that all of the hellspawn would be safely locked away for the day, I whistled up a friend and we agreed to meet at the Gallery.

My attendance was contingent upon a two-hour train trip into the heart of the city, so I left home pretty early on the day. As I departed, it was pleasantly foggy – after weeks of imminent destruction by fire, any kind of humidity is welcome at this stage. As we progressed down into Babylon however, that fog turned into drizzle, then rain, and then into a steady blatter which became the hallmark of the rest of the day. And, foolishly, I had decided that I could manage without an umbrella. Aided by all of Sydney’s connected underground and street-level shopping malls and covered thoroughfares, I managed to get as close to the Domain as I could before reconciling myself to dampness as I ran across Hyde Park. Fortunately, a fellow pedestrian heading my way took pity on me and offered me the shelter of her brolly; thanks to her I then only had to dodge from fig-tree to fig-tree along the drive to the Art Gallery of New South Wales and I was all set.

My timing had been excellent, and I had only a short wait beneath the Palladian portico of the Gallery until the place opened. Then I had my first intimation of disappointment: as I waited there for the doors to open and my friend to arrive, groups of school kids began to appear being ‘organized’ by teachers with the same degree of success usually discovered when herding cats. I had forgotten about school excursions! It seemed that even outside of the school holiday period I was doomed to be exposed to an unwanted amount of kiddage. As the teachers bawled uselessly though, I determined that these scions of the overly-moneyed from their exclusive school were here to see some other part of the Gallery’s offerings, so I pinned some hope on being relatively child free for the exhibition I had come all this way to enjoy.

Once the doors were open, my friend in attendance and tickets purchased, there was only one objective in mind – caffeine. I had come too far already without a single coffee onboard and I don’t function at all well when I’m pre-caffeinated. So, we went to the Gallery Café and got outside a light breakfast while watching the rain battering the windows from across Woolloomooloo. After that it was time for some Japanese horrors.

Sadly, while one of the groups of silver-spoon chewing schoolkids had been diverted to another section of the Gallery, the other – much younger – agglomeration of schoolboys was destined to come to Japan with us so, grinding my teeth quietly, we sauntered through the entrance and were on our way.

(And look, I understand the need to expose children early to the wonders of art and the creative process but these events are not free and these brats simply drift into corners where they titter and point at images of naked women, or they wander around in a self-absorbed daze getting in the way of paying guests. At this event almost every child simply stood in front of the artworks pointing their ‘phones at them – recording even the video presentations – as if by chance they might capture the answer to a question in an upcoming quiz while wondering vaguely when they were going to eat next. I got to the point where I deliberately walked in front of every child holding out their mobile phone while digging in their nose with a finger of their free hand, in order to just be a prick about it. And were their teachers present? Not that I could tell. Kids and I do not mix.)

*Ahem!*

Any one who’s done any kind of social history research about early Japanese culture knows that it quickly moved to a very refined cultural pitch. Artistic forms rapidly focused on subtlety and nuance and many creative outlets became ratified by various implemented structures and systems of imagery. Certain activities were confined to specific times of the day, or year, and a huge cultural mechanism of creativity was the result. One activity – the telling of ghost stories – became organized in this fashion, leading to an annual tradition of telling one hundred spooky stories over a series of evenings to entertain household or court members.

Inevitably, these stories were codified and written down, and then were illustrated in various fashions by notable artists of the period. The exhibition uses these scrolls as the jumping-off point for its raison d’être. These hyakki yagyō (“night procession of a hundred demons”) began to systematize the presence of supernatural beings within the culture. Some of these are exquisitely detailed renderings of all the creatures involved in the stories on long scrolls (emaki) while others are woodblock printed books depicting each creature and its behaviour; still others are collections of the stories from which they emerge.

Having determined the origins of this paranormal literature within the culture, the exhibition then traces the use of these concepts across all other areas of artistic expression. Thus, we see imagery of yokai and yurei (“supernatural phenomena” and “ghosts”, respectively) appearing in kabuki dramas, in fashion, in history – even in political discourse. Some narratives began to take precedence – the village headman crucified for speaking out against imperial cruelty summoned back to haunt his killers in the form of a gigantic skeleton; the demon posing as a samurai’s aunt trying to retrieve the arm he cut from her six days previously; the samurai approached by the ghost of a woman who died in childbirth begging him to look after her child – and were interpreted over and over in various ways.

At a point in the early 1800s, political opinion turned against ideas of folklore and superstition as Japan tried to modernize, in the face of increasing exposure to the West. Accordingly, discussion of supernatural creatures and events was banned, and those professing to have experienced such events were ridiculed and mocked. It was not until much later when foreign travelers began to collect Japanese folk legends and export them back to their own countries that interest was revived, and the Japanese began to reclaim these traditions and re-work them into their creative concepts. Most notable among these foreign collectors was Lafcadio Hearn, an American of Greek and Irish extraction who worked for a time as an American diplomat to Japan before moving there permanently. He is most renowned for his books of Japanese ghost tales, especially Kwaidan (1909), which was made into an award-winning movie by Masaki Kobayashi in the 1960s and which helped revive Japanese interest in mythology and folk traditions.

In the modern era all of this impetus has seen modern artists re-discovering these narrative traditions and using them as springboards for their own contemporary creative works. Thus we have Fuyuko Matsui reinterpreting a Buddhist tradition of realistically depicting the decomposition of the dead, in order to discuss the role of women in the modern world; Chiho Aoshima playing with the liminal notions of graveyards and childhood; and Miwa Yanagi’s disturbing Fairy Tale series of photographs which, just like Hearn’s reinterpretation of Japanese stories for the West, takes European and other non-Japanese children’s narratives and refocuses them through a Japanese supernatural lens.

Of course, the big noise of the exhibition is Takashi Murakami’s contributions to the show, which have caused some angry discussion in the local media. The main bone of contention is the 10m x 3m mural installation especially created for the Gallery entitled (only moments before the exhibition opened) “Japanese Supernatural: Vertiginous After Staring at the Empty World Too Intensely, I Found Myself Trapped in the Realm of Lurking Ghosts and Monsters”. This is a colourful series of vignettes surrounding a kabuki-inspired image of a cat (chosen for its appeal to children, apparently) and assembled by a 350-strong staff working for the artist. The disposable, last minute, group-effort nature of this work has thrown some critics into a tailspin, not the least for the amount of money that the Gallery forked-out for it. Personally? I found it garish and a bit haphazard, too much like glittery wallpaper at a catwalk fashion show. I did like his temple guardian-inspired statues, though.

All-in-all I thoroughly enjoyed this event from the tiniest netsuke to the largest club-wielding bakemono. I had to suffer the inconvenience of twice having some pubescent moron step backwards into me in order to get an artwork into frame on their mobile ‘phone, but that was a small price to pay overall. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition is lavish and well worth the cover price (although you can find it cheaper at Kinokuniya – heads up, locals!) and will repay re-reads into the future. This was a well presented and carefully constructed parade of night creatures that could be enjoyed on many levels and it’s a credit to the Art Gallery of NSW to have taken such a potentially-dubious notion and to have run with it so successfully. The exhibition continues until March 8^th this year so, if you can, you should definitely make the effort to catch it.