The Night Land: questionable dark roads

Inadvertently in time for Halloween, I'm considering The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson as a piece of literature and thinking about how it did what it did for me. That is, I found it flawed but intense. The setting is wonderfully stark and eerie, and towards the end are some very good bashes and clangs of emotion, but some of the narrative make it not so compelling to me.

As the story goes, long after the Sun has gone out and humans take shelter from the darkness in a vast pyramid, the protagonist hears telepathic cries from someone who was his beloved in a past life. She lives in a smaller pyramid, long forgotten, where the Earth's limited energy supply is already becoming scarce. The protagonist braves monster-infested, volcanically-active lands to try and rescue her people.

It's a story filled with archaic prose as well as separated cultures sharing a language and old-fashioned gender roles millennia into the future. It's also filled with things like the "Road Where the Silent Ones Walk" and the "Doorways in the Night"—the latter of which was really quite creepy to me: in a certain stretch of the Night Land, you might get from time to time the strange sense that an unseen door has opened above you, and then it begins to transmit unearthly noises from without. 

My following thoughts on the novel are going to be fraught with spoilers. I'm writing these for people who aren't planning to read The Night Land or have read it already.

What the slow parts are missing

The story turns quite slow during the return journey: after all, it's mostly encountering the same sights and hazards as during the outward journey, only in the opposite order, and accompanied by Naani, whom the protagonist has rescued. About sixty e-reader pages from the end, I found the story so slow-paced I was reading several pages a week and had to finally resolve to read ten pages a day just because I was fond of the story's atmosphere and wanted to see its conclusion.

By considering what I was missing as a reader, I had room for a good exercise before me in figuring out what a story needs to be compelling.

This part of the story is a return journey, so we're encountering the same sights in opposite order. The difference is that the protagonist now has a companion and sees things somewhat differently: he's more afraid for his girlfriend's safety than his own. Even so, the traveling is very repetitive and drags on sometimes with not much conflict.

There's a disturbing scene in which they leave the rest of the Lesser Pyramid survivors to die. What if some of the other survivors begged to join them in their travel, and then our couple have to turn them away? But I can see that getting to know the other survivors before their deaths would've been traumatic and made the story even darker, perhaps a lot darker than it should be. Besides, the tragedy of the Lesser Pyramid is already expressed in other little ways. Naani is quite troubled when asked whether she had a brother.

A less mood-changing addition might've been some of the information about the Night Land that the protagonist read in the library early on. He could have saved it for when it became relevant instead of spitting it all out before the journey. I'm of course applying my modern sensibilities here— I'm assuming they didn't have the same rule of speculative-fiction writing back then to avoid infodumping and to reveal the setting through the action. Or did they? I'd be interested to know what sorts of advice for the genre got passed around at the time. 

Maybe he could have even taken some time during his return journey, now that he knows the way and is a bit more relaxed, to verify what he read or seek out new discoveries about the planet's history. As it is, it almost feels to me like most of the worldbuilding information that comes out in the early chapters goes to waste since not much of it is actually put to use on the adventure. Some subplots like this wouldn't deviate too far, since it's shown already that both he and Naani have a curiosity for the earlier world.

And then the leg of the journey preceding the final fight with the Humpt Men gets particularly tedious because Naani's being difficult for no reason. I had thought earlier on that their love scenes are a little gooey and overly harmonious, and was hoping they'd have some tension further on, which would be a perfect addition to the level of conflict. I would've found it both appropriate considering that their pairedness is specifically what makes the return journey different from the outward, and helpful in making the characters feel more compellingly realistic.

Just, it would've been really nice if the tension were over something actually substantial. Here she's only annoying and petty, and I'm pretty sure there's even a bit where he says later in life he learns women are simply like that, but I can't find it now.

The end! 

The pace picked up for me namely when Naani becomes less defiant. And then the final push! After Naani is made unconscious by the House of Silence, things get downright intense. In desperation the protagonist drops the caution that has slowed all his travels up to now and just makes a run for it.

It's very well-written— I would find it hard to write an emotional first-person action scene without resorting to an instinct-driven stream-of-consciousness thing, but the protagonist, for how flustered he is, continues to be eloquent while yet very vivid—even when Naani is pronounced dead.

I teared up during the burial. It was a beautiful ending, and I felt I should have seen it coming, with the protagonist's earlier musings about the death of one's beloved and how it makes you not want to live on. During the funeral, I expected the protagonist to drift off into death with a sweet knowledge that he would be reborn one day into an even stranger world.

This would have been an excellent conclusion to the story, being a culmination of the two main pieces of the novel: his love beyond death for His Own, and the weirdness of that future age. He even says the journey hasn't been for nothing, since "she not to have come alone and with madness unto her death; but to have died in mine arms."

But instead, the author goes with a less-fitting, rather cliché ending where she comes back to life at the last moment.

Loving detail

Nevertheless, I found the final chapter, about their happily ever after, pleasant and moving. I was glad for the use of little details that rendered the story more vivid, like when the protagonist finally tells Naani he regrets never managing to catch her kissing him in his sleep, and Naani reveals that all that time she didn't realize he had any awareness of that at all.

That was charming! I loved how they could look back on a seemingly unimportant bit of fun on their horrifying journey and get some smiles and sentimentality out of it. I mostly found that the story is weakened by a lack of details, to the point of all conversation being paraphrased, so it's all the more emphatic and vivid when a detail like this actually is mentioned.

In a way the story also sort of feels more universal without much detail, combined with the narrator sometimes asking the audience to compare his experiences with their own. I do wonder whether that universality is intended— C.S. Lewis wrote of fantasy's ability to "generalize while remaining concrete," actually a concept I should maybe think about more sometime.

And it does feel like detail is present when it matters, at times of both terror and love. The couple's playfulness and lovingness through their journey, though a little excessive at times, feel realistic and give their relationship a certain character, in fact more character than either of the two individuals get on their own. I suppose that vagueness regarding individuals but specificity regarding the couple lends well to the protagonist's project of making his audience understand what true love is capable of.

I imagined that if the book were a movie, the final scene would begin with the camera sweeping in on the two of them kissing each other's food before they eat it, just as they used to do with the food-tablets during their journey. Unfortunately, while the final chapter mentions a meal, they're never said to do that.

Emotive uses for fantasy

As I said, the funeral was powerful for me. You might think rituals from fantasy settings, or even from cultures other than yours, wouldn't have much emotional effect, since things don't have the meanings you're familiar with, but The Night Land in fact makes good use of its foreignness.

The funeral is described piece by piece, which would be boring and petty to do with a familiar funeral since we already know what goes on during one. The protagonist's slow lingering over the various customs is a kind of mourning, and the reader's unfamiliarity with the event gives him an excuse to do it. And the customs he explains—the meaning of Naani's garment, the Song of Weeping rolling over the gathered multitudes, and the final haze of the Earth-Current—are beautiful and imaginative and each one contributes to the sense of finality.

Besides, as the protagonist mentions some of the death rituals in the beginning of the story, I did have some steeping in their culture before the funeral. I just think the rituals could have been introduced more smoothly, like if he had a reason to go down there and see something happen firsthand.

Another bit of fantastical worldbuilding that I found to add emotionality is the aether, which appropriately can transmit emotions. When he nears the end of his journey, he senses the multitudes looking out for him, and I can feel the situation awaken with hope. As the monsters gain on him, the "thrillings of the Aether" are what make his final battles hopeful and noble, instead of a pessimistic expression of the world's inhospitability. In that sense, I would say the presence of the aether changes the very meaning of his journey. 

The aether would've also been a nice clever way to stay in the protagonist's point of view while communicating to the reader that the Great Pyramid is still around and eager for his safe return, if only he didn't mess it up by talking about what he "later" learned was happening in the Pyramid while he was out there, which spoils that he does in fact survive. To be accurate, he spoils that much earlier on by referring to life after the adventure was over, but I had forgotten about that by the end.

Forces of good

I wasn't overly pleased the first time the circle of light appeared overhead and saved the protagonists from sure death. At the same time, in a world that seems overly plentiful with evil forces, or "Evil Forces" rather, where there are unreasonably many things that want to destroy everyone, maybe it's fairly excusable to have a force of good that does the opposite, for balance.

The deus ex machina is also carried out as well as it could be, I think. At the end of the protagonist's mighty run, I was wondering where the forces of good were to save him, since they were there last time he was in serious danger—and then sure enough, it was there, and that contributed to a sense of hope and comfort. In that way, it's nice that the circle of light had been introduced once before; it is established that it's possible but also that its occasional appearance certainly doesn't guarantee a safe rest of the journey.

During that intense final leg of the journey, that divine force didn't move me quite as much as the goodwill of humanity. As he nears the Great Pyramid, it's so heartwarming to know that the masses are supporting him. That might be because of my more humanistic outlook, but probably more because of how it's portrayed throughout the story.

There's a little running theme of humanity and its associations with love, with the "multitudes" being so well-wishing. By contrast, non-human humanoids are usually hostile, and the protagonist even muses a little on the distinctiveness of the human spirit even in the face of evolution and the production of hybrids through interbreeding, even though he doesn't actually mention love there.

There's not one evil human in the story. You know in real life, there'd be someone out of the huge gathered crowd who, say, spits on him when he enters the circle of protection, or peeks when the doctors are examining the Maid. But I'd like to think even in reality, a majority of the people would be kind, and it is the majority that stands out to the protagonist.

I love that the kindness of humanity is shown in a majestically benevolent way, even a holy way. That great light on the horizon is from the massive tower of people waiting for him, eager for his safe homecoming

I didn't notice it when reading, but The Night Land really is a story about love, most overtly romantic love, but also love among humanity. The two aren't contrasted; rather one seems a generalization of the other, since romantic love is described as an "utter greatness of understanding" and being surrounded by joy, both qualities also seen in the sympathy and goodwill of his Pyramid. And love of both kinds provides the people with life and meaning, even as humanity is on the decline and the darkness is fated to close in. 

And now I to have set out somewhat of my opinions regarding the Book.

The Kalevala, and music about it

I finished reading the Kalevala today—that is, the national epic of Finland, adapted by Elias Lönnrot in the 19th century from folksong. I was surprised how much emotion it managed to produce in me, emotion as you get from stories, despite it just being a poem. Things happen according to the order of poetry rather than reality, such as there being a lot of coincidences, and everyone speaks in verse. And yet I got a strong sense of the characters and enjoyed it very much in a story kind of way. It was good reading.

A friend asked why I chose to read the Kalevala, and, heh, I wasn't exactly sure. It's a combination of having a taste for classics from European cultures, listening to a bit too much Finnish metal, and knowing a Finnish guy on the internet.

It was the characters that impressed me the most. Writers can learn a lot from how you feel for these characters even though the tales are simple and there's little internal narration. Lemminkainen is quite unlikeable, yet I end up caring about the outcomes of his missions, and one event concerning him is somehow the most heartwarming thing in the book. What another character, Kullervo, goes through seems to be a serious case of what we would now call an existential crisis, having nothing to do, no one to live for, and almost no cause to devote himself to. Given that, his fate, which I won't spoil, is masterfully sad.

I read the final chapter with the Kalevala Melody on repeat—here's a Spotify link—which is apparently the tune to which the poem is sung. It's very pretty and appropriate to the feel of the story, but I'd read too slowly if I actually synced my reading to the music! I found it a few days ago when searching for what a kantele sounds like, which is a folk instrument that comes up significantly in the epic.

In searching for the Kalevala Melody today, I found there's also quite a bit of music inspired by the Kalevala. Sibelius wrote some, and I'm listening at the very moment to the Kalevala Suite by Uuno Klami; I especially like the first movement as of now, which is about the creation myth in the first chapter. It's interesting to see which scenes from books composers decide to render as music— After I read the Icelandic Njal's Saga last year, I smiled to see there's a piece called Björn Behind Kári by Jón Leifs, which refers to an event that's not particularly significant, but definitely memorable and surprisingly funny and feel-good.

I've been told about Amorphis, a progressive metal band who have several albums themed after the Kalevala. They're not my style of music, though a few songs are growing on me. But it's exciting to read their lyrics and see how those old poems have been rendered into modern ones. It feels almost like hearing people speak conversationally about something you like that's more obscure or scholarly, the excitement of some solitary pleasure being put among the popular and quotidian. And they have a take on Lemminkainen's character that I didn't see when I was reading—

However, the greater effect of Kalevala on my metal appreciation is just familiarizing me with some of the myth and lore of Finland. Turisas is another name for Iku-Turso, who lives in the water and does some things; Lempo, the title of a Korpiklaani song, is the force of evil. Swallow the Sun's Songs from the North, which I wrote about in my last post and still love very much, has a little Finnish passage mentioning Pohjola, the cold and depressing northern country in the Kalevala. I wondered for a little while if the whole "North" in that album was this Pohjola. But I think the mention of Pohjola is just a very clever way to dip into the band's heritage and evoke the rustic and gloomy connotations of the North. The final song on the album is about commanding clouds into battle—could the speaker be becoming like Ukko, the highest god in the Kalevala who's always spoken about with regard to his control over the clouds?

By the way, there's something I really like about the sound of the name 'Ukko.' There's something mysterious about it, not a sinister sort of mystery but a quiet and peaceful one, as though after all the phenomena in the world, if you go behind the scenes and into the clouds, there's an Ukko hidden there. But apparently it just means 'old man.'

I'm young and grew up with the internet, so it didn't occur to me till writing this how instrumental the internet has been in my appreciation of the Kalevala. I know about it through the internet, read it from an online public domain archive, and browsed and discovered relevant music in a way that'd be much different if I had to, say, go to the library if I wanted to hear a kantele.

Songs from the North: I'm lost in your wilderness!

I'm compelled to blog again by Swallow the Sun's 2015 triple album Songs from the North, something a bit outside the usual heaviness range of my music tastes. Spotify suggested it to me and I gave it a hesitant try. As it turns out, Songs from the North is three beautiful albums relating to each other intricately, all replete with shades of melancholy. After a month, listening and reading the lyrics still give me sudden moments of admiration.

I don't know how to criticize music, so you shouldn't expect me to do that— I just want to talk about what makes Songs from the North so beautiful and my personal reactions.

The three movements are summarized in "The Memory of Light": "From the fires of yesterday / until the hell of tomorrow / the memory of light is all we have"—it's a nice chorus. The character goes from guilt and temptation to sin in part I, to a vivid hell in the really heavy III, and in between catches a glimpse of light in the musically lighter II.

I'm only a casual listener and haven't ever felt this strongly about a particular album, as in a unit of music. In this case I find myself appreciating the whole thing as a large, cohesive work because it really lends itself to that; I learned to like the heavier songs at the end despite that their style doesn't appeal to me right away, just because they were a part of the whole. It is clearly something beyond the individual tracks. I love how it puts me in a morbid mood and relieves that particular mood at times with a bit of dying light. The same images—wings, fire, the North—come up across songs and across the three movements, but in different ways, but eventually form a fuller picture of the character's dark world. There's a running theme of orientating oneself to the North, a place of salvation by nature's beauty beyond that of Christianity.

It's amazing how much the album goes through. It involves dark romance, contrasts Christianity and paganism or maybe the spiritual and the earthly, and invokes a Mother Nature. The more realistic "7 Hours Late" caught me off guard with its sadness, since it leaves behind the metaphors for a while and goes into the character missing the chance to exchange final words with his father. 

When I first read the lyrics, I puzzled over how the songs connect. Some tracks seem to together tell a story. Even the transition between parts II and III seems to take the character from begging to see another dawn to being in hell. Yet there are also contradictions, like whether the character pled for another day or killed himself, whether the "you" is a woman who led him to sin or the personification of the North. My immediate reaction was to want the three albums to be disconnected stories. III is bitterly depressing, and I wanted it to be separate from the gentler melancholy of the others. But the ambiguity is part of the artistry, and maybe is part of the story itself.

Note the crucifixes in place of the other directions. So many
details like this!

I find it so uplifting that even Swallow the Sun, as much as they sing of despair and death, can find such refuge in the "memory of light." Maybe I'm taking part II too literally, but I am really comforted by its idea that it really is possible to deal with the tragic through consolation from the splendor of nature. There's fire in all three movements, but no one burns in the "autumn fire" of II. The connotations of darkness in I and especially III are so dismal that it's very relieving to refer back to II, where the dark is merely associated with the constant darkness of the northern winter. It's a much milder sort of "eternal  nights" which has its charms—the whimsically portrayed sky in "Autumn Fire"—and will soon give way to the "ever-light" of summer.

Later, after making it through most of the crushing III, the hope re-emerges: the character arises from hell to battle for his freedom and, even after being removed from the world, return to the North. That weighty album thus ends on a very fitting cliffhanger: he finally gets to see the North again, and the girl from I, if she's indeed the one referred to. Also the gloom and the hope, as they have throughout Songs from the North, complement each other. He might have won.

Journal writing

First off, "Journal Writing" is the name of a poem I wrote; you can read it on the online magazine Page & Spine.

The approach to journal writing it describes is the one I use myself, except with fewer pretenses of wringing liquid out of my heart or whatever. In a class I took during postgrad, I noticed something of my own journal writing in the approach to historiography known as the "history of mentalities." This sort of history isn't particularly concerned with looking at past events, considering events to be mere moments; it's more revealing to look at past ways of thinking, which lasted longer and would've surrounded the events.

A couple months before learning that, it was an interest in my own mentalities that led me to start a journal. I saw how my feelings about things in my life were changing with some rapidity and decided to record them. I occasionally write about events, but even then, I focus on how the event has embodied or affected my mentalities.

Combined with an evening walk near Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh, particularly to this spot you see to the left with its tiny, shallow pool, the poem acquired the mountainous landscape imagery that it did.

The Red Etin Corporation

I haven't posted in a long time. On top of being busy with my master's dissertation, I've had a bit of difficulty knowing just how to write on this blog. I've never quite had a sense of whom I'm talking to here and in what manner they should be spoken to, and that makes it difficult. My posts are probably quite disparate in tone since I can't decide on one. But I should get back to at least trying!

I have a decent excuse to break the streak of quiet months. I've just had a story appear in Manawaker Studio's Starward Tales, an anthology of myths and fairy tales placed in science fiction worlds. Mine's a little retelling of the Scottish tale of the Red Etin—of course titled The Red Etin Corporation. You can find the traditional story in both Grierson's and Lang's collections, the latter having a nice bit of Scots dialect. Starward Tales is on Amazon for a few dollars, yes.

That is the most commercial thing I've ever said of something containing my personal work, and already it's somewhat uncomfortable.

About the story itself, it was quick to write and just for fun— lighthearted, in the sense of being light in the amount of heart put in it. I'd seen the call for submissions when I had already been reading Grierson's volume of Scottish stories, and retelling one of them averted the problems I often have with plot and trying to develop disconnected ideas and scenes into full narratives. Unlike the other contributors to the anthology, I preserved a fairy tale sort of style. I felt a bit awkward about that when I first noticed, but upon further thought, I rather like my decision. The result is a future-set story that's also recognizable as a fairy tale even if you're not familiar with the source material.

Side-glances at simulation

When I was 12 or 13, I found one of the first chapters of Asimov's I, Robot disturbing, the one where the little girl has a robot as her only friend. That was my first introduction to the idea of technology threatening to replace the organic.

I think this is the exact version
we had— I guess the warning
must've been on the back or side

I think my discomfort with it had its roots some years before, being a young kid and feeling this sense of coldness while playing the Windows solitaire games. I was used to playing card and board games with my dad, and then here I was playing a game against a computer who had no emotional connection to playing together or to me.

We owned an Othello board game which had a warning on the box, something like "We strongly urge you to eat and sleep between games." As a little girl who had never heard of addiction, it made me sad to think a pair of people could be so crazy as to ruin themselves and each other by playing relentlessly, ignoring that they were hungry and tired. My dad would never let me do that even if I tried, because he cared about me, but that was not the case with the computer. I could destroy myself playing a hundred games in a row and it would make no difference to my computer.

That dismal child-thought was probably at least partly responsible for my years of discomfort with any suggestion that machines could ever in some way replace people. I didn't read Asimov's "Bicentennial Man" until a class in university, which put that chapter of I, Robot, or the whole book really, into a different perspective, since perhaps the robots were supposed to really have emotions? My distaste for the idea joined up with my distaste for overly positivistic sociology, which seemed to hurt from the opposite direction: reduce people to machines, suggesting emotions and motivations could come down to a bunch of mechanistic rules.

Now I'm fond of myNoise, a collection of online soundscape generators ranging from forest noises to musical instruments. What led me in particular to write this post is the recent addition of a generator that seems described by the artist as being something like computer-generated music. (Or, less recent now, because I'm lazy with finishing posts). It's precisely the sort of thing that would have made me uncomfortable—and I realize there are a number of examples of computer-generated arts out there—but I suppose there's little to be so uneasy about—

I'm sort of revisiting my old issues with this discomfort, which is why I'm reflecting on their origin. What am I worried about: that programmed music is cold in the same way that replacing my dad with a computer is cold? I certainly don't find playing games with a computer all that cold anymore, I

Despite being a bit rusty at FreeCell

suppose due to the internet rendering games a shared experience whether or not you're directly playing against a human, and due to knowing that programs are a creation, that even if they're not people, there are people right behind them. When I think about computer games now—well, even as a kid the feeling of coldness didn't keep me from playing—I don't think of the computer replacing a human at all. I don't know if that's just my own development or whether it's a change in how people as a whole are thinking about technology.

I wonder how many people now would think about robots becoming someone's only friend. I get the sense that would be seen these days as a sign of a deeply lonely person. It seems like now it's more a matter of simulations being extensions of people, not replacements for people. I've had a couple brushes with 'digital humanities' recently at university, and one of its great themes appears to be that computers change people's relationship with the humanities. When I learned about that, I didn't have a problem with it and it just seemed intuitive. Over time, it seems experience has quietly replaced the understanding I had that caused the discomfort in the first place. And I've only just noticed what it left in its place.

Swapping character genders

A little low-fantasy short story I've been revising for about six years is nearly ready, according to a recent rejection letter. Enlivened by the encouraging feedback, I set out to make some small changes before submitting it elsewhere, and among them I decided to switch the gender of the protagonist and someone they meet.

Now instead of a working-class man taking the actions and briefly meeting and helping a young woman who inspires him to think in a more revolutionary way, the genders are reversed.

It wasn't too cumbersome a task when the story is under 3000 words. The main difficulty was in how to refer repeatedly to an unnamed young man. When the genders were the other way around, 'girl' worked conveniently enough, but there isn't quite a male equivalent, is there? 'Man' sounds too old, 'young man' is a little clunky, and 'boy' sounds like a child. I switched between 'man,' 'young man,' and 'youth,' a little awkwardly. I made the protagonist's co-worker, who gets in a physical conflict with the protagonist, female as well.

To me, the story felt a bit less gloomy when all the words were the same except the protagonist's gender. As this story is after all meant to be a gloomy one, it's strange and annoying how a woman just seems happier than a man if you don't pay special mind in your narration to the character's brooding, or at least that is the impression I get.

I was surprised, though, how much the story still makes sense when the genders are flipped— I'd thought some reactions and motives would need to be explained more explicitly since they'd just be expected in a male character due to typical narratives but might not be familiar in a female. As it turned out, I didn't feel the need to explain anything more. The things my female protagonist did were slightly unexpected, and I think most people in English-speaking society would primarily cast the genders the original way when considering this plot, but not hard to understand.

I like to think of writing stories as a way in which I can exercise a little agency, and here I went for a subtle, not radical, alternative to following exactly what the most mainstream of culture would have me do. It's not much, but I think it's something.