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.