rushthatspeaks | Mar. 28th, 2013

This afternoon I reread William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland, because a) I am very fond of it and b) I wanted to verify my suspicion that Homestuck takes some worldbuilding elements from it, which turned out to be entirely the case.

The House on the Borderland is probably Hodgson's most successful novel, though I admit I have not yet read The Ghost Pirates. It does not suffer from the devastating flaw of The Night Land, a brilliant novel which is written in an almost unreadably terrible pseudo-archaic cod-Victorian pastiche. House's prose is not great-- no rhythm, general clunkiness-- but it is serviceable and unobtrusive and allows Hodgson to achieve effects of greater subtlety than the book's straightforward manner might at first lead one to expect.

House is a classical manuscript-found-in-a-strange-place novel, in which the narrator finds the rest of the book in some ruins under peculiar circumstances, and then goes through and annotates bits of it for clarity and so on. This usually clunky device is pleasant here, because the diary in question is quite episodic. The frame is a reminder that the person who is supposed to have written the diary isn't attempting literature, but is a man trying to process a set of confusing and terrible experiences, which helps make up for the initial sense that there is no overall plot. There is not, in fact, much overall plot. There is only the House.

The diarist, our principal character, lives in the House, which is in the middle of nowhere, with his sister and his dog. No one knows who built the House, or why, or when, and it's architecturally weird and supposed to be haunted. It is in fact haunted, but in a way very different from traditional hauntings. It is not a place intended for human dwelling. It seems to be an expression, perhaps, of some incomprehensible nonhuman forces, and perhaps it is being fought over by various of these forces. The diarist may have been enlisted to guard it. Or it may be trying to throw him out. Or it may be utterly indifferent to him because it is not on his scale. Or any of the above, at certain times. It is definitely on a borderland, but what lies beyond the border?

The first chunk of the novel, the more conventional one, involves the diarist fighting off some swine-like things which may be demonic or ghouls or weirder. This is a series of action setpieces, and the finest thing about it is the way that the diarist's sister, who has not seen any of the things, clearly assumes that he has gone completely off his rocker, while he, who can't seem to realize that she doesn't know what's going on, believes that she's the one who's dangerously nuts. Then things get stranger. Parts of the manuscript are fragmentary. The diarist and the usual flow of time become divorced from one another, and he moves at an accelerated pace into the future, until he literally witnesses the end of the universe.

This is the bit that makes the book worthwhile. Hodgson is amazing at intriguing details which have no explanations, and at widening the scale, and widening the scale, and widening the scale. Deep time has never been this deep before. The size and nature of the things the diarist sees are awe-inspiring. As he watches the Green Sun at the heart of all universes, surrounded as it is by the foamy bubbles, wrapped in cloud, which contain all creative potentiality and also the souls of the dead (this is where Homestuck people are nodding), the book genuinely reads as the account of someone who has witnessed the incomprehensible and indescribable and is trying to get some part of the experience across anyway. It is that sense of the desperate communication of what cannot be communicated, the way you get part of an experience of which the diarist himself can only understand a very small part, which makes the book a masterpiece of weird fiction and a classic. It's not as completely batshit insane as The Night Land, but it comes from a place many novels have started and walks by itself into the utter void, sharing space only, perhaps, with Olaf Stapledon, and some small parts of Lovecraft.

The other book I am reading, Renee L. Bergland's The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects, a study of the figure of the Native American as spectre in American literature, is so amazingly, incredibly, ridiculously good that I am going to need to write a much longer review of it after I finish.

What I intend to read next: Under the Poppy, Kathe Koja. The Emperor's Winding Sheet, Jill Paton Walsh. I would like to reread Iain Banks' Whit: or, Isis Amongst the Unsaved, which is by far his best novel and which I return to whenever one of the Culture books aggravates me (this occurs approximately whenever he puts out a new one), and I also want to reread The Wasp Factory, which, though it is Banks' second-best novel, would be a career-best book for many writers. Fortunately I have finally after much travail managed to purchase a copy of The Wasp Factory, and I look forward.