Dennis Wheatley, Edgar Rice Burroughs,Rider Haggard and The pulp Masters.

Most of Edgar Rice Burroughs work is available in eBook form much of it free.Earlier this year Disney tried to revive the fortunes of Burroughs Martian tales with a block buster version of A Princess of Mars retitled John Carter.As a Burroughs fan I thought it did justice to the book although it did not catch on with the general public.I suppose Burroughs science fiction would appeal to the retro sci-fi enthusiasts of steam punk so like the sci-fi of Wells,Verne and Conan Doyle it will hopefully survive in a niche market.The audience of teenage boys who once lapped up such fictions I presume now do little reading instead playing fantasy and science fiction video games and watching DVDs on such themes.Since the Disney animation of the 1990s Hollywood seems to have finally lost interest in Tarzan.Probably the whole Tarzan theme is now too un- PC for them to touch anymore.A shame really as like Dracula and Sherlock Homes he was once a character familiar to everyone.

Dennis Wheatley ,Edgar Rice Burroughs ,Rider Haggard And The Pulp Masters.

Second only to Dennis Wheatley  in terms of ubiquitous paperbacks was the pulp writer Edgar Rice Burroughs.During the post war paperback revolution pocket sized paperbacks were sold in news agents, station book stalls and automats.Edgar Rice Burroughs with his brand leader Tarzan was a favorite for these venues.As well as Tarzan he also wrote science fiction of a dated variety set on Mars (Barsoom) Venus (Amtor) and the hollow Earth Pellucidar. Edgar Rice Burroughs was also a fairly conservative writer and also like Wheatley a man  of action.His last exploits when he was quite old were as a war correspondent in the Pacific during the Second World War.He had been living in Hawaii at the time of Pearl Harbour so when the war came to the Pacific he managed through his fame as the creator of Tarzan to be credited by a newspaper as a war correspondent.

Dennis Wheatley,Edgar Rice Burroughs and The Pulp Masters

There seem to be few current editions of Dennis Wheatley apart from a couple of the occult novels published by Wordsworth books but such was his popularity that second paperback and hard back editions from the 1960s and 70s are still available at very cheap prices on line.As yet there seem to be no Kindle versions of his books which one would have thought the literary estate would seek to remedy especially in regard to the occult novels.His Conservative views are now deemed politically incorrect which may also be preventing any revival of his works.In the 21st century the horror writer Clive Barker championed him in his TV series and book The A to Z of Horror and there was a television program devoted to him entitled a Message To Posterity.This revolved around a letter left by him in a time capsule in the late 1940s warning the future about the danger of a socialist communist dictatorship. A number of cultural talking heads discussed him and his books in the program.The critic John Sutherlan devoted  a chapter of his cultural autobiography  Magic Moments to his novel Such Power is Dangerous which he favorable reviews.He contrasts him with Aldous Huxley a literary writer who he also read as a teenager.There has also been the recent biography by Phil Barker entitled The Devil is A Gentlemen.There are also several blogs devoted to him .Whether this will result in a revival only time will tell.

Dennis Wheatley,Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Pulp Masters.

During the Second World War Wheatley  worked at on secret ops with Ian Fleming the future creator of James Bond.Wheatley  had created his own secret agent Gregory Sallust who is similar in many ways to the future Bond and who featured in a series of thrillers set during the war.Wheatley has his hero meet various real historical persons in these stories such as Hermann Goering and Hitler.After the war Dennis Wheatley continued his prolific output down  the 1970s.His books are exercises in pure escapism within a realistic 20th century setting (apart from the historical).Like most pulp fiction the message is conservative with heroes coming from the upper class and living the good life.His lost world stories are his most fantastic with visits to Atlantis, another to a lost Atlantean civilisation in the Antartic ,a lost civilisation of 17th century English cavaliers in the Sargasso sea and a visit to Mars by flying saucer.These stories are all mixed in with struggles against the Nazis in World War II and the Communists in the Cold War.His chief claim to fame however is his novels which combine conventional thrillers with Black Magic and Occult themes.

Dennis Wheatley,Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Pulp Masters.

Way back in the 1960s one of my favourite authors was the paperback thriller writer Dennis Wheatley. I must have devoured most of his oeuvre during those years .His output was prodigious and contrary to received wisdom  only a small number were concerned with the black magic and occult themes for which he is now remembered that is when he is remembered at all.Much of his work consisted of thrillers set before and during the Second World War in which he served as an adviser to Churchill's War Cabinet.He also wrote historical novels set during the French revolution and Napoleonic Wars and the late 19th and early 20th centuries.As well as the Black Magic novels he also wrote novels of the lost world variety which date back to Edgar Rice Burroughs ,Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle.I believe on modern creative writing courses the students are advised to write about what you know.In Wheatleys case this involved a year in the Kaisers Germany studying the wine trade prior to the Great War,four years in the trenches, a partnership with a Raffles style gentleman crook Eric Toombes,the Roaring Twenties as experienced by someone in the wine trade invited to all the wild parties,meetings with the worlds leading Occultist Aleister Crowley,marriage to a wife who subsequently worked for MI5 and a place in the planning department of Churchill's War Cabinet.He was also King George the Sixths favourite novelist.

Philip K Dick,Pohl And Kornbluth The Men Who Saw The Future.

Topics covered in Philip K Dicks books include parallel universes such as the Axis controlled America in Man In the High Castle but also the Neanderthal earth of Cantata 140,Schizophrenia and mental illness, artificial life forms,global heating in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Edrich,everyday domestic appliances such as doors and taxis that talk to you, artificial realities produced by drugs which are controlled by the supplier of the drugs, cryonic suspension of the dead with whom it is possible to have a conversation,The Penfield  Mood organ on which you dial up your moods for the day, a device which produces animated film versions of novels where you decide the animation style ie Moby Dick animated by,Dali or Picasso.A key trope is always the impossibility  of defining what is actually real or not in such a world.A child for example can watch real footage of an elephant and CGI footage of a dinosaur probably not understanding that one is real and the other not.Philip K Dicks world is now our world, we actually live in Philip K Dicks universe ,perpetually asking ourselves the question is this for real?

Philip K Dick,Pohl And Kornbluth The Men Who Saw The Future .

During the 1960s and 1970s Philip Dicks out put of science fiction novels was considerable.At the time they were naturally enough only known of and read by readers of science fiction which was still a vast literary field  which had been going for decades.This is pretty much over now as anyone can see who walks into a bookstore and looks at the section devoted to science fiction and fantasy.This is mostly devoted now to modern fantasy novels.The writers who dominated the science fiction field in the mid and late 20th century have largely disappeared and those under 50 are unlikely to have even heard of them.The one exception to this rule seems to be Philip K Dick whose work is still in print and readily available.This to someone who was a reader of science fiction and to whom Philip Dick was only one author among many has always struck me as rather strange.Why Philip K Dick of all people ? ,an author who was so poor at one time he was reduced to eating pet food.

Philip K Dick ,Pohl And Kornbluth The Men Who Saw The Future

Philip K Dick first started publishing science fiction short stories in the science fiction magazines of the early 1950s.His first published science fiction novel was Solar Lottery published in 1955.His novel a future dystopia in which life chances for the population are decided by lottery was quite prescient .At that time the notion that the state would actively promote the vice of gambling would have seemed far fetched yet it has now come to pass and is taken for granted.However at this time despite his small success as a fairly minor science fiction author Philip Dick was actually trying to become an author of mainstream literary fiction.The novels he wrote in the 1950s such as Confessions of A Crap Artist,The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt and In Milton Lumky Territory among others  are tales of suburban Californian life.It seems Philip Dick was following the same groove as Richard Yates with stories of post war America with its affluence combined with conformism.It seems probable if these books had been actually published Philip Dick would have dropping the science fiction in favor of  social realism.Like Richard Yates he would no doubt be largely forgotten now.Instead the literary novels loss turned out to be science fictions gain.It is hard to imagine Riddley Scott directing a block buster based on In Milton Lumky Territory.The key text which bridges the two worlds is The Man In The High Castle   set in California in 1961.The characters are similar to the suburbans who feature in his unpublished 50s novels.However the California they inhabit is occupied by the Japanese as a result of Americas defeat by the Axis powers in World War II who have partitioned the country in the same manner that Germany was.Philip Dick won a Hugo Award for the novel and after this largely stuck to writing science fiction.

Philip K Dick,Pohl And Kornbluth The men who the saw future .

Pohl and Kornbluth's next collaboration Gladiator At Law continued the vision of The Space Merchants with corporate lawyers instead of advertising executives as the protagonists.The book was published in 1955 at the height of Americas post war boom .However the future depicted is far from optimistic with the post war  housing developments turned into slums dominated by gangs of feral children. The population is  divided into corporate serfs or  welfare drones  with entertainment laid on in the form of gladiatorial games a prophecy which looks all too likely to come true. This vision was one in direct opposition to that for example being turned out for Americans by Walt Disney's Tomorrow Land  for example.In fact the world of the early 21st century has turned out to resemble that of Pohl and Kornbluth rather than Disney.

Philip K Dick,Pohl And Kornbluth The men who saw the future ..

Pohl and Kornbluth's  magnum opus The Space Merchants is 60 years old this year.A key science fiction text it is extraordinarily prescient with its vision of a world run by corporations ,its culture defined by advertising and its environment wrecked by overpopulation and pollution.When I first read it back in the 1960s when the Cold War was still in existence I was surprised to find no mention of either the Soviet Union or Communism which seemed to have mysteriously disappeared.This seems to have been the most prescient feature of all of the novel   for the softly and silently vanishing away of Soviet Communism, Americas great Cold War bug bear is the most astonishing fact of our times.At the time the novel was written in the early 50s at the time of the Korean War such a demise for Communism would have seemed more far fetched than speculations about space travel.At the time of publication Senator McCarthy was hunting communists ,in The Space Merchants the enemy are not commies but consies ,conservationists the novels term for those we now call  greens.

Philip K Dick, Pohl and Kornbluth , The men who saw the future.

Philip K Dick is Hollywoods favourite science fiction writer the inspiration for films going back thirty years both adaptions of his own novels and also for works using similar themes. His work first appeared in science fiction magazines and in cheap paperback novels in the 50s ,60s and 70s.At the time popular depiction of the future barring the possibility of nuclear war were generally fairly positive. Dicks stagnant ,high tech,alienated,scuzzy , run down future turns out to have been fairly accurate as a prediction.However the future depicted in his books was actually originated by Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth in their novels The Space Merchants and Gladiator At Law.Pohl and Kornbluth are largely forgotten now but in the 1950s and early 1960s they were the cutting edge of science fiction

The Hobbit ,The Inklings And The New Middle Ages Final Part

H G Wells in his 1941 book The Outlook For Homo Sapiens raised some interesting points about a return to medieval conditions.He envisaged a world in which large scale systems such as rail networks,postal systems and international trade might break down but radio broadcasts,simple light aircraft and fire arms would continue to exist.Fire arms are very simple machines and there are plenty in working order that are a century old.Existing supplies of fire arms will last for centuries if well maintained and ammunition can be made in simple work shops as they are in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.Distilled Spirits are another  a fairly simple technology which people in the future would be unlikely to forget.We can already see signs of such a scenario in the combination of crumbling infrastructure and advanced digital technology which exist in parts of the early 21st century world. The probability is that the future will resemble the past rather than the dream of progress dreamt by the 20th century .The reappearance of such evils as slavery and piracy is proof of this.

The Hobbit ,The Inklings And The New Middle Ages

In 1994 the BBC 2s nightly cultural round up show The Late Show produced its own program on the new middle ages fronted by journalist Benjamin Wooley who has recently published a book on Doctor Dee Elizabeth the firsts Merlin.The Late Show was the kind of program that has been removed from the BBCs major  channels as part of the dumbing down process and now confined to its cultural ghetto BBC 4.In this program Wooley looked forward to the new millennium as part of a return to medievalism.Part of the doomier predictions made in the program was mention of the Black Death which was linked to various 1990s bogies such as AIDs ,SARs and avian flu.In the nearly twenty years since the  program was broadcast global pandemics have been conspicuous by their absence so in that respect there has been no return to medieval conditions.Likewise the feared rise in global temperatures and melting ice caps has failed to materialize.The most interesting prediction in the program and one which proved correct was that of the demise of the printed word in the wake of the internet.As the Internet had only been open to the general public for a few years at that point this was quite an accurate prediction.

The Hobbit ,The Inklings And The New Middle Ages.

In the 20th century the medievalists always cut a slightly absurd figure as their ideology seemed incongruous in the face of the then modern world as it was with its strong nation states,industrialism ,secularism and ideology of progress.Now in the 21st century articles on what has been dubbed the new middle ages are quite frequent.The  rise of China the old middle kingdom and the resurgence of Islam has produced a world that resembles the late middle ages in many ways. Science fiction novels in the 20th century frequently depicted future worlds which combined high technology with feudal social structures.Nowadays the idea of a technological society in which large chunks of the population are semi-literate and semi numerate has been realized.The wealth that the population is surrounded by seems to appear as if by magic divorced from human effort and manufactured in distant continents which they would be hard put to identify on a map.As in the middle ages the clerisy which still has some   actual  some understanding of the world and how it functions make up only a small proportion of the population.

The Hobbit, The Inklings And The New Middle Ages.

The medievalism of the Inklings was the tail end of a long tradition dating back to the Romantic movement of the early 19th century taking in along the way the novels of Sir Walter Scott and his various imitators,the philosophy of historian Thomas Carlyle,the Gothic architecture of Pugin who designed the Houses Of Parliament ,the paintings of the Pre- Raphaelites ,Tennyson's Idylls of The King ,the operas of Richard Wagner and the socialism of William Morris.The term Middle Ages was coined in the 17th  century to describe the period of western history between the ancient world of Greece and Rome and the modern world which is dated from the 16th century or thereabouts.The intellectuals of the modern period have always felt uncomfortable about the Middle Ages preferring to think of themselves  as being the heirs of Greece and Rome.Of course in a roundabout way this is true but the legacy was passed on through the civilization of the medieval period.The late medieval period of the 15th century saw the rise of strong national states in Spain England and France ,capitalism and technological developments such as gunpowder ,the printing press, the magnetic compass and the ocean going sailing ship.All Chinese inventions admittedly but developed by Europeans to a more advanced level than their originator.So in effect the late medieval period was more innovative and intellectually curious than the Classical period which was fairly stagnant culturally in comparison. The modern world still continues to misunderstand the Middle Ages in many respects.Frequently in modern film adaptions it is portrayed as a drab dun coloured world whereas the medievals in fact loved bright colours and used plant and mineral dyes and paints to achieve them.Likewise medieval armies eschewed the idea of camouflage and burnished their armour so that the sun would flash on it announcing their arrival from a distance. along with the noise from their drums and trumpets .Their love of spicy food had even more momentous consequences as it was the spice trade that inspired explorers such as Columbus in their search for a sea route to the Indies.

The Hobbit,The Inklings And The New Middle Ages.

As well as JRR Tolkien,C S Lewis and Charles Williams other Inklings who were authors were Warnie Lewis the brother of C S Lewis,Roger Llancelyn Greene,Neville Coghill  and the philosopher Owen Barfield. Barfield is the one I am least familiar with at the moment though I dare say I shall get round to his work eventually.I have recently been reading Warnies book on the social history of the France of Louis XIV which was first read to the Inklings and thought it quite good.Roger Llancelyn Greene is famous for his children's books retelling myths and legends Norse and Classical.He did a particularly good book retelling the Arthurian legends marvelously illustrated with wood cuts.This is still in print in a Puffin classics edition I believe.Neville Coghill produced Penguin classics renditions of Chaucer both The Canterbury Tales and Troilus And Cressida in modern English verse translations, He aslo collaborated on a film version of Marllowes'  Dr Faustus with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor the only time this work has ever been filmed and is worth catching to see Burton in full classical mode.

The Hobbit,The Inklings And The New Middle Ages

C S Lewis claimed that reading  one of Chesterton's works The Everlasting Man 1925 was pivotal on his own journey from atheism to Christianity.The Everlasting Man was written by Chesterton as a rebuttal to his friend H G Well's Outline Of History which was an influential best seller in the 1920s.Well's history was essentially a scientific one which offended those of a religious bent such as GKC and his friend Hilaire Belloc both apologists  for Catholic Christianity.In the film of The Maltese Falcon Sidney Greenstreet tells Humphrey Bogart the story of the falcon and remarks "This is history sir,not Mr Wells History but history nonetheless" The Everlasting Man which told the story of Christianity in the late Roman world has the same message that there is more to history than Wells scientific rationality.George Orwell in his essay Wells,Hitler and The World State.made  a similar claim that to Wells history was essentially a series of victories of the scientific over the romantic man with his highest scorn reserved for conquerors such as Alexander and Napoleon.

The Hobbit ,The Inklings And The New Middle Ages

A key text of Chesterton's with regard to the Inklings was the chapter entitled The Ethics of Elfland from his 1908 book Orthodoxy.In this chapter Chesterton defended the role of fairy stories as part of traditional culture in the upbringing of children.He is able to point out the moral content of the traditional fairy story and also the role of the fantastic element in stimulating the youthful imagination.Chesterton's defense of the fairy tale was later taken up and expanded by Tolkien in his long essay on Fairy Stories.The use of fairy tales in the work of C S Lewis is too obvious to need pointing out as is his debt to G K Chesterton of which I will expand on later.

The Hobbit,The Inklings And The New Middle Ages.

Charles Williams novels with their 20th century English settings could not be more different than the invented worlds of Middle Earth and Narnia.However they do have something in common with the works of an author who died in 1936 and who can be described as the father and inspiration of the Inklings G K Chesterton.
G K Chesterton was one of the giant figures of early 20th century English a friend of H G Wells and Bernard Shaw despite his not sharing their socialist politics.Chesterton's Christianity,his medievalism his small is beautiful hostility to the Big State and Big Business ,his anti-imperialism .his distrust of what is now called scientism and  his love of fantasy and fairy tale all mark him out as the ancestor and inspiration for the Inklings.

The Hobbit ,The Inklings And The New Middle Ages.

It is of course JRR Tolkien and C S Lewis who made the Inklings during the 1930s and 1940s into the group that has been synonymous with literary fantasy.The third major Inkling Charles Williams was equally interesting but you will look in vain for editions of his novels on the same shelves in a book shop as Tolkien and Lewis.It is possible to find second hand editions of his works but takes some perseverance to do so.Charles Williams was a closer friend of C S Lewis than of Tolkien.,his novels are on occult themes such as the Grail,Tarot cards,Solomon's treasure and life after death which take place in a modern(20th century setting)The edition I have of his novel War In Heaven on the grail theme was actually published in the Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult in the 1970s.He  wrote poetry on the theme of the Arthurian legend and  was also a former member of The Order of The Golden Dawn the magical society which also numbered WB Yeats.Arthur Machen And Aleister Crowley among its members.The main influence on C S Lewis was on the concluding novel to his space trilogy That Hideous Strength which has been described as a Charles Williams novel written by C S Lewis.The Inklings were inspired mainly by English Literature from the Anglo-Saxon  period down to Milton in the 17th century as well as fantasy and also the science fiction of H G Wells and Olaf Stapledon.

The Hobbit,The Inklings And The New Middle Ages.

In December 2012 the first part of a two part adaption of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit will hit our cinema screens with Sir Ian Mckellan reprising his role of Gandalf.The second part will be released the following December.It is nearly nine years now since the last part of Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings, The Return Of The King was released. This is quite a long time to go in what has been a successful movie franchise.During this period the attempt to repeat this  with fellow  Inkling C S  Lewis Chronicles Of  Narnia has not been as successful.After an initial imaginative adaption of The Lion,The Witch And The Wardrobe with Tilda Swinton as a memorable witch the series seems to have collapsed.The successor Prince Caspian was not terribly good and the rewriting of the plot of The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader to make it a conventional good versus evil story was a mistake which only alienated fans of the books without gaining a wider audience.There seem to now be no further films in the Narnia pipeline due to copyright problems.Those who wish for further adaptions will have to content themselves for the time being with the excellent BBC TV and Radio versions of the four remaining books.So what is it about the fantasy novels that Tolkien and Lewis produced and read initially in their literary group the Inklings that has lasted into the 21st century and continues to make them as popular as ever?.

The Woman In Black And The Genius Of Nigel Kneale Final Part

1. The Stone Tape theory of haunting is something thrown out by Nigel Kneale in his stories only to be later contradicted by events.Looking through his ouvre  as well as Quatermass And The Pit,The Road and The Stone Tape he also produced two ghost stories for his 1970s anthology Beasts. These were Buddy with its story of a deserted dolphinarium haunted by the spirit of a dolphin murdered by the owner and Baby in which the mummified body of a 17th century witches familiar is found in the wall of a country cottage by a trendy 70s couple.In The Stone Tape the initial haunting which is investigated is that of a 19th century servant girl who appears in a sealed up room of an old mansion  being used as the HQ of a scientific team trying to develop a new recording medium..Eventually the stone tape of the room is accidently wiped by the powerful electronic devices used to investigate it.The stones in that part of the house long predate the Victorian house and date back to Saxon times.It is found in the finale to harbour a malign ancient pagan force which garners a fresh victim and adds it as a new addition to the stone tape.This is reminiscent of the Martian spacecraft in the finale of Quatermass And The Pit which is actually alive in some strange way and capable of acting on human minds.In Buddy and Baby also the spirit forces involved turn out be be more than merely recordings and reach out to malign effect. In Kneale's version of The Woman In Black the ghostly replaying of the overturning of the pony and trap in the marsh is dealt with to great effect and seems a classic instance of the stone tape theory which probably attracted him to the offer to adapt the story. Nigel Kneale was a writer of great integrity who would only work on projects he thought worthwhile.He was very critical of the way television was heading and very much predicted today's age of TV dross in his satirical masterpiece The Year Of The Sex Olympics 1968.Another invention he used to great effect in his adaption of TWIB was a wax cylinder recording machine in Eel Marsh House a piece of state of the art late Victorian technology .The same piece of technology was also used in Bram Stoker's Dracula by Dr Seward as an audio diary.
2. The Martians in Quatermass and The Pit and the ancient force in The Stone Tape are reminiscent of the elder gods of H P Lovecraft.Nigel Kneale was asked about this but he said he had never read him which was likely as HP Lovecraft was pretty much an unknown American pulp writer during Kneales formative  years.Kneale said his two main influences were H G Wells and M R James.He actually wrote the script for the excellent Ray Harryhausen 1964 adaption of  H G Wells The First Men In The Moon.He also wrote the script for the 1962 18th century mutiny film HMS Defiant.I feel that The Road his 18th century future ghost story probably came from the research he did for this.His work will live on hopefully .Mark Gatiss (The League of Gentlemen,Dr Who and Sherlock) is a great fan and tried at one time to remake The Road so his influence goes on . I have been a lifelong fan of Nigel Kneale and have dealt with his work elsewhere in my book on some of Britain's leading science fiction writers.

The Woman In Black And The Genius of Nigel Kneale

Nigel Kneale was the pioneer of the scientific ghost story.In his definitive science fiction story Quatermass and The Pit he features a haunted house but the house is actually being haunted by prehistoric ape men and Martians which emanate from a long buried and now excavated alien spacecraft.In The Road a play broadcast in 1963 he featured an 18th century English  wood subjected to a haunting thought to be a battle between Romans and ancient Britons. In actuality the wood is the site where a future road will be built which refugees from a nuclear strike will flee down and which is the true source of the haunting.In The Stone Tape broadcast in 1972 he set out the theory that ghosts are basically recordings of past events which have somehow impressed themselves on the physical surroundings in which they occurred and are then received by the minds of people now living.This is now actually called The Stone Tape theory after his play.Each of these programs proceeds as a form of scientific detective story in which the protagonists such as Quatermass, a scientific squire and a coffee house philosopher in The Road and a team of electronic engineers in The Stone Tape gradually solve the mystery surrounding the various supernatural goings on.   

The Woman In Black And The Genius Of Nigel Kneale

Nigel Kneale like Dennis Potter and Ken Russell emerged from the talent factory of the 1950s BBC.Television was a new medium  and young creative talent was attracted to it and allowed to make programs which were highly innovative.Nigel Kneale initially became famous through his Quatermass science fiction serials and also his adaption for television of George Orwell's 1984 which created a major stir due to its violence which led to questions in Parliament.The early 1950s version with Peter Cushing as Winston Smith and Andre Morell as O'Brien is still probably the definitive one .I prefer it to the Michael Radford  version with John Hurt and Richard Burton which was actually released in the year 1984 itself.Inspired by Orwell and also Aldous Huxley Kneale went on later to produce his own dystopian visions in particular The Year Of The Sex Olympics, Wine Of India and the apocalyptic vision of a broken Britain in The Quatermass Conclusion.However the dystopian visions came second to his reputation for being a master of the spooky and weird television serial and play.In particular three stories involved a mixture of science fiction and the supernatural which included novel theories about ghosts.I thought of these stories when watching the 1989 adaption of The Woman In Black .The three stories were Quatermass and the Pit 1958,The Road 1963 and The Stone Tape 1972. It Is these stories I will deal with in my next posting

The Woman In The Black And The Genius Of Nigel Kneale

I have finally seen the 2012 version of The Woman In Black and find my suspicions from the trailer fully justified.The setting has been returned to the Edwardian period of the book instead of Kneale's clever 1920s update.Crythin  Gifford  is depicted  as a village of the damned inhabited by superstitious peasants from a Hammer Dracula  movie and Eel Marsh House should have a sign up over it proclaiming Haunted House.It is a foreboding mansion in overgrown surroundings with everything inside dusty and cobwebbed like the house of Miss Haversham  in Great Expectations.The funeral of Mrs Drablow where in the book and 1989 version The Woman In Black first appears and is taken by Arthur for a mourner is omitted.In actual accounts by people who have seen ghosts they always say that the ghost looked like a real person and only later is it found out that the person is deceased.In Nigel Kneale's version Crythin Gifford is depicted as a prosperous 1920s Norfolk market town and there is a farmers market going on the day Arthur arrives.Likewise Eel Marsh house is a Victorian villa neat and tidy inside and even equipped with electric light from a generator.The spookiness only emerges later it is not immediately obvious.In the 1989 version The Woman in Black is in fact only seen five times in the film.Once in the Church at the start,then once in the churchyard,in the graveyard at Eel Marsh House then when she memorably visits Arthur at the inn in that scene. then right at the finale.The psychological terror comes from the expectation that she might appear rather then the actual appearance.

The Woman in Black And The Genius Of Nigel Kneale.

Although there are echoes of Henry James famous ghost story The Turn Of the Screw in Susan Hills The Woman In Black the Nigel Kneale 1989 adaption was more reminiscent  of M R James.The early 1960s black and white film adaption of The Turn Of The Screw with Deborah Kerr titled The Innocents is a superb film and the female ghost in it Miss Jessel is in fact a prototype for the ghost in The Woman in Black.She appears in daylight dressed in black as a figure seen in the distance through  rain  at one point in the film.However the model of the 1989 version of The Woman In Black is in fact the BBC 1970s adaptions of the M R James stories such as Lost Hearts.These were broadcast as ghost stories for Christmas as was the The Woman In Black which was broadcast by ITV not the BBC on Christmas eve 1989.Generally in the M R James story the protagonist is drawn into a haunting which generally starts in a low key but gradually the tension is ratcheted up .There is also a mystery involved with the protagonist gradually discovering what the events are which are behind the haunting.In his most frightening story Lost Hearts adapted in the early 1970s an orphan boy is sent to live with an elderly relative in a country house in the early 19th century. The house is haunted by the ghosts of a boy and a girl who it  turns out were murdered by the relative who is a Satanist who believes he can prolong his life by removing the hearts of children in a magic ritual.The period setting was unusual because M R James generally gave his stories a contemporary setting (contemporary being from the Edwardian age to the 1920s). The Woman In Black is sometimes referred to as a Victorian ghost story.I have noticed that people today often have only the haziest notion of period due to the Cultural Amnesia that Clive James refers to.The relation for example of the Victorian,Edwardian ages and the 1920s seems particularly hard to grasp.From my reading of the novel I presume it to be set sometime in the ten years prior to the Great War. Motor Cars and telephones for example are mentioned in the text, these are both late 19th century inventions but only became ubiquitous in the years prior to the First World War.There is no mention of this war so it is likely that it has not happened yet and there is a reference using the word Victorian as something related to the past. Nigel Kneale set his adaption in the 1920s.In fact it can be dated precisely.The junior clerks in the law practice where Arthur Kidd works are joking about the new Charlie Chaplin film The Gold Rush which came out in 1925.So the story begins in 1920s London with its cinemas ,motor cars and buses,elecrtic light and modern electric  subway system.The 20s was the first great era of modernity ,the Great War had shattered the 19th century world and people felt that they were in many ways living in a new world severed from that of the past.The unfolding story which follows shows how a horror from that past is able to wreak havoc on the protagonist.

The Woman In Black And The Genius Of Nigel Kneale

The original Susan Hill novel published in 1983 is a tribute to the ghost stories of Henry James -The Turn Of The Screw and the short ghost stories of M R James.One of the chapters in the book is actually entitled Whistle and Ill Come To You which is the title of one of M R James most frightening stories.The name of the protagonist in the novel is Arthur Kipps.Nigel Kneale in his adaption changed the name from Arthur Kipps to Arthur Kidd which apparently annoyed Susan Hill. So why did Kneale effect this small change in nomenclenture?. Arthur Kipps was originally the hero of H G Wells comic novel Kipps. This was a best seller in its time and virtually every literate person in Britain had heard of Arthur Kipps.The novel was adapted as a film starring Michael Redgrave in 1941 and was adapted into the musical Half a Sixpence which was also filmed in 1967 staring Tommy Steel.I would be surprised if Susan Hill was not aware of this so why give her character what was at the time the well known name of a popular fictional character?.In the current 2012 adaption  the leading character has once more become Arthur Kipps and I doubt if one person in a hundred would be able to tell you who the original Arthur Kipps was.I think this is part of the phenomena which the critic Clive James has entitled Cultural Amnesia which title he has given to a brilliant book on his cultural heroes. published several years ago.A lot of things people used to know they don't know any more and they don't know what what they are missing.

The Woman In Black And The Genius Of Nigel Kneale

So what is it that raised my suspicions with regard to the new film version of  The Woman in Black?. When viewing the trailer I immediately noticed that they had three spooky little girls in it. These girls are conspicuous by their absence from the original novel and Kneale's adaption,the only child ghost in the story is a little boy who is in fact The Woman in Blacks son.So where have they come from?.In fact they seem to have wandered into the film from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. In Stanley Kubrick's version of Steven Kings story his haunted house The Overlook Hotel is haunted by the specter  of two twin girls the Grady twins .They spookily  appear wearing party frocks and holding hands in the corridors of the hotel to the young son of Jack Nicolsons caretaker.It is quite a spooky unsettling image that only a director of Kubrick's quality could come up with.The spooky twin girl image was sent up brilliantly in the BBC black comedy series of the early 2000s The League Of Gentlemen.The twin Denton girls obviously based on the Grady twins from The Shining continuously and unexpectedly appear to torment Harvey and Val Denton's normal nephew who has come to stay with their eccentric obsessional family.The twins are called Chloe and Radcliffe .Radcliffe I always presumed as a camp reference to Radcliffe Hall the author of the 1920s Lesbian novel The Well Of Loneliness.Obviously the writers and director of the new version of The Woman In Black decided to go for three little girl ghosts. Is this a rather feeble attempt to use a key trope from The Shining but by increasing the number to three be able to deny it is a direct steal.?.To me it suggests a lazy imagination and an underestimation of the audiences intelligence many of whom will obviously be horror film fans who will immediately spot the reference.

The Woman In Black And The Genius of Nigel Kneale

Daniel Radcliffe's first post Harry Potter film The Woman In Black based on the 1983 novel by Susan Hill has apparently done well at the box office since its release in the USA and comes out this week in the UK.As well as the original novel there has been a long running London stage version with a cast of three actors.a BBC radio version and a made for television film version scripted by veteran horror writer Nigel Kneale first broadcast in 1989.I have not seen the stage version or heard the radio version but have read the original novel and seen the 1989 TV version which is one of the best scripts that Nigel Kneale ever produced. Naturally I was intrigued as to how the new movie version would stand up.Having seen a couple of trailers and read a synopsis of the new film my heart sank.From what I have seen and read of the new film it only seems to highlight the skill of Nigel Kneales adaption which pace Susan Hill I consider to be an improvement on the original novel.From what I have seen of the new film version it is no more faithful to the original novel than Kneale's version but cliched and derivative of other ghost story  movies in a way that Kneale managed to avoid.

Books -The Last Chapter Final Part.

I have on my bookshelf an edition of a book which is over 100 years old.It is an edition of an illustrated novel by George Du Maurier the author of Trilby entitled The Martian and is a mystical novel with science fiction overtones.It was published in 1908 and is a handsome book with a dark blue cloth cover embossed with gold leaf.It is perfectly readable and the quality paper it was printed on remains pure white with no yellowing or foxing.It has obviously been well looked after and sat on various book shelves during the past century.During this period as it sat there The First World War happened as did The Russian Revolution,The Great Depression ,The Second World War,The Cold War,The 60s .,men landed on the moon,The Berlin Wall fell,911 occurred. During this time countless books were destroyed sometimes deliberately as in the Nazi book burning sometimes    accidently. This particular book survived and there is no reason why it may not survive for another century if it is looked after.I possess an electronic edition of the same book on my Kindle .The e book edition cost me nothing from Amazon and it is also possible to down load for nothing from Project Gutenberg..However I feel I possess the physical book in a way that I do not with the electronic one.The physical book is also worth something while the electronic one is freeware.James Lovelock one of the worlds leading  scientific prophets has dismissed the whole idea of submitting the sum of human knowledge to cloud computing.He thinks such networks which after all consist of extremely sophisticated complex technology may be all too vulnerable to the breakdown for example of the economic and ecological systems they depend on.I was in London on the day of the terrorist attacks on the 7th of July 2005.One of the first things I noticed happening was that the cell phone network collapsed under the weight of calls and everyone's phones became useless.Combined with the closure of roads and public transport people were essentially returned to 19th century conditions in which they had to walk and ask strangers for news by word of mouth - all in just a few hours.James Lovelock has suggested that basic scientific knowledge should be collected in a sort of primer which would be printed in a solid bound book something like a church bible which could be produced in large numbers and distributed to various educational, military and medical foci .He thinks this is far more likely to survive than an e reader or laptop which without power or its network just becomes a piece of unusable junk.Such devices are also produced in a small number of  industrial centers in Asia ,easily accessible now but in the future who knows ?. Of course people would have to look after the books and know how to read them.I a reminded here of a scene from the George Pal 1960 version Of H G Wells The Time Machine.This has always been a favourite film of mine ever  since I saw it as a child.In the scene Rod Taylor the time traveler is stranded among  the child like Eloi in the distant future.In the film they are depicted like vacant 50s American teenagers who show a total lack of curiosity about anything.Rod Taylor asks them if they have any books and that books will tell him all he needs to know about them.They say they have and take him to some book shelves in a room at the back of their building.When Rod touches the books they simply crumple into dust.Rod tells them ,yes books have told me all about you.

Books- The Last Chapter ?.

The question is being raised as to whether those coming generations who will learn to read from screens will engage with books in the same way as those previous generations who grew up with the printed book.Will they ever read a whole book ? or merely be contented with extracts and precis ,a sort of literature light.The critic George Steiner in his masterful work In Bluebeard's Castle ,Some Notes Towards a Re-Definition Of Culture prophesied as long ago as 1970 that Western literature of the last few centuries would gradually become inaccessible  to the common reader.Just as classical literature has become a minority interest with few reading Plato or Homer these days so will modern literature with the great authors of the past largely unread. The culture of the past would in effect become the property of a minority of intellectuals rather in the way that Mustapha Mond the Controller in Huxley s Brave New World has The Bible and Shakespeare in his safe while the lower castes are restricted to the feelies.The modern feelies are only too obvious from Reality TV to Video Games.If everything is left to consumer choice with one choice as good as another the majority may well  prefer the feelies in the same way that someone who has never eaten a proper meal will prefer branded junk food to one.

Books- The Last Chapter ?.

At the moment we live in the golden age of information.Massive amounts of books which would have been out of print or hard to find are either available online or ordered online if only available in a printed edition.It is truly a wonderful time to be alive if you are a bibliophile.Back in the 1960s Marshall McLuhan coined the phase The Global Village.This conjures up an image of a cosy friendly community of equals.In real life villages tended to be very unequal places with the squire and other wealthy families owning most of the land and the poorest members of the community agricultural laborers who worked for them for a pittance.The present information global village is pretty much the same and it is only too obvious to name the squires who actually own the land.When it comes to information you actually have to know what information you are looking for.To do this you have to have a  level of education which many people are denied these days.Actually reading a printed book from cover to cover was once part of such an education.There are many snake oil salesmen who will tell you that we now live in a new paradigm and this no longer applies.Such people were only a few years ago telling us that there we now lived in a New Economy which would grow perpetually. Book titles such as The World Is Flat and Living on Thin Air give a flavor of the period of the 1990s and early 2000s. Everything's Coming Up Roses was the general  message. money would make money and trickle down to even the poorest in good time.Such people now seem quite happy and enthusiastic about the demise of the printed book the bringer of literacy and civilisation  for nearly six centuries.  

Books-The Last Chapter ?.

It is strange sometimes just when you are about say something on a subject someone else will say something on it but not quite what you were going to say.I feel this about best selling author Jonathan Franzen's recent comment denouncing e books and e readers. I like Franzen's work and read his recent magnum opus Freedom over the summer. In Thomas Love Peacocks book Headlong Hall three philosophers are invited by an hospitable squire to a country house party.The philosophers are a Perfectabilian who believes everything is getting better, a Deterionationist who thinks everything is getting worse and a Status Quoite who thinks everything stays the same.When given any set of facts each of the philosophers uses them to prove his own point.I think Jonathon Franzen is definitely a Deterionationist where technology is concerned.E readers are essentially a tool and many bibliophiles will use them as such to increase the number of books they own and to conserve their shelf space for printed books they want to hang on to.As an anology music lovers often possess the same piece of music in different  formats such as vinyl ,CD and download.The increase in the use of e books  may well increase the value of printed books as less of them are printed just as there is a specialist trade in vinyl records.Record decks capable of playing not just vinyl but the old breakable 78s are available and will even turn the music into digital form for you.The invention of the automobile did not lead to the extinction of the horse  in fact there is a global equine industry.This is the upside to the argument on e books to counteract  Jonathan Franzen's more pessimistic view.None the less he obviously sees the e book as a threat and often when someone identifies a threat there may well be something in it.Optimism when there is no grounds for it can be fatal as the present global economic crisis shows.The global boom and bust of the last 20 years coincides pretty neatly with the digital revolution and they are probably  closely linked.

Books-The Last Chapter.?

So now we have the e book and the e reader which look likely to lead to the demise at least of the paperback perhaps sooner than we think. One does not need to elaborate on the advantages of this new method of  purchasing,storing and reading books.The sheer instantaneous nature of the transactions
 with no more ordering and having to wait while the bookshop or library tries to get the book you want.The whole of 19th century literature and much of early 20th century literature which are now out of copyright available free or for a few pounds.I possess a Kindle which I have stacked with nearly 2000 books and it still has space for more.My Kindle is in effect the equivalent of a country house library of the  early 20th century.I can carry around with me the complete works of Shakespeare,The Bible,all the volumes of Gibbons Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, multi  volume works such as Boswell s  Life of Johnson,The Complete Works of Dickens ,Mark Twain,Wilkie Collins,Zola,Kipling.Jules Verne Chesterton and Wells.Truly a marvel.They say you should never look a gift horse in the mouth so why do I have my doubts about this technology ?.

Books-The Last Chapter ?.

In the 1950s,60sand 70s the pocket sized paperback book was fairly ubiquitous.They were relatively cheap and in Britain retailed in the 1960s at between two shillings and four shillings in comparison to nineteen shillings for the latest Beatles LP.Most news agents and tobacconists sold paperbacks and they were sold in automats at rail stations for passengers in search of reading matter.The leading paperback publisher was Penguin which published a vast range from contemporary fiction to the classics.It also had a non-fiction imprint Pelican and published a huge range of childrens books under its Puffin logo .Other paperback companies were Corgi,Pan,New English Library and Panther.All used the pocket book format and generally had brightly illustrated covers by artists who specialized  in that line of work.Sometimes the same artists also produced the art work on  LP covers another key artifact of the time.The art work was often eye catching and helped sell the book.Penguin had originally published its paperbacks in plain colour coded editions ,Orange for Fiction.Green for Detective Fiction and Pale Blue for Non Fiction.By the 1960s even Penguin succumbed to illustrations on the covers.Penguin had originally started publishing its paperbacks in the late 1930s.All these paperbacks are remarkably durable if well looked after.I possess several Penguin Specials from the late 1930s on subjects such as Appeasement and the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany.They are quite readable with the paper in the pages and cover showing no sign of crumbling.This goes for other paperbacks from the 50s 60s and 70s in my collection.The paperback revolution was even celebrated by the Beatles in their song Paperback Writer.
I was surprised that from the 1980s on-wards the small format paperback began to gradually disappear to be replaced by the king sized format which is harder to carry around and takes up more shelf space and was also more expensive.It seemed that the paperback revolution was over and someone wanted people to read less books.

Books-The Last Chapter ?.

Books have always had their enemies of course.The kings and churches always tried to suppress the books they disapproved of because they were afraid they would undermine their authority.With the invention of the printing press this became harder to do and once it was known that a book had been banned there would naturally be a demand by some to read it.By the 19th century freedom of the press seemed assured in many countries.However in the 20th century the regimes of those such as Hitler and Stalin destroyed countless books and their authors. Nevertheless the printed bound paper book was obviously to most people to be a permanent artifact of civilization.The science fiction story by Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit  451 depicted a world in which books were banned and burned by a special brigade of firemen.This was actually mentioned in the Alan Yentob film which set me writing on this topic and a clip from the 1960s film by Francois Truffaut was shown in it.This prescient work seemed very far fetched and unlikely when people people first read it back in the 1950s and 60s and yet we seem to be living to see some of its predictions come true.The television screens which cover the entire walls of rooms for example.It appears that very thin pliable screens are now being developed which will be able to do just that.     

Books -The Last Chapter ?.

The question of the Ancients versus the Moderns is largely forgotten now.The large temporal gap between the Ancient and Modern worlds with its low level of literacy,small literary output and book production seen as an anomaly in the overall story of progress.To me it suggests instead that books and literacy are not a given and in the right circumstances can disappear quite rapidly from a culture. Obviously technology such as the Gutenberg Press or modern digital technology which I will come to later can have an enormous facilitating effect on literacy.However by essentially handicraft methods the ancients were able to achieve a level of literary production which was only eventually surpassed by the invention of printing.The rote learning educational methods of the ancients with their emphasis on memory no doubt helped .Some texts such as Homer would no doubt have been memorized by scribes facilitating  a rapid rate of production.Once the Gutenberg Revolution was in full flight the surviving back catalog from the Ancient World was mass produced and distributed to the scholars of Europe encouraging an educational revolution promoting literacy for people such as the glove makers son William Shakespeare.From the 16th century onward the Moderns started to accumulate their own vast archive which eventually surpassed the Ancients in terms of quantity if not of quality.   

Books -The Last Chapter ?.

Another work this time serious on the subject of the Ancient and Modern literatures was Sir William Temples On Ancient And Modern Learning published in 1690.This book is a precursor to that of Swift and in fact Sir William was a patron of Swift.  Swifts satire was basically a continuation of Temples argument that the  Ancients were the originators of Western thought  with the Moderns basically continuing and developing their work.An example of this is the so called invention of the steam engine.Work began in 17th century England    on steam engines to pump water from mines  long before James Watt(1736 to 1819).It is more than probable that the inspiration for this was Hero of Alexandrias model steam turbine. Hero wrote a book on mechanics which survived and was eventually published by the new printing press. The work contains a clear description of how to construct the model steam turbine along with a variety of other machines including a coin operated slot machine to dispense liquids.Is it not likely that amateur inventors and natural philosophers (the term scientist is a 19th century one) were inspired in  their developments of practical steam engines by Hero?.This would make Hero the actual father of the steam engine rather than as someone who somehow anticipated its actual invention by Newcomen and Watt.

Books-The Last Chapter ?.

The Gutenberg printing press in the 15th century inaugurated a new age of books and literacy.The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 led to a flight to the West of Byzantine scholars bringing Greek texts such as Plato with them.So by the time the printing presses were running the surviving Latin and Greek texts became the basis for the new publishing industry.Initially books were published in Latin and Greek because there was far more ancient than modern literature in existence at that time.This state of affairs continued for some time and was eventually satirized by Swift in his pamphlet The Battle Of The Books.In this satire the books of an early 18th century library dispute who should come first the Ancient or Modern books. The Ancients claiming to be original in their thoughts with the Moderns often merely commentating on the works of the past..By this time a considerable literature in the modern European languages had arisen.It is interesting to note that Caxtons printing press in England  which started in 1476 published four fifths  of its books in English. 

Books- The Last Chapter ?.

With the Fall of the Roman Empire widespread urban literacy and book production largely ceased.The market for books and the public and private libraries which bought them from the producers all went out of existence during the religious upheavals and barbarian invasions which overwhelmed the Western Empire.Eventually the only large scale body of literate men and women were the priests and nuns of the Christian Church. Surprisingly at this time a technological revolution  occurred which created the format of the physical book we know today. The volumen or scroll of the Greeks and Romans was replaced with the bound leaf book with its pages.This is obviously a lot easier to navigate around with new inventions such as numbered pages,chapters and the index.Unfortunately the production of such books was small by Roman standards limited by the small number of literate scribes within the population and also the fact that the books were produced on parchment and vellum.Parchment and vellum are produced from costly animal skins unlike the cheaper mass produced papyrus scrolls of the Roman Empire.Book production of Latin texts took place  in the scriptoriums of monasteries in Western Europe.In the Byzantine Empire the heir to the Eastern Roman Empire copies of Greek texts continued to be produced.A massive amount of the literature the ancient world simply disappeared during these centuries. To quote just one example Sophocles one of the fathers of Western theater wrote 123 plays of which only 7 survive.Imagine if we only had half a dozen of Shakespeare's 30 odd plays.It seems works often survived merely by chance.As well as the monasteries of Western Europe and the Byzantine Empire another repository for ancient texts was the Islamic world which often translated them into Arabic.The truly erudite medieval scholar as well as learning Latin ,Greek and Hebrew(for the scriptures) would also learn Arabic.The literature of the ancient world was in many cases a buried treasure accessible to only a tiny minority.Medieval European scholars knew Aristotle because they had Latin translations of him but Plato and Homer they knew only by reputation because the original Greek texts  had been lost.Some books such as those by Vitruvius on architecture survived because of their practical use,medieval architects were able to use them to build the towns,ecclesiastical buildings and palaces which were required.Eventually the medieval world produced its own literature,Petrarch ,Dante Chaucer and Malory are names that come to mind.This was small compared to the legacy of the ancient world.C S Lewis has pointed  out that there was  a prejudice of the medieval mind against literary innovation..Why invent new stories when the old ones are so much better. All this would seem to be an unpromising setting for the revolution in communication which eventually occurred.