There is a sadness, as well as a terror, about ghost stories: we may not want to be haunted, but we may want to haunt. Is an unappeased afterlife better than total annihilation?

Haunting a draughty castle with your head stuck under your arm may not sound like much fun, but it beats non-existence (for the non-Buddhist among you) or Hell (for the Catholic among you).

Ghost stories are best enjoyed at the liminal times of year: where autumn slips into winter; when the dark starts to last longer than the light; when the portal between the living and the dead worlds flickers into existence.

The most anarchic of customs occur around this time, the other time being April 30th, or Walpurgisnacht, when a similar inversion tales place. The ghosts seek closure, or vengeance, or just recognition. Don’t we all?

Be careful what you wish for

As a child, and I cannot be alone in this, I both craved to see a ghost and craved not to see one. Scooby-Doo cartoons taught us that they did not exist, but that the fear of them was powerful. Ghosts now are more of a metaphor than an actual fear; like quicksand.

The great-grandfather of Scooby-Doo, of course, is The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which the spectral hound is – spoiler alert – just a bloody big dog with luminous paint all over it. It’s the first modern anti-ghost story, and I like to think that Scooby himself is an ironic nod to Conan Doyle’s creation.

But we still like being scared by them, and this is the time of year to do it, when darkness falls. The most famous ghost story of all was composed during the particularly miserable summer of 1816, “the year without a summer”. Mary Shelley, staying with Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, came up with a monster.

Frankenstein and other classics

Frankenstein’s monster

Frankenstein not a ghost story? Well, it may not be a conventional ghost story, but a ghost story was what Byron had asked everyone to come up with. And it is, after all, about a kind of survival of life after death. Not to mention that its very composition conforms to the classic way such stories continue to be told, right up to the days of The Simpsons: around a fire, and extemporised.

There had been ghost stories before: the so-called Gothic novels of the mid to late 18th Century had plenty of ghosts, but they are of debatable quality, i.e. I think they’re rubbish.

You could argue that Hamlet is a kind of ghost story, and indeed some of the elements of all the best ghost stories are contained in it; similarly Macbeth, with Banquo’s ghost scaring the bejesus out of the eponymous antihero. All children, in the days when they were obliged to read these plays, considered the bits with ghosts in them (or witches) to be far and away the best bits. (The other good bits were when people were killed.)

Henry Fuseli – Macbeth, Banquo and the Witches 1793-94. Petworth House collection

Are the parts of The Odyssey set in the Underworld a ghost story? Is Dante’s Inferno kind of a collection of ghost stories? Not really, even if they deal with the shades of the dead; but they do provide a kind of authority or reference point for the more contemporary ghost story.

Proper ghostly horror

But the best ghost stories, of the kind that we now understand as ghost stories, came about in the lateish 19th and early 20th centuries, with the big literary gun among these being Henry James, whose stories “The Jolly Corner” and The Turn of the Screw are still – especially the latter – capable of giving even the jaded modern reader a frisson. Not to mention the fact that students groaning under the wight of James’s epic sentences in his more ‘serious’ works have seized with relief the relative simplicity of his narrative here.

In The Turn of the Screw we have lots of candles being mysteriously snuffed out, and apparitions at windows. And the notion, which had escaped people at the time, that everything was a figment of the governess’s imagination, gives things a surprisingly modern twist.

Before then we had, of course, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. And even though we have Marley’s ghost clanking its chains, I am not sure it is the kind of ghost story we are after. It is rather didactic and has a soppy ending. I do not think ghost stories should have soppy endings, or even happy ones.

Much more satisfactory is Dickens’s own “The Signal-Man”, whose appearance portends some terrible railway accident. The reason this is such a good story is that Dickens had skin in the game, so to speak. The year before he had been in the famous Staplehurst rail crash, and had been severely rattled, both literally and metaphorically, by it.

Fear of the unknown

But the really big beast in the ghost story canon has to be MR James (no relation to Henry). Here is the genuinely spooky stuff: there are grown men I know, and I am one of them, who come over all queer, in the old-fashioned sense of the term, when they hear or read the very name of his most famous ghost story, “Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”.

Illustration by James McBryde for MR James’s story “Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad”, first published “All Hallows Eve 1904”. As recounted in the book’s preface, James was close friends with the illustrator and its publication was intended as a showcase for the illustrator’s artwork. McBryde died having only completed four plates. If that’s not spooky…

This, to lapse into literary critical jargon for a moment, is the business. It’s got everything you want from a ghost story, and provided the template for much of James’s other ghost stories: an innocent professor of something arcane (Ontography, in “Whistle”’s case, whatever that is) who gets in over his head after discovering an ancient artefact of great malice, and an apparition of great power which is yet also indistinct.

It gives me the heebie-jeebies just to think about it. And if you want to spend the dark months of winter looking anxiously over your shoulder and wondering what that noise was, then I strongly suggest you get hold of a copy of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary right now. You won’t regret it. Or maybe you will.

Nicholas Lezard

Nicholas Lezard has been a freelance writer since God was a boy. He writes the Down and Out column for the New Statesman, and lives in Brighton.

The post Darkness falls across the land – and Nick Lezard is close at hand… appeared first on Silver Magazine.

Naturally, before the gig, I found myself singing a song. I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a thing to wear … but seriously, what does one wear to a Morrissey review these days?

It was so much easier in the old days. Bunch of gladdies in the back pocket, shirt undone, hearing aid; job done. You looked like your hero, everyone else did, and everyone was happy. “Happy” being a relative term when the Smiths were playing, of course, but you know what I mean.

I must confess, I came here hoping for outrage

Now, though? Morrissey has become … problematic. Which is probably the politest way of putting it. I will mind my words, for we are in lawyer-infested waters here, and it is best to be careful. One thing I can say without fear of legal reprisal though: any suspicion that you might have had that he was a wrong ’un were confirmed in spades when he insisted on his autobiography being published by Penguin Classics. Although at least the publishers ended up looking more foolish than the pop star.

Anyway, to the gig, at Brighton Centre, a large venue of quite astonishing ugliness. I did wonder, Brighton being the kind of place it is, whether there might be some kind of protest outside; or whether he’d manage to get a decent audience. (No one wanted to go with me; well, almost no one.)

Well, there was no protest, and a large crowd. Not completely packing the place out, but nothing to be ashamed of. And all in all quite a feat when you consider that they must have managed to get every Brexit voter in Brighton to show up. I am pretty confident in my assessment of how everyone voted in the referendum, but I promise you I am not being mean or snotty.

The music

That is why we’re here, after all, and it soon becomes clear that we are in Wagner territory here: in that someone with very murky views can still produce a good tune. And for the first half of the gig, they are very good tunes indeed. A mixture of Smiths and solo stuff. And the thing about them is that they are fast, and punchy, with a very tight band behind him. The slowest song is “How Soon Is Now” but that counts as fast because it’s so good. Sorry, but it was when it came out, and always will be.

The pace slows down about halfway through. At this point I remember why I was never the hugest Smiths fan: because so many of their songs are, essentially, dirges. The audience is happy though; of course they are. Shouts of “love ya!” happen every couple of minutes. At one point it looks horribly as those in the front are giving a straight-armed salute with unfortunate associations; but we’ll let that pass. However, the woman sitting next to me does ask why I am not cheering or waving my arms about; I let that go too.

I must confess, I came here hoping for outrage. I wanted Morrissey to say something incredibly inflammatory and regrettable. Damn it, I’d have been satisfied if he’d waved a Union Jack. But no: this was the final date of a long tour, and he was probably knackered. (He said his voice was “raggedy” towards the end, but I didn’t notice it.)

There was a mild irony in the way the crowd loved “Every Day Is Like Sunday” – another great song, but he can’t really have had Brighton in mind when he wrote it, for the place is quite jolly even in the off-season. I wondered if he’d play “The Queen Is Dead” but he didn’t. I also wondered if he was going to play “National Front Disco” which, until his views became clearer on the subject, always struck me as an extremely fascinating and poignant song. But of course, it isn’t any more, and playing it would be unwise, to put it mildly. So instead, we had Morrissey carefully and professionally safeguarding his legacy. It’ll be a long while before I see him again, but everyone else loved him; live and let live.

Morrissey official fb

Read: Interview with Gary Kemp

Nicholas Lezard

Nicholas Lezard has been a freelance writer since God was a boy. He writes the Down and Out column for the New Statesman, and lives in Brighton.

The post Morrissey review – the light that never goes out? appeared first on Silver Magazine.

I’ve been trying to come up with decent romantic novels, and despite a degree in Eng Lit and thirty-six years’ experience as a book reviewer, I can’t think of a single one. I mean, apart from the obvious one.

In fact, you can probably come up with the top three yourself. (Google will deliver the same three if you can’t be bothered to do it yourself). The other two are Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, which seems to me to be stretching the concept of ‘romance’ somewhat.

Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, even Austen and Eliot, are all wonderful writers, but their work is founded in wish fulfilment

Looking at lists generated by an internet search can be a dismal affair for those who take their literature seriously. I looked at the results of a poll conducted by National Public Radio (NPR), the worthy non-commercial sector of American broadcasting, and it was quite the eye-opener.

NPR persuaded 18,000 people to write in with their suggestions and, scrolling down the lists (there are several categories: historical, paranormal, what have you) I find myself looking at a lot of book covers showing muscled hunks and bosomy women in revealing dresses. Revealing, either because they are marvellous satin ballgowns, or because they have become somewhat décolleté after a romp in a haystack. Always a haystack. And if not a haystack, then a stable. Where there is, of course, hay.

Every single one of them is by a woman. Or says they are. I suspect there may be a few men writing under pseudonyms in this racket. Here are some picks from the top of the deck (the ‘historical’ section).

Ravished, by Amanda Quick: “Fossil-hunting rector’s daughter Harriet Pomeroy summons the notorious Viscount St. Justin to sleepy Upper Biddleston …”

Lord of Scoundrels (part of the Scoundrels series) by Loretta Lynda Chase (“… stands out for the matchless banter between gruff, unruly Sebastian Ballister, Marquess of Dain, and his lovely nemesis Jessica Trent …”)

The Rules of Scoundrels, also a series, by Sarah MacLean, is about “four notorious aristocrats”, who learn that “love has a way of offering absolution”.

I could go on, but then you might think I’m deliberately taking the mickey. I am not. Do you begin to see a pattern here? Maybe one or more of these is one of your favourites. And maybe, despite superficial similarities, each one of the novels I have mentioned is a tour-de-force of originality.

It was while I was thinking about this subject that I read an article by the great critic, John Lanchester, in which he articulated something that had been bothering me for decades. “The reader whose idea of the novel is formed by the English canon may at some stage start to read books in the French tradition.

“At that point, it may suddenly seem that everything one has previously read has essentially been children’s literature. Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, even Austen and Eliot, are all wonderful writers, but their work is founded in wish fulfilment, happy endings and love conquering all … When you turn from that tradition to the work of Laclos, Flaubert, Balzac, Stendhal, Maupassant and Proust, it’s like getting a glass of ice water in the face.”

He’s right. The so-called romantic novels mentioned above cannot really be counted as literature, that’s obvious; putting Dickens etc into an adjacent camp is, to say the least, audacious. But it’s a thought that’s very hard to shake off once you’ve come across it. (In the same essay I’ve quoted from above, Lanchester mentions the doyenne of English romantic novelists, Barbara Cartland, who “wrote 723 books in total. Nobody cares, because they’re all shit.”)

When I read Madame Bovary, it kind of inoculated me from every romantic feeling that fiction had to offer

I struggle to think of any novel in English literature where I have been affected by a central romance. Possibly I moped after Estella in Great Expectations for a bit. I remember thinking, while wading, heavy-footed, through Middlemarch, “what’s so bad about Casaubon? He’s a serious scholar, for goodness’ sake.”

I remember reading Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust when I was a teenager and falling in love with Brenda Last. If you do not know the work, Brenda Last is a shockingly poor choice of woman. Based on his own unfaithful first wife, Waugh portrayed a woman so vain and thoughtless and selfish that she sobs with relief when she finds out that it is her son, and not the worthless lover who shares his first name, who has died in a hunting accident. But I was in love, from a distance, at the time, and I thought women were simply like that.

When I read Madame Bovary, it kind of inoculated me from every romantic feeling that fiction had to offer. And I think that was precisely Flaubert’s intention.

So I am afraid I cannot offer any advice for Valentine’s Day reading. I presume everyone here has read Pride and Prejudice? That’s your lot, as English romantic novels go.

Try Lezard’s holiday reads

Nicholas Lezard

Nicholas Lezard has been a freelance writer since God was a boy. He writes the Down and Out column for the New Statesman, and lives in Brighton.

The post Lezard’s best romantic novels for Valentine’s Day – or not… appeared first on Silver Magazine.

Some of the best books to take on holiday; five of the best, in fact.

There is nothing that can make you tear through a book like taking it on holiday (major disclaimer: not if you’re on holiday with children. Let’s assume you’re not).

Of course, you need the right kind of holiday book. It shouldn’t involve too much concentration, unless you’re the kind of person who takes Proust in your luggage (and I have been known to do this, and, once when in Italy, Dante – in the original Tuscan, without a translation. I did better than I thought I would…).

But it shouldn’t be mindless. No Da Vinci Code, no 50 Shades of anything. And it’s nice if it involves travel, especially to the place you’re travelling to.

1. The Golden Rule, Amanda Craig

Craig’s latest novel, just out in paperback, is a nifty potboiler. Two women on a train are having hellish times with their husbands, so they agree, in the manner of Highsmith, and Hitchcock in Strangers on a Train, to murder each other’s. The idea being that with nothing to connect them, the crimes can be committed with impunity.

Of course, as with the original story, it all goes horribly wrong. Like Craig’s last book, The Lie of the Land, which is at least as good, the plot cranks up, until by the end there’s a race against time to stop something really terrible happening.

Craig is concerned about the state of the nation, so we get a lot about the class system and how ghastly things are for Cornish natives. The Lie of the Land was about how ghastly things are for people in Devon. Chances are you won’t be going abroad this year, so take one or the other depending on which county you’re going to.

The Golden Rule by Amanda Craig (Little, Brown)
£8.99 paperback, £16.99 hardback

2. Widowland, CJ Carey

It is a by-law in most parts of the country that each holiday cottage must contain a copy of Richard Harris’s Fatherland, his novel set in an imaginary past where the Nazis won World War II. But you’ve all read that by now, haven’t you? So try this one for your alternate history fix: a new novel by an established writer normally known as Jane Thynne.

Thynne/Carey has, with her Clara Vine novels, considerable experience when it comes to writing books set during the last war. Here, though, we are in 1953, in a miserably Nazi-occupied Britain, very plausibly imagined.

Our heroine, Rose, is employed rewriting literary classics to conform with the authorities’ stifling attitude towards women. You know, make Dorothea Casaubon or Jane Eyre less intelligent and independent, that kind of thing. Women are divided into categories, depending on their utility as baby-providers.

So as well as Harris, it’s also 1984 meets The Handmaid’s Tale. As I was reading this I was thinking, “hang on, there was something the Nazis did which was even worse than this”, but it gradually becomes apparent that Carey knows very well what she’s doing.

Widowland by CJ Carey (Quercus Publishing)
£8.99, £14.99 hardback

3. Journey by Moonlight, Antal Szerb

This 1937 Hungarian novel wasn’t translated into English until 2001 and a lot of people are now very happy it has been. The translator, Len Rix, learned Hungarian precisely to translate this book, which cultured Hungarians consider to be absolutely essential reading.

It’s narrated by Mihály, a man for whom the word “diffident” might have been coined. He accidentally, or accidentally-on-purpose, abandons his wife Erzi during their honeymoon and then goes wandering through Italy in a kind of existentialist daze.

It’s a book with serious themes – such as the Hungarian fascination with suicide – yet it deals with them with such a tender, humorous grace that you don’t feel as if you’re reading anything substantial at all. Until you get to the end and realise you’ve just read one of the best novels ever written. And feel like starting it again.

I’ve recommended this novel perhaps more often than I have any other, and I’ve never had any complaints yet. If you’re holidaying in Wales, read his The Pendragon Legend, which is more of a romp, with ghosts and spies and castles, like a grown-up Tintin adventure.

Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb (Pushkin Press)
£8.99 paperback

4. Killing Floor, Lee Child

Frankly, anything featuring Child’s errant army veteran, Jack Reacher, will do. Killing Floor, from 1997, is the first. If you haven’t come across him, Reacher is a giant of a man; an ex-military policeman with more than a touch of the Sherlock Holmes about him. Peripatetic, whose only luggage is an ATM card, travelling toothbrush, an expired US passport. And the clothes he stands up in.

He travels by Greyhound bus or hitchhikes all over the US, and always ends up, despite wanting a quiet life, involved in the most heinous plots. Often in out-of-the-way places, but he does get to go to New York or Paris or London every so often.

He is usually up against some seriously evil hombres and the odds are stacked incredibly against him. But he is as tough as he is smart, and always acts honorably to decent people. Hates racists and misogynists.

We love him. Bonus fact: Lee Child’s prose is impeccable, like stripped-down Chandler.

Killing Floor by Lee Child, (Transworld)
£8.99 paperback

5. Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess

Many years ago, as a young man, I went on a trip all the way up Italy on the back of a friend’s motorbike. This was my holiday read, and I don’t think I’ve ever had a better one. Burgess had a brain the size of a planet, and this book takes us all around the globe and through the 20thCentury, tackling the big questions of good and evil and whatnot.

And yet without it ever being a strain on the reader. It’s perhaps the most deliberately outrageous opening line of all novels. “It was the afternoon of my 81st birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”

My Italian motorbike-riding friend, who like many Italians is suspicious of the Catholic Church and homosexuality, read this with a shudder and handed it back to me. I know I said holiday books shouldn’t involve too much concentration – and amazingly, you don’t need too much to enjoy this. Just let it all wash over you.

Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess (Hutchinson)
£10.99 paperback

 @nicklezard

Nicholas Lezard

Nicholas Lezard has been a freelance writer since God was a boy. He writes the Down and Out column for the New Statesman, and lives in Brighton.

The post Nick Lezard: Five of the best books ever to take on holiday appeared first on Silver Magazine.