Customer Reviews

The Night Land

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

(This review is written with the earlier Amazon.com reviews in mind)

The ideas in The Night Land and in Hodgson's other early novel The House On The Borderland seem to have been derived from Wells The Time Machine. You can imagine the book as an attempt to map out the survival of humanity into, and beyond, the time of end of that story - the red sun, the beach, the swollen, flopping, things. Wells believed (with educated men of his time) that the sun had a lifetime of the order of 50 million years: therefore the idea of human survival into the Night was not as implausible as it might seem today.

What is unique about Hodgson is the fertility of his imagination and - and I find this extremely attractive - the way he mixes supernatural and scientific explanations for everything so completely there is really no separation. Some of the things that besiege the Last Redoubt are degenerate humans; some are animal; some come from other dimensions and have been let into this world by corrupt future sciences; many are hybrid of all three sources. Yet the most formidible, carnivorous psychic entities which will eat the souls of any human being they catch, are kept off from the Redoubt by what is unquestionably a technologically produced force field (maybe the first time this idea has ever been used in fantasy?).

The book has a flavour of ideas which no other has ever duplicated. There are things in it, merely thrown away, that could create whole sub-genres of fantastic and imaginative literature. For example, there is one point in the return journey where the heroine (remembering one of her many past lives) remembers a time when The Cities went always to the Westwards - a vision of a great metal roadway with cities on it moving round the slowed-rotation world in time with the Sun. These cities take in the harvest; others (forward on the road) have sewn the seeds; and behind comes a year-long night. The hero strains to remember his own life in that age, and cannot. And this - tremendous image - is one paragraph.

I cannot excuse the writing style, or the author's attitude to women, but I deny that these things are enough to make the book worthless. As well as being a tremendous adventure story it is a picture of THE END of humanity, as we are the beginning - and it succeeds in implying the whole span of humanity between those two points. For all its faults, I have never found a book to compare with it.

In broad outline, this book is cartoonish and childish, it reminded me a lot of the Marvel comics I read when I was a kid in the sixties.

But it's childishness is also its greatest strength, since Hodgson is the only author I know who can so potently conjure up the childhood terror of the dark.

Some of the visible monsters and hazards that are described are almost laughably preposterous, but Hodgson never blinks and ended up convincing me to suspend my disbelief.

One significant drawback is the meglomaniacal importance placed on the hero and his quest, it just doesn't quite ring true. A modern anology would be the Apollo 13 moon mission, I suppose, when millions of people were all thinking and worrying and hoping for the safe return of a handful of astronauts. So the phenomenon is not unprecedented, I just found that Hodgson treated it in an overly grandiose, facile and unconvincing way.

I read the same edition as one of the other reviewers below, the Ballantine one, and the second volume was somewhat edited, according to the preface. A lot of the excess romantic stuff was deleted. Even so, there are many long passages that are well nigh unreadable, because they are so over-the-top cutesy and mushy.

The faux 17th century writing style gets very wearing, as well, but it does succeed in significantly adding to the larger than life grandeur of the tale. It's a pity that Hodgson was killed in WWI, if he had lived to edit it, and clean up the style to make it more convincingly 17th century, the book would have benefited tremendously.

And another of the endearing qualities of the story is that the landscape and basic story premise is very psychologically evocative of any person living a hopeless, dispirited existence. It really succeeds as a psychological allegory, in my opinion.

Speaking of psychological things, Hodgson succeeds in describing many human emotions in a very tangible and palpable way. His

description of telepathic "good vibrations" pre-dates the hippies by many decades. And he is also very good as evoking how one's emotional state can drastically alter one's life in a very marked, and even physical, way. He was a writer of rare insight and sensitivity, and the world suffered a great loss when he died so young and needlessly.

It's been said in other places on the web, maybe not in these reviews here, that one of the most remarkable things about this book is that the tension is sustained for so long a time. I have to agree. One way that Hodgson does this is to adopt an almost journal-like structure for the story, each meal time in every day is covered, all along the quest. This keeps the focus of the story narrow and close down on the hero's level, so you never stop empathizing heavily with him.

All in all, I would say, that if you are a fan of fantasy, then you should definitely give this a try, it's an amazingly original and engrossing fantasy.

Everyone raves about "The Lord of The Rings", but this is the real "grand-daddy" of the "modern" epic adventure. I read this for the first time when I was a young teen-ager (admittedly skipping the more "flowery" bits), and the book's dark and frightening imagery has haunted me ever since. I recently picked up an old copy and re-familiarized myself with it more thoroughly. Yes, the prose is repetitive, and Victorian in style, but it's all part of the experience. It takes a bit of discipline to plow through this tome, but it's worth it - knowing that you've completed reading so difficult and rewarding a book makes you feel good. Think about all the folks who have given up trying to wrestle with it..?! There are very few books written which are able to convey such senses of atmosphere and desolation. This is a book that you either like immensely, or hate completely. Hodgson was brilliant - what a shame that he died so young. Imagine if they made it into a film...WOW!

Mr. Hodgson's THE NIGHT LANDS concerns the last remnant of mankind, alive on a darkened and terror-haunted Earth after the extinction of the sun. At the bottom of the trench of a dead sea, still kept warm by dying embers of geothermal heat, powered by the mysterious 'Earth Current' rises the Last Redoubt, a massive pyramid a mile or more in height, the fortress in which the final descendants of mankind survive. Around the Last Redoubt lurk massive and sinister beings, perhaps brought to Earth long ago by the unwise curiosity of man: but whether they are demons, or aliens, or extradimensional manifestations is unknown. The Northwest Watching Thing rises like a mountain near the redoubt, but history reports it has not moved in centuries. About its feet glide the Silent Ones, dimly seen by the light of the Giant's kilns, and in certain pits beyond the Silent House the shadows of the Great Gray Man are sometimes seen. In the Last Redoubt is born a hero who has the gi! ! ft of the Night-hearing, a type of telepathy. Dimly, he hears in his mind the voice of a human woman, and finds that there is another Redoubt somewhere lost in the darkness of the Night Lands, and he recognises her as his one true love from a previous cycle of incarnations. This Lesser Redoubt is besieged and dying. Alone, dressed in his armor and bearing his disk-shaped war-ax made of living metal, the champion goes for to find his love, despite all the unnamed terrors and mysteries of the Night Lands.

The language in Mr. Hodgson's work if formal and archaic, hence will be found difficult or boring for some readers. There characters are mere viewpoints, without any personality whatever. The plot is so simple as to be nonexistent: the hero voyages across the eerie landscape, avoiding monstrous beings and hulking troglodytes, finds the girl, and returns.

For me the main interest in the book was the depiction, all in hints and adumbration, of the supernatural entities ! ! looming, vast and inhuman, throughout the dead and wasted l! andscape: but since, during the second half of his odyssey, the hero returns by the same route he passed in the first half, no new spectacles are seen. Therefore the second half of this long book I found boring.

Night Lands is memorable, strange, quaint and horrid, and conveys a lingering sense of cosmic inhumanity, but so flawed in its lack of plot and character, its affected prose, that this book may only appeal to devoted aficionados of strange fantasy.

Disgruntled English students usually think they are suffering when they are made to read William Golding's "Lord of the Flies". They say the symbolism is too confusing, too hard to understand etc. But that book is a walk in the park compared to "The Night Land". It is no exaggeration to say that, unless one is prepared to make an effort, reading this book can be exquisitely painful. In order to avoid getting a headache I was obliged to read in short bursts, or until the words started spinning in front of my eyes.

The writing of "The Night Land" is the deepest shade of purple prose imaginable. Exceedingly dense, flowery, and, in some parts, almost indecipherable. Curiously, I still wanted to finish it. Despite the critic's warnings, I couldn't resist the story: the remaining inhabitants of Earth (a handful of millions) surviving in a future that has long been dark, desolate and hostile since the death of the sun. A cordon of lumbering, monolithic creatures inching their way toward the Last Redoubt, where the humans are sheltered.

While reading "The Night Land" I was, to a certain extent, reminded of Camille Flammarion's "Omega: the Last Days of the World" (1893). Both books are fairly bleak visions presenting an Earth disturbingly changed by the aeons. Both have an element of Victorian-era romance where the heroes set out and eventually find their Intended Ones. "Omega" is far more easy to comprehend, however. It gradually eases the reader into the remote future, preparing him or her for the shock of change. "The Night Land" cuts right to the chase. The narrator, a grieving widow in the first chapter, "awakes" in the future with a different body, completely familiar with his surroundings, looking on his past life like a vaguely remembered dream.

Like other readers, I would have enjoyed the book more if it weren't for the language. There did seem a bit too much padding and a frustrating sense of going round in circles. The romance can only be described as mawkish. Hodgson does do a good job at evoking a feeling of dislocation though. Making the future look confusing and bewildering to outsiders like ourselves. If you want to read a book that plays with language, I would like to suggest "Riddley Walker" by Russell Hoban. It's only set a few thousand years from now, but it does evoke the feeling of another era through language more convincingly than Hodgson's attempt.

I strongly feel that this book must be read in the context of other books of its era, as well as the artistic and poetical zeitgeist, and not only those if the era in whch it was written, but that in which the beginning and the personality of the narrator is set. This is a book such as Wagner would have written, Wilde would have rejoiced in, Swinburne been inspired by. The enormity of the canvas, the breadth of field, all are characteristic of the fin de siecle romantic disaster in its best and most eloquent portrayal. Even the faults of the work are those of the style. It is very easy to imagine the whole work as an outgrowth of the late nineteenth-century operatic tradition, with the same assumptions about the nobility of the hero, the clinging vine purity of the heroine, the handkerchief-wringing finale. I would allow this comparison to colour the reading of the work. Read in this way, the true greatness can be seen through a corrective prism, adding in an understanding of the distortions of their world-view and removing the distortions of the prevailing zeitgeist of our time. I

It is not clear from the reviews above that this epic fantasy novel was one of the first in the genre, first published in 1912.

Hodgson conjures up a unique vision of the far future, where Earth is near its heat death, and all is darkness. At times his prose is brilliant, hinting at how humans are a minute remnant, scurrying between the toes of titanic forces they only dimly understand. In this he evokes a Lovecraftian sense of our vulnerablity. However, his prose goes beyond purple well into the ultraviolet. It is not written in what one might call modern English, nor even turn of the century English. He is trying to evoke a mythic tone by writing with a more archaic mode. It is full of enough "Lo!"'s and "Behold!"'s to choke a bard. If you can get past that, the novel is worth while for the mood it evokes.

Hodgson wrote a number of fantasy works before the First World War which attracted favourable comment, especially his "Carnacki the Ghost Hunter" stories. The "Night Land" was his greatest work, both in its expanse of imagination and its sombre staging. The first few chapters, once you pass the laboured plot gimmick of a dream state from which this fantastic story set in the very,very far distant future is related, are very good. The imagery of the Last Redoubt, a doomed fortress at the end of the world, beset by "unspeakable" horrors waiting for its defences to fail as the prelude to the extinction of humanity, is magnificent. After that the mock antique language, "love" story, and overall length of the story kill this promising beginning. Brian Aldiss described the work as "flaring into magnificence", a comment one publisher promptly embellished the blurb with, before adding "fades into unreadibility". Aldiss was right. Buy it or read it for the first few chapters. Hodgson never bettered the atmosphere of dread in this book, save for some his short sea horror stories (Peter Haining made a collection of these in a "Master of Terror" series) which have some genuinely disturbing imagery.

William Hope Hodgson's epic novel "The Night Land" was chosen for inclusion in Cawthorn & Moorcock's "Fantasy: The 100 Best Books," and yet in this overview volume's sister collection, "Horror: 100 Best Books," Jones & Newman surprisingly declare the novel to be "unreadable." No less a critic than H.P. Lovecraft pronounced "The Night Land" to be "one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written," and yet still insists that "the last quarter of the book drags woefully." With critics seemingly split down the middle regarding this novel, I manfully plunged into this book's 400+-page story, having greatly enjoyed four previous Hodgson titles: "The Boats of the Glen Carrig" (1907), "The House on the Borderland" (1908), "The Ghost Pirates" (1909) and the short-story collection "Carnacki The Ghost-Finder" (1913). Although "The Night Land" was initially published in 1912, it may very well have been Hodgson's first novel, if we can believe Sam Gafford's scholarly Internet essay entitled "Writing Backwards: The Novels of William Hope Hodgson." Be it the author's first novel or last, however, the book is extraordinary in many ways, and depicts a milieu not easily forgotten.

Our nameless narrator, who apparently lives in the 18th century, tells us of his visions of the very far distant future. His reincarnated self, he reveals, lives in a time when the Earth's sun has burnt itself out, and the remnants of humanity reside in a seven-mile-high, 1,320-story pyramid, The Last Redoubt, around 150 miles below the planet's frozen surface. Our narrator, using a pseudo-archaic form of English that doubles as the language of the far future, goes on to tell of the epic journey he takes through the uncharted bowels of the Earth in search of a woman named Naani, who he is in telepathic communication with and who also seems to be the reincarnation of our narrator's 18th century wife. The travails that our young hero undergoes to find his lost love and bring her safely back to the Redoubt are certainly no less insurmountable than those that Homer's hero experienced in his classical odyssey. This young man is forced to encounter monstrous beastmen, enormous slugs and spiders, giants, feral hounds, volcanoes and other menaces during his months-long journey, and his plight is only made more worrisome when he ultimately does find Naani and has to turn around and bring her home. But a mere plot summary can in no way convey the atmosphere of eeriness that Hodgson manages to sustain for the entire duration of his book. The Night Land is indeed a world of dark wonders, most of which go unexplained. The angelic powers of good that repeatedly come to our hero's salvation, the dreadful Watchers, the inhabitants of the House of Silence, the Laugher of the East, the invisible Evil Powers...all these mysterious inhabitants of the underground realm are fleetingly referred to, leaving the reader hoping to learn more. Despite the novel's length, "The Night Land" could easily have served as a mere introduction to an epic fantasy series. Sadly, with Hodgson's death in World War I action in April 1918, that continuing series was never to be, leaving us with this tantalizing glimpse of Earth's future.

I mentioned that archaic language before, the major stumbling block, seemingly, for most readers; the one responsible for the charge of the book being "unreadable." Here are some examples of this supposedly "unreadable" language: "And presently, when eighteen hours did have passed since that my sudden awakening to the peril of the Grey Men, I did search about for a place to slumber." "But I to know how that she did be like to be all gone of her strength thiswise...." "And there to be yet one thing upon which, mayhap, I not to have thought sufficient...." Although this diction is initially offputting, I found that I quickly adapted to the book's unusual grammar, syntax and punctuation (Hodgson's other works, especially "Glen Carrig," were a good prep for this), and soon felt that the narrator's manner of speech is almost charming. The book is far from unreadable; indeed, I think it is actually quite gripping. The final quarter that Lovecraft complained about is, for me, anything but a drag. Yes, the action does slow down a bit, as Hodgson details the "Taming of the Shrew"-like relationship that develops between our hero and his Naani; but this only sets us up for a final 50 pages or so that are really very thrilling. The relationship referred to, by the way, is quite a sweet one. Has a couple in all of fantasy literature ever been more manifestly in love than this couple here? Have you ever seen two people so enamored of each other that they actually kiss each other's food? Though some modern feminists might have a problem with our narrator's pet name for Naani ("Baby Slave"), the two are as perfect a couple as one could hope to find, and the reader's sympathies are wholly with them during their harrowing journey. Indeed, the more sentimental reader may find him/herself getting quite a bit misty-eyed by the book's conclusion. In any event, the bottom line is that this novel is some kind of brilliant work, and one that should greatly appeal to all fantasy, sci-fi and horror fans. It is well worth seeking out.

The Nightland is written in a near impossible 'classical' style. It should be a disaster as a book. It isn't. Written early 1900's its a breathtakingly visionary work that inspired the likes of HP Lovecraft. Persist reading it. It's worth it!