The Spell of a Summer's Night: 'The Enchanted Village' by Edward Shanks

In searching for forgotten examples of supernatural or fantastic fiction, it is inevitable that some books with promising titles or descriptions will turn out not to belong to the field. However, there are also others where the question remains open. There may be no clear incursion of another reality, yet there is an uncanny atmosphere, or a series of subtle, finely-shaded implications.

Edward Shanks’ The Enchanted Village (1933) is set in a small settlement under the Downs, consisting of one street only, off the main road to London. It is a hot, dry summer with a drought. The village team are playing a team of ‘gentlemen from London’ at cricket. The latter might be a passing nod to the Invalids, the touring team run by J.C. Squire, editor of the London Mercury, where Shanks was a contributor and reviewer.

We are introduced to the city newcomers who have made their homes in the village, modern young men and women with light, fashionable clothes and casual, open-handed ways. Rather too many are paraded at once, three couples, two singles and a few others on the edge of things, but the principal ones are Joe Marriott and his wife Nina, who have converted a former inn into a large house, and Arthur and Ursula (known as Billie) Dodd. Both have friends to dinner, some staying as guests. There is to be an all-night party in a big barn (a post-cricket match tradition), with dancing and fireworks.

One of the guests asks another if he is thinking of moving here too: ‘“You will have to, if you don’t take care, you know. The village throws its spell over everyone who comes into it. I believe that it is an enchanted village’” (pg. 37). This is the first reference to the book’s title and up to now there has been no particular reason to describe it as ‘enchanted’. It is drowsy, usually quiet, it has an inn, a nearby railway station, and, in the big Georgian house, a retired Oxford don who writes popular essays about its local life. The remark might be merely a pleasantry, but we assume it is to have further significance. 

In the next chapter we begin to get some hint of this. Between the grounds of the Marriott and Dodd houses is a piece of ‘no man’s land’ occupied by a gigantic mulberry tree. If the village is enchanted, says Arthur Dodd, ‘that’s where the enchantment comes from. I’ve always felt that there was something queer about that tree. No Man’s Land! Perhaps we’ve given it the right name’ (pg. 49). These reflections are the more notable as until now he has seemed not in the least a reflective individual: practical, commonsensical, easy-going. But the conversation soon veers away, and the scene shifts to the party, now getting under way. Later, the ex- Oxford professor sees an indistinct couple disappearing into the deep shade of the tree and reflects that it has probably been a trysting place for local lovers for generations: it is, he thinks, the village’s ‘tutelary spirit’. He does not realise one of the pair is his own youngest daughter.

The remainder of the novel depicts the nocturnal tensions and excitements of clandestine affairs involving the villagers, the newcomers and their visitors, with several couples finding new partners. Shanks writes vividly of these fervent, furtive passions. By the end of the book there will be dramatic changes in some of their lives. Others will find that the village is not the rural idyll they hoped for, and decide to move back to London. For them, there is disenchantment. 

It is not clear to what extent Shanks intends us to infer that the mulberry tree really does exercise an ancient influence on the amatory activities in the village: this is not spelt out, and may be purely metaphorical, but it is invoked enough for this to be one possible reading. By contrast, throughout almost all of the novel, there has been no mention of the village church, and indeed it does not appear, and then only in passing, until the very end, for the next morning’s Sunday service after the party. It is as if it has no place in the pagan revels of the night, but marks a return to ‘respectability’ when these are over.

Shanks was at first known as a poet in the restrained, rural, Georgian mode, but was also the author of a science fiction novel, The People of the Ruins (1920), and an occult thriller, Old King Cole (1936). I wrote about these in my essay ‘Change Here for the Dark Age’—Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins’ (Sphinxes and Obelisks, 2021).  Here, in discussing The Enchanted Village, I noted: ‘The characters are deftly drawn, and we see them chat [to] and chaff each other in shrewdly-observed, brisk set-pieces. The prose is assured and well-honed.’

But I had been hoping for some more overt use of the supernatural: ‘The title leads us to expect some stranger enchantment, and we do not really get it. The best that can be said is that he succeeds in conjuring a slightly peculiar nocturnal atmosphere, but he refrains from developing this . . .’ Nevertheless, the book is one that draws you back: and in my further reading, as I have indicated above, I do think there is room for an interpretation that sees an ancient, uncanny influence at work.

The author was perhaps most noted at the time for his magnum opus, the 650+ page novel Queer Street (1932), which apparently sold well, and went into Penguin paperback in two volumes. The title refers to a slang term: being in Queer Street means being in trouble of some sort, usually financial. His bohemian characters often lead a hand-to-mouth existence. This work has received little attention for some years: given its scale and ambition, it might be compared to the novels of John Cowper Powys. The Enchanted Village is sometimes described as a sort of sequel, since some of the characters reappear, but to my view it is really quite separate, with its own different, strangely-charged atmosphere.

(Mark Valentine)

‘Mysterious Images’: An Exhibition of Trompe L’oeil

It is my habit to rummage in bookshops and flea markets in boxes of booklets and pamphlets. I like monographs on ancient monuments or obscure subjects, old town guides, programmes for forgotten festivals, and unexpected ephemera, the passing moments of the printed word.

It was in this way I came upon a catalogue for an exhibition devoted to the art of Trompe L’oeil from the XVIIIth century to the present day held seventy years ago at Arthur Jeffress (Pictures) of Davies Street, London W1, from 18 January-19 February 1955. Sixty one pieces were on display. The gallery had opened in 1954, so this exhibition would have been one of its earliest.

The cover design, signed by A. Groves Raines, depicts a surreal miscellany of eyeglasses, eyeballs, a green lamp and pieces of paper on a wooden shelf against a canvas background. This artist does not seem to be otherwise much known.

An introduction by the artist and art critic Robin Ironside is cool and crisp. He defends the technique: ‘The beauties of trompe l’oeil painting are seldom acknowledged by earnest minded critics without some form of introductory apologia. Though such caution may be explained, it could hardly be more misplaced.’ It may in fact be an intriguing art: ‘The contents of the cabinet, the book shelf or the letter rack are potentially rich in revealing or mysterious images and lend themselves to a diversity of elegant arrangements’; further, ‘the contents of a modern medicine cabinet, selected with imagination, might prove to be more wonderfully grotesque than anything in the curio cabinets of the seventeenth century.’

One of the qualities of trompe l’oeil is that it may sometimes seem a keen metaphor for the world we think of as real, prompting the idea that what we see is also an artifice and that there are further, stranger realms beyond, a view shared by Machen, de la Mare and Mary Butts among others in the field of fantastic literature. For some time I mulled over the notion of using the catalogue as a stepping-off point for a story along just those lines, but it has never quite cohered. 

I leafed through the descriptions of the exhibits and the occasional illustrations. Some phrases caught my attention. The catalogue listed a 1778 work by one ‘John Mallacott’, entitled ‘Where Shall Celia Fly For Shelter?’, which seems to have been a contemporary song: but I could find no further record either of the painter or the painting. The same was true for several of the earlier pieces. They seem to have disappeared.

Whoever possessed the catalogue has made a few pencil annotations. They wrote the date in pencil on the front cover, January 1955, and on an inner page the enigmatic note ‘suede shoes/black duffel’. This sounds like a brief note about someone they were to meet or who interested them there, perhaps the description of another visitor to the gallery. Boy or girl? By the Fifties, these items might be worn by either. Who were they? Did the two make contact? What, if anything, transpired?

The titles of some of the pictures make us wonder what they looked like, from Martin Battersby’s ‘Cup of Tea’, ‘Shuttlecock’, ‘Key’ and ‘Gauloise Bleue’ to ‘Torn Papers’ (Chinese School), ‘Riddle-me-Ree’ (English School, Early 19th Century), ‘The Bibliophile’s Firescreen’ (Varnished Watercolour laid on wood), and ‘A Portrait with Broken Glass’ (French School, 18th Century). Each image suggests a story of some sort.

There were three watercolours by Richard Chopping, ‘Pansies and Snails’, ‘Pears and Still Life’ and ‘Globe Artichokes’. He was soon to become known for his dustjacket designs for Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, some of which use elements of trompe l’oeil too.

There was also one piece in egg tempera by Eliot Hodgkin, ‘Flint and Egg Shells’. He was notable for his keenly observed, highly naturalistic work. I liked this quotation from him in The Studio, 1957: ‘In so far as I have any conscious purpose, it is to show the beauty of natural objects which are normally thought uninteresting or even unattractive: such things as Brussels sprouts, turnips, onions, pebbles and flints, bulbs, dead leaves, bleached vertebrae, an old boot cast up by the tide. People sometimes tell me that they had never really ‘seen’ something before I painted it, and I should like to believe this . . .  I try to show things exactly as they are, yet with some of their mystery and poetry, and as though seen for the first time . . .’

Our visitor has bracketed the four contemporary pieces by L. Roy Hobdell, ‘Pompom Rouge’, ‘Erotica Romana’, ‘Gothick’ and ‘The Clove Ball’, and written ‘poor’: but Peter Stebbing’s ‘Camellias’ and Timothy Whidborne’s ‘Still Life’ are noted as ‘good’, the latter with the question ‘date?’

Most of the contemporary artists exhibited here went on to have careers which continued to involve aspects of trompe l’oeil, for example in murals, theatre design, still lives and commercial art (posters, packets and boxes). I enjoyed the oddities and mysteries that the catalogue suggested and have often wondered about the individual pieces of art, the visitor with the pencil, and his suede-shoed, duffel-coated stranger.

(Mark Valentine)