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)
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