The Centenary of 'Pender Among the Residents'

This month marks the centenary of the publication of Forrest Reid’s Pender Among the Residents (1922), a haunted house story set in the small seaside town of Ballycastle, Co.Antrim, N. Ireland, a favourite resort of the author. He set scenes from some of his other books there too.

The titular character, Rex Pender, was based, in his rather dreamy manner, upon Reid’s friend Walter de la Mare. However, his circumstances are different: he is a wounded WWI veteran who has inherited his grandfather’s house in the town.  

Reid acknowledged the novel was ‘a composite tale’, partly ‘a village chronicle intended to be light and amusing’, and partly ‘a rather conventional ghost story’. There is thus a double meaning to the ‘residents’ of the title, who are both the local people his protagonist must get to know and the psychic inhabitants of the house. As often with Reid, the character-drawing is picturesque and convincing, with a particular eye for the foibles that make individuals distinctive.

Pender is researching his family history and becomes absorbed in old portraits and letters. This brings him into contact with an ancient tragedy, and as he looks into this, and pieces together the story, he finds it exerting a disturbing influence upon him.

The novel, in its leisurely style, has a late Victorian, Henry Jamesian pace and poise: Reid was an admirer of James and dedicated his first novel, The Kingdom of Twilight (1904), to him, much to James’ embarrassment.

In Pender Among the Residents, the little town and its society, as well as its seaside atmosphere, are carefully evoked. The rather steady, studied style has not made it a favourite among either Reid enthusiasts or connoisseurs of the ghost story, but it has subtle, observant qualities that make it a worthwhile contribution to the difficult art of full-length supernatural fiction, and I wonder whether it may be under-appreciated.  

(Mark Valentine)

The Centenary of 'Kai Lung's Golden Hours'

Today marks the centenary of Ernest Bramah’s Kai Lung’s Golden Hours (1922), the second volume in his series about a wily Chinese storyteller, following The Wallet of Kai Lung (1900). Doug Anderson has identified that the UK edition was published on 30 October 1922. The book uses the Scheherazade device of stories told before a potentate to postpone a fatal sentence.

The Kai Lung stories are noted for a highly ornate, courteous and circumlocutory form of dialogue intended to suggest the formalities of Mandarin in English. Each episode also has a title in similar elevated form. The adventures of Kai Lung, however, are straight out of traditional storytelling, typically involving wicked overlords, cunning courtiers, magicians, bandits, mendicants and lovely (and resourceful) young women.

Bramah achieves a comic contrast between the loftiness of the language and the often rather base motives of his characters, which include avarice, ambition, lust and revenge.

The style was an elaborate invention of Bramah’s, who had in fact never been to China, and his depiction of its landscape, legends and customs is purely a fairy-tale, willow-pattern fantasy. The only remote comparisons would perhaps be to the heightened prose and sardonic undercurrents of Lord Dunsany’s tales, or the contrast between the omniscient Jeeves and the jejune Wooster in P G Wodehouse’s tales.

I found my own copies of the first three volumes in a catalogue from the late and much-missed Manchester fantasy/SF bookdealer Mike Don of Dreamberry Wine, as I did so many other good things. They were cheap reprints in golden covers and very battered, half-torn dustwrappers, but they were a passport to some hours of pleasant reading. I went on to pursue other books by Bramah and to write about him for Book & Magazine Collector. I was delighted to find that William Charlton, co-author of the first Arthur Machen biography (with Aidan Reynolds, 1963) was also an aficionado and had in fact acquired Bramah’s copyrights.

The Kai Lung books were a great favourite of Edwardian and interwar literati, including Hilaire Belloc, who provided a preface to the Golden Hours, J.C. Squire and Dorothy L Sayers, who has Lord Peter Wimsey quote Kai Lung several times. Belloc recounts his pleasure at the first book in the series, and says he has ‘just over a dozen’ copies in his house and that he has frequently presented it to friends.

The new book, he avers, has ‘the same complete satisfaction in the reading’. Quoting a few of what were to become much-admired phrases, he challenges doubters to ‘try to write that kind of thing yourself’. Belloc believes the books will endure: ‘Rock stands and mud washes away’. The book has indeed been reprinted numerous times, including as a Penguin paperback, in Richards Press reprints, and in Lin Carter’s Pan Ballantine Adult Fantasy paperback series in 1972.

Ernest Bramah, who was an enigmatic and reclusive figure, possibly felt somewhat haunted by his character and the frequent demand for more of his adventures. The Golden Hours was followed by Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat (1928), The Moon of Much Gladness (1932), a novel presented as narrated by Kai Lung, and Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry Tree (1940). Kai Lung: Six (1974) offers previously uncollected tales.

It is certainly true that the Kai Lung stories will not be everyone’s cup of Keemun, but those who acquire the taste will soon be pursuing them all with, to quote from the Golden Hours, “the unstudied haste of one who has inconvenienced a scorpion”.  

(Mark Valentine)

Antiphon - Andrew Sherwell

The Amsterdam label Shimmering Moods have just announced pre-orders for a new album by Andrew Sherwell, whose Invocation of Deities by Working of Ritual Instruments, a composition drawing on the melancholy timbres of English church bells, we noticed in an earlier post.

The new album, Antiphon, is is available as a limited edition CD (60 copies) or as a download. It is announced by a highly evocative prose poem, beginning:  

“Autumn in Albion is always magical. Gold, red, and bronze, the quivering leaves glow in the perpetually slanting light, light that reveals yet also creates the deepest of shadows. As the season unfolds, the leaves fall, the mists rise, and the clouds lower. And the veils get thinner. The dead are close now and so are others, others more wondrous and terrible”.

The work is inspired by ideas of visionary England, with glimpses of Avalon and Zion, and is dedicated to all ‘Wanderers in Arcady’, including William Blake and Arthur Machen.  

The music is hushed, ethereal, stately, with distant reverberations of enigmatic noises and brief echoes of wordless liturgical voices.  We feel like a stranger who has wandered into a semi-ruinous abbey or citadel where the strains of some invisible mystic ceremony may be heard, ever elusive among the shadowed courtyards and tapestried passages. And it is All Hallows’ Eve.

(Mark Valentine)