The Night Land and Other Perilous Romances: The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson, Volume 4
This book is 480 pages, and 400 of those pages are comprised of the novel
The Night Land. The remaining 80 pages are romance-related stories in Hodgson's style. Normally, I would never read romance stories, but I wanted to read
The Night Land, so I ordered this book.
The Night Land and the remaining short stories are all excellent.
The introduction to this book said that
The Night Land is a flawed masterpiece. I agree completely.
The Night Land is a science fiction, horror, adventure, fantasy, romance story. It's a masterpiece. It also has several flaws. Even with its flaws, it's still a masterpiece.
The Night Land is quite an amazing novel. The word "amazing" has both meanings: "I like it a lot" and "this perplexes me in strange ways". Maybe "fascinating" is a better word. It's hard to say what
The Night Land's primary genre should be. I guess "adventure".
The prose style is very flowery and moderately dense. Of all the dense, flowery prose I've read in my life, this style was the easiest to understand. I understood 99% of Hodgson's archaic-style sentences. The 1% that I didn't understand, I decided to just give up and move on. Hodgson didn't have to use such an archaic style for his prose, but I feel like if it was written in a more ordinary English style, the masterpiece-ness of
The Night Land would be diminished. In other words, I like the prose the way it is.
Here's a sample of
The Night Land. Page 150.
And here shall I set down more closely the things that were ready to my gaze.
And first, that it did much attract me, there was a huge and blackened mountain unto the left of the mouth of the Gorge, and the mountain did go upward into the night, maybe fifteen and maybe twenty miles. And there was a mighty peaked volcano that grew out from the side of the mountain so high up as five miles, as I did guess that height; and this was upon the far side. And above this there was a second, maybe nine or ten great miles up in the blackness of the night that hung afar upward. And, as that this were not great wonder enough, there did burn and glow two other mighty fire-hills, at an utter height, upon the left crest of that black mountain; and these were upward so monstrous a way, as that they did seem to make strange and smouldering suns within the night. And truly, as you shall perceive, this was a wondrous thing.
And below these upward fire-hills there rose up from the earth vast mountains of ash and burned stuff, that had been cast forth by these perched volcanoes, and had poured downward unto the earth throughout Eternity, and so to build grey and sombre monuments upon the dreadful glory of Time.
The story starts in our modern world (late 19th century perhaps?). The protagonist is in love with a woman named Mirdath, they get married, have at least one kid, and Mirdath dies. The protagonist has a ridiculously detailed dream, and that is most of the contents of the novel
The Night Land. The widower feels like he has mentally traveled to the far future, or something like that. He's not sure if he actually traveled or if it was really a dream. Earth's sun has died, and the planet is shrouded in darkness. Our unnamed hero's society lives within a single pyramid-shaped colossal building named the Last Redoubt. Outside of the Last Redoubt is the dark wilderness, filled with danger and mystery. Watchful creatures are near the building, waiting to entrap humans and kill them. There are ancient roads, and no one remembers to where they go. Outside of the Last Redoubt is a sort of electrified fence which keeps out the monsters and mutated humans. By "mutated humans", I really just mean another species of human that stayed outside for many millennia or millions of years, and evolved to be another species.
The hero, and his colleagues and mentor, detect another colossal building somewhere. I think they call it the Little Redoubt. They used something akin to telepathy to find it. They discern that the people there are in danger. The hero telepathically detects that one of the women from the Little Redoubt is the reincarnated version of his wife that died in the modern world. An expedition goes out to try to find the building and rescue the people there; that expedition fails. Then the hero decides to go out just by himself.
The hero describes a lot of the fauna in the world as evil monsters. There are good beings too but they are few are far between. I'm not sure the hero ever encounters a good being face to face. It's kind of like Dungeons and Dragons world, where pretty much everything is out to kill you and eat you.
The wife who died in the modern world is named Mirdath. The reincarnated woman is named Naani. Naani lived in a single colossal building, just like the unnamed hero. Both buildings had a power source which is called the Earth-Current, which is a seemingly endless power source. The Earth-Current stopped working in Naani's Little Redoubt, leaving the people there defenseless. I suspect it's supposed to be the harnessed magnetic field of the Earth to generate electrical current.
If you look at google images for "the night land", you'll see a pyramid and an armored guy carrying a staff or rod with a disc at one end. That staff with the disc is called the Diskos and it's the primary weapon of the men in the story.
Some spoilers below with more discussion.
The novel ends within the setting of the dream, not in the modern world. That's odd, isn't it? You'd think that a story that is the recounting of a dream should end within the real world, not in the dream world.
The hero discovered the object of his quest too easily I think. I'm referring to Naani. He spent months (or weeks?) walking to the Little Redoubt, and at a certain spot, hears a woman crying. It's Naani! So, he convinces her to go with him. He knows that she's the reincarnated version of Mirdath, but I'm not sure that Naani thinks that he's the reincarnated version of Mirdath's husband.
The hero definitely thought that Naani is the reincarnated Mirdath. However, I don't think that the reader can say that that is definitely true. Like, it's really just a strong hunch by the hero.
Never in any of Hodgson's work have I seen an instance of domestic violence. In other words, two people in a relationship where one hits the other out of anger. There was domestic violence in The Night Land. The hero physically punished Naani a few times. It was weird to read that sort of thing. The hero said that he was her master and that he had to whip her to make her behave. I'm paraphrasing. I suppose that Hodgson tried to invent a culture for this far future society, and domestic violence was a part of it. Having the hero physically punish Naani is an ugly flaw in the story, and I don't think that Hodgson needed to have it.
The House of Silence is a dangerous location in the story. Anyone who goes in doesn't come out. The House of Silence is capable of attacking humans mentally and emotionally and causing despair. Hodgson doesn't describe the House in any way, other than that there is a way to go inside. I suppose I can't think of this as a flaw, but I would have liked to know more about it.
The good beings in the world come up a few times, to help the hero. We have no idea who these beings are. They seem to help the hero telepathically. In other words, they use mental powers to confuse the evil creatures or energize the hero. At least, that's what I can vaguely remember.
Naani is ultimately slain by the House of Silence. She goes through a public funeral ceremony and when she is accidentally exposed to the Earth-Current, she revives. When I read that, I instantly thought that that means that the people in the far future don't embalm their dead.
The outside of the Last Redoubt has plants and animals. You'd think that plants can't exist in perpetual darkness, right? Well, I looked it up, and fire is a source of light that plants can use for photosynthesis. The terrain around the Last Redoubt has a lot of fire pits. Those are holes open to magma or burning gases, and they produce light. I have no idea if Hodgson knew that fire produces sufficient light for photosynthesis. In any case, he had forests in the story, which seemed wrong to me. He had mossy grass too, which I thought was more believable. I would think that trees require a lot of energy to grow, which would mean that the faint light produced by fire wouldn't be good enough.
Earth, without the sun, shouldn't have breathable gaseous air. Hodgson handled this with the fire pits. The fire pits in the terrain outside the Last Redoubt would be sufficient for producing heat to keep the air gaseous.
Earth, at some point, had a horrendous earthquake. It tore a gigantic canyon in the ground, and the ocean drained into it. This vast canyon is where the Last Redoubt is located. The canyon is miles deep. Above the canyon, on the old surface of the planet, it is implied that the air is frozen.
Hodgson, in all of his work, seemed to have very little ability to create suspense and tension. And his denouements almost never have any kind of relief of tension, like everything was resolved, and the reader is like "Oh I get it now!" Perhaps his ghost-mystery stories are like that, at least a little. None of his other stories are like that. That's just his style. Other than the archaic flowery prose,
The Night Land is very much in the style of everything else that Hodgson wrote.
Recommendation: If you feel like reading Hodgson's romance stories, especially
The Night Land, then this book is for you.
