REVIEW: BELBURY POLY - THE BELBURY TALES

Belbury Poly - The Belbury Tales
Ghost Box, 2012

Between the new Burial EP, the new Caretaker album, and the new Belbury Poly album--to say nothing of the rumours of a new Boards of Canada album, cruelly squashed though they were--this has been something of a banner year for hauntology. Perhaps even more than Burial at this point, whose Kindred EP was so fascinating precisely because it seemed the first glimpse of where his sound might go beyond hauntology, the releases on the Ghost Box label (and possibly those of the Caretaker) are the last vestiges of hauntology as that style was being defined in the middle part of the last decade, a kind of "pure" hauntology. The Belbury Tales is an able realization of that style, perhaps even a peak that's come long after hauntology is no longer fashionable. Drawing their power in part from the fascination that is generated by the uncanny as a mode of cultural and political critique, Ghost Box releases develop little worlds that are in contact with ours but that nevertheless remain alien, strange, and a little frightening. Existing just beyond the boundaries of time and maps, these worlds are powerful triggers for memories, longings, and desires (often ones that have been forgotten, suppressed, or dismissed). The label offers this overview of its releases:

Ghost Box is a record label for a group of artists who find inspiration in folklore, vintage electronics, library music and haunted television soundtracks.

Indeed, much of the aesthetic ground explored by The Hauntological Society is at the very least implied by the Ghost Box family, if not outright referenced: the Penguin Classics, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, library music, sound effects from radio serials, children's television, mid-century science fiction, and British folklore, all can be found on Ghost Box releases.

For me, the hauntological dimension of the Ghost Box project (and Belbury Poly's latest release in particular) develops out of its very heimlich rather than unheimlich associations (as, properly befitting the uncanny, it should--Freud is very clear that etymologically [and, I think, psychologically] the progression must be from the homely to the unhomely, the familiar to the made-strange, the secret to the revealed). Specifically, The Belbury Tales (and Ghost Box releases more generally) have a particular sound that I associate with home and with childhood. Unlike the British listeners whose exposure to the BBC offers a certain kind of shared media framework for these songs, though, mine comes via the CBC and its show openings and interstitial music on the radio.

My mother turns on the radio (permanently set on CBC) first thing in the morning and only turns it off when it is time for bed (or, more commonly now, when she switches over to the television to watch the news). As It Happens--a news and interview show with occasional flights of whimsy and the bizarre (such as its love of puns)--comes on during dinnertime, and its theme music ("Curried Soul" by Moe Koffman) evokes memories of my home and childhood stronger than just about anything else. Even as a child, "Curried Soul" seemed slightly magical and out of time, a remnant of something that had been day-glo, but was now slightly dusty and faded. Until Google and YouTube became prominent features in my life, I didn't even know it was a piece of music separate from As It Happens. When I was young, I'd imagined a longer piece of music that I had no access to, a part of a world in which music like that existed popularly and was able to be heard and listened to (obviously this was already the case, but it wasn't in my house). In short, I wanted the song to give up its secrets and to make my world weird and psychedelic (though I was then unaware of that term or its freight).

I don't claim to be an expert on anything when it comes to children--not their biology, not their thoughts, not their media--but isn't this somehow a typically uncanny act that children perform constantly? Demanding the secret to be revealed, demanding the hidden to be brought to light, demanding the strange and the new as a supplement (and at times a replacement) to the familiar? Isn't a certain romanticism--the power of childlike innocence and wonder, the new, clear sight of the child--an attempt at a kind of positive working out of the uncanny? Thus, the absolute horror of the scene in Children of Men in which Miriam tells Theo while they stand in an abandoned school that "As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in. Very odd what happens in a world without children's voices," when the uncanny can no longer be worked out. A few years ago, I was visiting my brother, his wife, and their daughter. As the grown-ups talked, my brother turned on the television to allow his daughter to watch her favourite show. It is, I'm told, quite a popular children's show these days. I found it at once terrifying and exhilarating, though. For me, it resembled nothing so much as a bad trip, an unconscious let wild and free, running roughshod over mundane reality. It was the same kind of energy that I searched for as a child. It was why I loved dinosaurs and science fiction so much and checked out the same books at the library over and over again. It's why I forced myself to try and watch In Search Of... even though (more likely because) it gave me nightmares. It's why the opening credits of The X-Files were at once so repellent and fascinating. All of these things were scary, but they hinted at other worlds within this one, secret worlds that you could have access to even in the daylight.

This is growing unwieldy and slipping outside the bounds of a record review at this point, but it helps explain why I find Belbury Poly's The Belbury Tales the most satisfying Ghost Box release of the ones I've heard. It integrates itself seamlessly into the world defined by In Search Of... and "Curried Soul" and strange science fiction paperbacks from the 1960s and 1970s and library books on ghosts, monsters, and unexplained occurrences to assemble a kind of alternative culture and place. I anticipate finding advertisements for comics and novels set in this world in the pages at the back of the used science fiction books I read (or old copies of Semiotext(e) I occasionally find). I expect to come across these songs on YouTube when clicking through episodes of In Search Of... or watching The Stone Tape or Threads (the latter two of which I've learned about because of Ghost Box and hauntology), one more example of strange cultural offshoots that no longer seem quite of this world.

Consider, for example, the description of Belbury Poly's project from the Ghost Box website, which is not only to insert Belbury Poly's music within these media, but also within the world described by these media, a world that never existed outside the page, the screen, and the speaker:

The music of Belbury Poly is, by turns joyous and naive and at other times shot through with terror or supernatural wonder. Parallel world TV soundtracks and nostalgia for an imaginary past.

Of course this is a project fraught with nostalgia, but an ironic nostalgia for that which never had a chance to exist but which might yet be brought into existence.* As Adam Harper points out, the crucial feature of hauntological art is its dual nature, that ironic nostalgia that critiques the present by positing it as the future of the imaginary past, a position in which the present is seen to inevitably fail in comparison to the future promised by that past. In this way, hauntological art is able to elucidate both the limits of our current thought--What can't we think beyond when it comes to the future? How has our future drawn in ever closer and, in turn, become ever more narrow? What changes do we no longer recognize as possible? Why do we hold them to be impossible?--and to recapture the utopian thrust of a different time, one that was before those limits and therefore freely posits a future (our could-have-been-present) without those limits. While this project has been criticized as being regressive, an exercise in simple nostalgia (or ostalgia) dressed up in PoMo clothes, its emphasis on reclamation and re-imagination serves a practical function. As Fredric Jameson notes in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, "the more surely a given Utopia asserts its radical difference from what currently is, to that very degree it becomes, not merely unrealizable but, what is worse, unimaginable" (xv) When such Utopias become unimaginable they fail at what Jameson calls "the most reliable political test" of a Utopian text, "its capacity to generate new [works], Utopian visions that include those of the past and modify or correct them" (xv). What does the theme song for As It Happens or The Belbury Tales say to me politically, in and of itself? Not a whole lot. As part of a constellation of cultural artifacts, though, they both serve as a foundation for utopian imaginings.

This is far too much context for a review and it will inevitably overshadow what I have to say about the music. Nevertheless, I turn to that now, starting with the record's highpoints: "Now Then" with its lysergically charged flute and analog squelches and "The Geography," which hovers just beyond the decipherable. These two tracks, to my mind, establish the basic types of songs on the album. There is the rough instrumental vs. vocal breakdown that they imply, but there is also a sense of the twin poles of Belbury Poly's project in this division. The former brings to mind the sounds of my childhood, while the latter suggests just how the strange the world behind that sound truly is. "The Geography" and the other vocal tracks--"Cantalus," "Green Grass Grows," "My Hands," "Unforgotten Town," and "Earth Lights" (though the latter is vocodored beyond all recognition)--supply the haunting, out of time residents of this world, their missives often brief and of Delphic inscrutability ("You are printed on the palms of my hands," "It's just what I didn't want!") but suggestive of something not quite right. On "Green Grass Grows" the child's voice is eerily bright, the sound of play in some unseen garden that has a hint of unease in its lyrics of compulsion, a sense of slight menace (possibly sexual) from the forces that can command the child to act this way. Certainly this balance between menace and ecstasy is key to the appeal of "My Hands," part drug trip, part cult ritual, part new age transcendence, and all the more affecting for never allowing one of those elements to overwhelm the others. As I keep saying, the world of Belbury Poly is strange, but its strangeness is neither rationalized nor forced into the realm of the supernatural. It's kept activated as a force through its indeterminacy, its deferral of explanation. To be sure, in the Belbury mythos, things are haunted, but what does that actually mean? The record keeps that tantalizingly unclear.

The real stars of the album, though, are the instrumental tracks. I've singled out "Now Then" for special praise (it is the track that inspired my "Curried Soul" remembrances), but there is plenty here to chew on. "A Pilgrim's Path" rides gently insistent piano to some beautifully technicolour synth work, while both "Chapel Perilous" (a Monty Python reference?) and "Goat Foot" take the funkiness of "Cantalus" and amp it up to hard-charging levels. "Goat Foot" in particular, with its vague whiffs of exoticism alongside some heavily flanged metallic textures, is a joy on headphones. "Unheimlich," ironically, is perhaps the only real miss here, a too obvious evocation of "uneasy" sounds, it reminds me of video game menu music (not necessarily a bad thing) and, in light of how masterfully the whole album works together to evoke the uncanny, doesn't seem to earn its name. The true third highlight of the album, though, after "Now Then" and "The Geography", is "Summer Round" which feels at once wholly recognizable and stubbornly tip-of-the-tongueish beyond recognition. I imagine pagan ceremonies during the dying light of the solstice when I listen to it, but it could just as easily soundtrack the opening of a news program in 1970 or a weekly show based around time travel. As an example of Jim Jupp's compositional prowess and his ear for period synth tones, it is pretty much peerless.

Those period synth tones are an interesting aspect of Jupp's work as Belbury Poly and of the Ghost Box label as a whole. In his review of the album for Tiny Mix Tapes, James Parker made an intriguing observation:

I think it's also worth pointing out that a record like The Belbury Tales works whether or not you were born between 1965 and 1975. . . . I came to the Radiophonic workshop and library music actually through Ghost Box, rather than the other way around. And I grew up in a Britain that was always already suburbanized and gridlocked with traffic.

The real genius of this record, and of Ghost Box's output more generally, is that it works even if you don't "get" the references in anything like a conscious sense, even if they don't make you feel "nostalgic" per se. Because the reference points Ghost Box is playing with are hardwired deeper than that, part of a more complex network of cultural memorization. And I can't help but think, therefore, that one of the reasons I love Ghost Box so much is precisely the fact that I don't really "get it," that I never could, that I never can quite tell the difference between the old and the new, but that these strange, hallucinatory feelings arise unbidden anyway, the result of some mysterious collective nerve being touched.

I agree with Parker. As someone who was born in Canada in 1986 (to parents who left England in 1976), Ghost Box is not mining a culture I grew up with. Oh, my father introduced me to Dr. Who when black and white reruns came on from time to time, and since then I've watched Nigel Kneale shows and episodes of Out of the Unknown on YouTube, but this has always been in retrospect; it has never been my culture that Ghost Box is mining. My pathway to Ghost Box is through bands like Stereolab and the cultural signifiers mentioned above, not from first hand knowledge of the label's typical sources.

What's more, the powerfully rural aspect of Ghost Box and Belbury Poly is something that I--as a pretty much lifelong resident of the suburbs--don't quite understand. The horror of the countryside, yes--in my one experience staying in a house in the Welsh countryside as a young child, I thought I saw a ghost and wet my pants in terror; not one of my finest moments--but not what the life that is being remembered and mourned in this music was like. In this sense, while I don't doubt that a grounding in the music and culture that makes up Rob Young's notion of Electric Eden and an attachment to the idea of Albion might strengthen appreciation for what Ghost Box releases do, it's the inability to know the new and the old, as Parker points out, that makes Ghost Box so enticing for those of without access to (or at least ignorant of) that culture. I don't imagine a future--except a dystopian one--that involves some return to the land in agrarian communes or that involves life in quaint little villages in the countryside (which seems a little too much like The Village); the future for me is urban (when it's not in cyberspace). As fuel for hopefully utopian dreams, though, The Belbury Tales pinpoints moments that connect and resonate with (and even haunt) me. The album's forty five minutes are weird and strange in the best possible way. It's not an everyday listen, to be sure, but when you need to escape to that parallel world, there's little else as beguiling as what's on offer here.



*Strange typo that initially ended that first clause: "never had a chance to resist." But it does resist. Isn't that the point? Hauntology suggests the possibility of and depicts the places that can exist in a society with what Mark Fisher calls a "Marxist Supernanny," a government that recognizes that:

the most powerful forms of desire are precisely cravings for the strange, the unexpected, the weird. These can only be supplied by artists and media professionals who are prepared to give people something different from that which already satisfies them; by those, that is to say, prepared to take a certain kind of risk. The Marxist Supernanny would not only by the one who laid down limitations, who acted in our own interests when we are incapable of recognizing them ourselves, but also the one prepared to take this kind of risk, to wager on the strange and our appetite for it. (76)

THINKING FOR A SINGLE SOLITARY MOMENT ABOUT THE SHINING AND MOVIE POSTERS

I have literally five posts sitting in my drafts folder that I need to finish and put up. For now, though, here's a quick one on my favourite movie, The Shining (which is playing in the background as I write this. Jack and Wendy are having a talk right now...).

Via twitter, I was directed to Buzzfeed's collection of 39 movie posters made by fans of The Shining. There are several striking posters in there (particularly #s 3, 9, 12, 14, 24, and 37), but by and large I am not a fan of them. What I dislike about many of the posters (aside from the ones that just look like covers for a Dover Thrift Edition of the novel) is that they mistakenly load their weight onto (admittedly iconic) elements of the film that have nothing to do with what makes it such a masterpiece. The twins, the axe, the blood, the tricycle, even the typewriter and the manuscript, all of these are contributing aspects to the film's horror, but they're not the central cause. That resides in the relationship between Jack, Wendy, Danny, and the Overlook Hotel.


The Shining is not scary because it's a violent film (really, the amount of violence is fairly small, though its impact is sizable); The Shining is terrifying because nothing in the film really explains why it is violent. The ghosts from the hotel don't really explain it (unless accepting the drink from Lloyd really does involve Jack selling his soul to the devil), the story Ullman tells about cabin fever doesn't really explain it, and the already present strain between the family doesn't really explain it. King famously complained that it was a mistake to cast Jack Nicholson because what is to come is too obvious from the opening scene. King makes a good point in that there's a certain narrative satisfaction that a less overtly "on edge" actor might have provided by emphasising the transformation of Jack from the start of the film to the end, but again knowing that violence will break out by the end of the movie, that Jack will become something monstrous, doesn't explain why. No, the very ambiguity of the movie, the "undecidability" that it foregrounds--is the Overlook a malevolent force that corrupts an otherwise decent man? Is this simply an encounter with absolute evil and its effects? Are ghosts responsible for all of this? Any of this? Would this have happened regardless of the family visiting the Overlook?--is the key to the horror that it instills in the viewer. This is what prevents a glib dismissal of the movie as "just a story;" it is fantastical in some respects, but in that is the seed of "fantasy" in the sense of a wise or desire: is The Shining showing us something we long for? Some quotidian violence that can erupt when given the right impetus? What is that impetus? Of course, these are once again the very questions that the movie refuses to answer. For now, I'll point in the direction of one of the most cogent explanations of the film's power (and horror), and leave it at that.

When it comes to a poster for the film, then, something of that undecidability, that quotidian element that trends into horror, that erupts into violence, should be captured in a way that blood and axes can't. For me, were I to make a poster of the film, I would focus not on the memorable "Here's Johnny!" scene that the DVD uses, but on a smaller scene that I find the most chilling in the film. After arguing with Wendy just before he goes down to the ballroom and runs into Grady, Jack storms out of the apartment, leaving the door wide open. That scene, with Jack walking away, the family now open and exposed to evil, to violence, to something that no longer feels like a possibility, but an inevitability (and, even worse, an inevitability that has never really seemed like anything else in hindsight, though there's still no reason why--cruelly underscored by Grady's insistence that Jack has always been the caretaker). Of course, one of the deepest ironies of the film that Fisher mentions in the analysis I've linked to above is that all of the horrifying elements, once they've assembled themselves into an (il)logical chain by the end of the movie, cannot be overlooked in any subsequent viewing. The telos of the movie is its violence, but nothing will ever really explain how we get there.

To that end, my movie poster for The Shining (clearly, I'm not a graphic designer, and I'd like to do something nicer with most of the text). One obvious caveat to all of this: more than almost any other movie I've seen, The Shining relies on all of its constituent parts to work; without its music/sound effects, any movie poster for The Shining is doomed to woefully underrepresent the movie's power.

BALDWIN'S GIOVANNI'S ROOM ON A COLD AND WET MORNING

It was cold here last night and it's shaping up to be a cold, wet weekend. The weather forecast looks like we're not about to get above 10C or so with a ninety percent chance of rain. Fall weather, but the depressing kind--not the crisp, cool, bright days that can make Fall so pleasant. The lawn of the house across the street bears remnants of what look like patches of frost. After a relatively mild winter last year--in the midst of it had about a month without snow--I'm wondering if that might not suggest we're in for something a little bit more severe this time around. I wouldn't be opposed to that; the winters of my youth were kind of a draw in moving back East.

In Oregon, this kind of gloomy, wet, cold day would've counted as a fairly typical winter day. As someone who grew up with lake effect snow every winter, I found Oregon winters incredibly depressing. I never descended into the levels of SAD or anything that severe, but I could understand why some of my friends were buying sunlamps to make it through the winter, an urge I've never felt during snowy winters here in the East. As I don't have any particularly outdoorsy plans for the weekend, I'm fine with the weather cooling down a bit--and even the rain is not a total downer--but I would like the sun to make an appearance from time to time as I sit at my desk (the whole reason that I'd put it under my big window in my bedroom/living room). 

On the slate for this weekend: some lesson planning for upcoming classes, some reading for the courses I'm taking, and some working on the paper I'll be giving in front of the department not this Friday but the next. At some point I need to finish that Facebook post, too. I'll do my best to have it up by tomorrow. I'm most excited to work on the paper, though, as I had to submit a title to the organizers so they can start "publicizing" the event (sending out an email to the department), which made it seem real. The person writing the email had told me I could include a brief description of my project if I wanted and, after writing a three hundred or so word abstract, I emailed her back to ask about length. The upshot is that the abstract wouldn't work (too long) and I didn't really have time to whittle it down, so no description in the email. That's fine with me. 

Writing the abstract was really helpful in that it gave me a picture of the whole argument, as abstracts are supposed to do. I'm revising a course paper, and while I'm not shifting entirely away from what I'd said in that paper, the argument definitely has a new focus and approach now, one that I was still unsure of how it would work. Once I've actually written the thing, I'm sure it'll bear no resemblance to this abstract (one of the great joys of writing is an unexpected development in the argument, of course), but I feel like I have more of a map now than I had with just the scrawled comments in the margins (mine and my professor's). More (most?) importantly, this now feels like the first piece of writing I'll have done that captures what I want to do as a scholar, how I want to address texts, and why I have an interest in this field. It's a good feeling--the original paper itself was hinting in that direction, but I was still in the grappling with ideas phase and I don't think the paper ended up really communicating what it should have. Now I have the chance to do just that, and I'd really like to take advantage of that opportunity. 

The paper is on James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, a novel that I read for the first time in the spring. Prior to reading it, Baldwin had always been something of a minor figure in my mind--"Sonny's Blues" and "Going to Meet the Man" are fine stories, but I don't know that I'd really taken notice of him. In terms of writers working the same terrain, to a certain extent, I would've taken Ellison and Wright over Baldwin if you'd asked me. Now, I'd take Baldwin over both of them. Giovanni's Room is an extremely strange novel, but it's also in possession of a haunting, hallucinatory beauty that is at the same time deeply unsettling. I don't think it's going too far to call the novel an expression of the uncanny; the heimlich and the unheimlich reverse so often in the novel that they become hopelessly tangled and enmeshed, just as Freud noted they do in any uncanny artifact, encounter, or situation. Given that this is, to a certain extent, my preferred mood when it comes to texts, I was right on board with the novel from the opening pages. The titular room itself couldn't be a more uncanny space:

I remember that life in that roomed seemed to be occurring beneath the sea. Time flowed past indifferently above us; hours and days had no meaning. In the beginning, our life together held a joy and amazement which was newborn every day. Beneath the joy, of course, was anguish and beneath the amazement was fear; but they did not work themselves to the beginning [I think this should be surface] until our high beginning was aloes on our tongues. By then anguish and fear had become the surface on which we slipped and slid, losing balance, dignity, and pride. Giovanni's face, which I had memorized so many mornings, noons, and nights, hardened before my eyes, began to give in secret places, began to crack. The light in the eyes became a glitter; the wide and beautiful brow began to suggest the skill beneath. The sensual lips turned inward, busy with the sorrow overflowing from his heart. It became a stranger's face--or it made me so guilty to look on him that I wished it were a stranger's face. Not all my memorizing had prepared me for the metamorphosis which my memorizing had helped to bring about.

 In keeping with the uncanny, the room itself cannot be avoided. Its repetitions will haunt the narrator forever, replacing a;; heimlich spaces with unheimlich spaces; unheimlich because of their resistance to description other than by reference to the original room, the space the narrator cannot (will not?) describe:

I scarcely know how to describe the room. It became, in a way, every room I had even been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni's room. I did not really stay there very long--we met before the spring began and I left there during the summer--but it still seems to me that I spent a lifetime there. Life in that room seemed to be occurring underwater, as I say, and it is certain that I underwent a sea change there.

Good stuff, that. The uncanny is no more than a footnote in my paper, but it would be interesting to see if it appears in any of Baldwin's other novels or stories (I'm fairly certain it's lurking not too far behind the words in "Going to Meet the Man"). Anyway, a project for another day.

ROBERTSON DAVIES AND THE PLACES THAT HAUNT US

My bedtime reading for the past week or so has been Robertson Davies' The Fifth Business, the first book in his Deptford trilogy (the other two being The Manticore and World of Wonders). I first read it in high school during our one unit on CanLit. We'd been given a list of six or seven Canadian authors to choose from, along with recommended books. I asked my mom for advice, and she suggested Davies to me as the writer who would most appeal to my tastes. She was right there. She has, in fact, never failed in suggesting books to me, and even though we don't share exactly the same tastes (she is not an SF fan, and she can't really get on with magical realism), no one manages to get my taste in novels right more often. The Fifth Business might be her best recommendation, though. Since high school, I've read it a handful of times. My parents have a handsome, hardback copy (it might be a first edition), but I didn't own a copy until I spied the entire trilogy in a used bookstore in Corvallis, in the same Penguin print run as my copy of The Rebel Angels. I got all three for the princely sum of $4.50, fifty cents cheap than each sold for individually when first released, and I'd have quite willingly parted with more to get them.

Few novels speak to me in the way that The Fifth Business does. While I adore the entire Deptford trilogy as a whole, I would not for a second suggest that The Manticore or World of Wonders are the equal of their precursor. Part of its initial appeal was the shocking realization that someone could write a novel about life in a small town in Ontario. This was unbelievable; to my teenage self, art was made by people who lived in glamorous places, like London or Paris or Rome, or in exciting places like New York and Los Angeles. The books and movies I liked that weren't set in those places were set in the future or in space. Art most definitely did not come from people writing about fictional towns on the wrong Thames. I was sure of that. That the small town in Ontario in which I grew up could be worthy of commemoration or reflection in this way was stunning. Since then, I've grown accustomed to the idea--indeed, I'm fairly convinced that I owe a great deal to growing up in the suburbs, intellectually and otherwise, although the sense of inferiority about where I come from (is this a general Canadian feeling? It might be. . .) has both served me well and hindered me at various times--and, as I read this time, when I came upon Dunstan Ramsay's line that "I boarded the train--there was no crowd at the station this time--and left Deptford in the flesh. It was not for a long time that I recognized that I never wholly left it in the spirit," I was so overcome and agitated I had to put the book down for several minutes. Nothing else has ever quite captured so well the way I feel about Canada while I'm in the States: the physical disconnection, but psychic/spiritual hyperconnection that is at once painful and embarrassing (I kind of hate being reminded of it by other people, especially by several people in the same day, or by the same person over and over again) but something that I long for and need (I will surprise myself at odd times with the need to assert, to myself as much as to anyone else, that I am Canadian).

Davies can flat out write about place. His description of a public mental hospital does such a good job capturing its atmosphere and evoking dread and loneliness that I found it (again) so unsettling as to require me to put the book down:

[T]he building was an old horror. It was about eighty years old and had been designed for the era when the first thing that was done with an insane patient was to put him to bed, with a view to keeping him there, safe and out of the way, till he recovered or died. Consequently the hospital had few and inadequate common rooms, and the patients sat in the corridors, or wandered up and down the corridors, or lay on their beds. The architecture was of the sort that looks better on the outside than on the inside; the building had a dome and a great number of barred windows and looked like a run-down palace.
Inside the ceilings were high, the light was bad, and in spite of the windows the ventilation was capricious. The place reeked of disinfectant, but the predominating smell was that unmistakable stench of despair that is so often to be found in jails, courtrooms, and madhouses. [The smell of the carceral society; and wouldn't Foucault have just loved that grouping: the apparatus of discipline!]
She had a bed in one of the long wards, and I left her standing beside it, with a kindly nurse who was explaining what she should do with the contents of her suitcase. But already her face looked as I remembered it in her worst days in Deptford. I dared not look back, and I felt meaner than I have ever felt in my life. But what was I to do?

Of course, that's not his only stunning description of place (his depiction of the Staunton house on Christmas morning as "a dismal, toy-littered waste of wealthy, frumpish domesticity" is delightfully savage), and really the entire novel is a long investigation of the psychological ramifications of places (especially homes). Davies' writing is uncanny, but in a quiet, subtle way. Without ever really seeming to disturb, he manages to get under my skin and make me uneasy.

Freud looms large in his novels in more than that sense of the uncanny, though. While his work is often discussed in relation to Jung--Dunstan Ramsay mentions a preference for Jung over Freud, and The Manticore is in the form of a Jungian analysis of its protagonist--in his tracing of the conflagration and commingling of history, religion, and myth in everyday life, his exploration of the logic of obsession and fetishes, and his depiction of psychosexual trauma as a key lens through which a person's life must be read, Davies is unabashedly a Freudian (cf. "I was trying to forget the spectacle, so horrible in my visions, of what I had seen when first I happened on them--those bare buttocks and four legs to strangely opposed. But I could never forget"). As in his evocations of the uncanny, the darkness of the pleasure principle and the death drive bubbles below the surface for the most part, but it will burst out in sharp passages that sear one's brain and cause a slight recoil in horror from the images on display. In fact, with all of its discussion of the Real and the Symbolic and their place in our lives, The Fifth Business might be of particular interest to a Lacanian. . .

There are other reasons the novel resonates with me: Dunstan Ramsay's appreciation of learning and his valourization of his scholarship as a hagiographer made my current life path seem glamorous, even when I was in high school. The plot is full of action and adventure, surprising for a novel so focused on deep psychological exploration. It is, to a degree I probably underestimate, a book that has shaped the way I see the world and the way I interact with the people and things I encounter. I can think of only a very small number of novels that have equaled it in terms of impact, and I don't think anything had such a radical and profound impact on my worldview until I really started to get into theory in grad school. At this point, I have a great deal invested in The Fifth Business. Once, after several years of me prompting her to do so, an ex-girlfriend read it: she said it was a good book, but the narrator sounded so stuffy and old that she couldn't really enjoy it. I should've known right then and there it wouldn't work out between us.

EDIT: I forgot one of my favourite passages. It's rare that someone catches the pain of puberty with such precision:

I thought I was in love with Leola, by which I meant that if I could have found her in a quiet corner, and if I had been certain that no one would ever find out, and if I could have summoned up the courage at the right moment, I would have kissed her.

That was painfully funny and painfully true to my high school self.