Name: The Terror
ISBN: 9783752415056

Arthur Machen

Reproduction of the original: The Terror by Arthur Machen

The Terror

Tim Pendry

What could have been an interesting addition to the canon of cosmic horror is considerably vitiated by the attempt at a dubious rational explanation of the 'terror' in the title, to which is appended a rather pompous and nasty bit of class conservatism for Machen's lower middle readers. This does not make the book not worth reading on two accounts. First, the way the horror is built up may be sly and overly sarcastic but its incidents are imaginative even if they retrospectively appear as just clues in a disappointing detective story lengthened out beyond its capacity to sustain our interest. The second is more interesting. The book is set in the summer of 1915 (though published in 1917) when the full horror of the Western Front had not quite set in, while total war was still a business opportunity for industrialists and when all but the young victims could see 'business as usual' ahead. War is always dreadful to our average Englishman but clearly all the fault of the Germans whose propensity for cruelty and evil is taken for granted as just cause for some of the more weird attempts to explain the terrible events taking place across the country. However, Machen, perhaps still a little innocent in his conservatism, captures almost satirically the limitations the rising new warfare state is placing on the free-born Englishman, the mounting paranoia of the population and the typically flaccid English acceptance of 'orders'. There are hints of cynicism here as the yellow journalist in Machen makes fun of the well-known rumours of his day - those Russians with snow still on their boots allegedly seen marching down from Scotland or the Angel of Mons (a myth he perhaps innocently created himself). Newspapers are silenced without protest (Machen was a Harmsworth journalist and propagandist himself), pathways blocked by sentries without explanation, deaths covered up for reasons of state security (actually to avoid 'panic') - the acceptance of the power of the State unquestioned. This may be what it is to be British when it comes down to it. A strutting belief in one's freedom in peacetime shifting into an unquestioned submission before the liberal and rather dictatorial warfare State that got the population into the fix of war in the first place. Plus ca change probably. The ideal of English freedom is probably one of the most touching cultural delusions in the Western world ... matched only by an equally touching delusion that all is well in God's Heaven (God being an Englishman) because the United Kingdom is (ho, hum!) a 'democracy'. This is what is so fascinating about the book. A failed scientific romance presented like a Conan Doyle mystery and an inadequate tale of cosmic horror become a story of the flaccidity of the British bourgeoisie in the face of world war. We cannot decide whether this is satire, cynicism or stupidity. One more thing in the book's favour is that Machen, when he is not being sardonic, is still a good writer. He captures the world of rural Wales in his period well. Wales is his territory and it will have been sufficiently foreign to his London readership to become his Miskatonic Valley.

The Terror

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