The Wine Dark Sea – Robert Aickman

It feels like a while since I’ve written about fiction (I’m not counting ‘The Prisoner of Happy Hansel’). Truthfully I’ve not been able to settle down to reading much recently; I have a book group book that I need to finish and it seems to be taking forever and due to the one book at a time rule (this thing’s on a deadline after all) I feel bad if I pick up anything else. Short stories however can’t possibly count so I’ve been reading lots of those, and newspapers, and cookbooks – why is it taking me so long to finish one short novel I wonder?

Robert Aickman’s ‘The Wine Dark Sea’ arrived a few weeks ago courtesy of Faber Finds. A while back I found a Faber Find in Oxfam, carried it home gleeful, and then threw an almighty sulk because it was riddled with typesetting problems. After a comment to that effect on another blog Richard Kelly (Faber Finds editor) sent me an email where he very graciously promised me a copy of this particular book, I couldn’t say no.

As my previous experience of Aickman was limited to the bits of ‘The Unsettled Dust’ I managed to wade through ‘The Wine Dark Sea’ has been a bit of a revelation. I still don’t know much about Aickman but I understand why Faber Finds want to reprint him now, and why Kelly himself is a fan. I’m quite impressed that he went to the trouble of getting in touch (Kelly obviously, not Aickman who died 30 years ago – that would be far too much like one of his own stories). It’s the sort of thing I have to do (grudgingly sometimes) for difficult customers – it’s nice to be on the other side of the equation, and of course it works, I’ve gone from someone who didn’t have a good word for this particular imprint to someone who sings praises and leaps to the defence of Faber when occasion demands.

My first impression was that this was a collection of ghost stories – I started with one called ‘Your Tiny Hand is Frozen’ where a man develops an unhealthy relationship with the telephone and a voice on the other end of it. It’s deeply unsettling both as a tale of the supernatural and because I can no longer imagine how I functioned without my mobile phone. I love the way that Aickman plays with the idea of something simultaneously connecting the user to the outside world and cutting them off from it. The next story that attracted me was ‘Never Visit Venice’ which is also deeply unsettling but for different reasons, not so ghostly but rather straight up horror. By the time I’d finished the title story it became clear that Aickman just deals in the odd. This is the kind of odd that sticks in the mind worrying away at your imagination until you’re not at all sure what’s what.

The end result is this; I’ve had some very strange dreams, spend less time with my telephone always within arms reach and will probably be reaching for this around Halloween next year when I want something a little bit spooky but also reasonably subtle with it. I’m also confident about spending my hard earned cash on Faber Finds that appeal to me in the future which is daunting because their list is long and full of temptation.

Finds

Possibly as in should find a way to pull myself together and work through the long list of things I have to do over the next few days, though actually as in Faber Finds and charity shop finds. Now before I go any further I want to make it clear that I have a huge amount of respect for Faber and Faber as a publisher, and everyone of their books that I owned to date is a thing of beauty both inside and out.

The exception now it’s come is a Faber Finds title – Robert Aickman’s ‘The Unsettled Dust’ that I got in Oxfam. I did wonder what it was doing there because these aren’t really cheap paperbacks (I’ve checked and this one would have been £13), and because they’re almost exclusively print on demand. Really the sort of thing you buy because you want it and not on a whim, so not the sort of thing that goes to a charity shop. I felt lucky, not least because I’ve been curious about print on demand for a while but haven’t felt able to afford a proper exploration. (I have a few Virago’s which are print on demand, but a brief search has revealed very little about their policy on this, and I’m not aware of being able to order up any old title that appeals. Which is a shame.)

‘The Unsettled Dust’ is a collection of short stories about the supernatural, and I wholeheartedly agree that it deserves both survival and revival. I was hooked in from the very beginning of the title story; narrated in a querulous middle aged voice it chronicles the strange atmosphere of a national trust type property. It really is quite unsettling, but in a very quiet way, nothing shocking, nothing terribly dramatic happens – but at the end of every one the world that’s known and safe seems a little bit more fragile.

The problem is that something’s gone very wrong with the resetting of the text, I have a fairly liberal view regarding grammar and spelling and will overlook quite a lot of errors even when I notice them, but take this as an example “But, as it to connrm me man s point mat runner communication” which I eventually deciphered as “But as if to confirm the man’s point that further communication”. This is a particularly atrocious excerpt but in the same story a character’s name changes from Agnes to Agnew (at about the same time that it becomes clear that the child in question is male), and although sometimes there were pages without noticeable errors the overall effect makes it hard to follow the plot or appreciate the quality of the writing.

The experience has made me wary of print on demand, and particularly wary of Faber. I can’t tell if this is typical, but I now have no intention of ordering any of the (few) £15+ titles on my wish list until I’ve heard good reports from others – I really can’t afford that kind of disappointment. It’s a shame and as I’ve been re reading about Faber Finds I’m feeling increasingly torn, not least because I’m comparing directly with the Bloomsbury group reprints (amazon parcel turned up yesterday and I’m off work for the week. Very happy.)

I understand that they are not at all the same thing, the Bloomsbury group books are not print on demand, but they are a nicely put together series of books which are most definitely being revived, publicised, and generally celebrated. Physically they’re a real pleasure to read with a particularly nice type (I love the Q’s). Faber Finds are printed specifically for customer orders and the list of potentially available titles is huge – which is exciting. Realistically a list this long and diverse couldn’t exist without print on demand, and again I can’t stress enough how exciting I find this list, which is perhaps why this particular experience has been so disappointing.