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Note for those who might try it: Don't read Susannah Clarke's new book (a collection of short stories) while sickening for the flu. It makes the world look very odd indeed.
I like her voice, I do like her voice, because it's perfect, which may be the problem. As with JS&MN I keep seeing these rooms, these interiors that belong, I have to assume, to places I saw in childhood before I was thinking, or saw on my adult travels when I was thinking of something else-- given that a large chunk of my 20's was spent in various parts of England of which I retain no memory at all. It makes me feel most strange. I'm a place person: emotions and memories attach to places, not events or people, so when I see a familiar house or room there's automatically a bunch of old feelings there, like ghosts, unattached to the present and usually vaguely kimoi. (Austen was mad when she said one doesn't necessarily dislike a place because one has been unhappy there. Huh? If I was unhappy there then I'll be unhappy there now, no question. The unhappiness becomes part of the place.) (Also, that race in Cherryh that never forgets anything. Bet if I had total recall I'd have no sense of transcendence at all. Anything ineffable I can think of usually seems to link back to something seen in childhood of which only the most distant outlines remain.)
Clarke's England, her unchancy and not terribly nice England, is something I know, possibly because the places I was in had the same psychic unease to them. Traveller's distress, maybe, the depression of the dépaysée, or just the way England normally operates. Stuff seen out the corner of the eye, ancient emotions overlaying the landscape like smog, a vague and unplaceable sense of menace. Whatever, it makes reading Clarke a weirder exercise than reading Ima Ichiko, whose bogles walk around in the light of day like anyone else, looking honestly bogley to anyone who can see them.
I like her voice, I do like her voice, because it's perfect, which may be the problem. As with JS&MN I keep seeing these rooms, these interiors that belong, I have to assume, to places I saw in childhood before I was thinking, or saw on my adult travels when I was thinking of something else-- given that a large chunk of my 20's was spent in various parts of England of which I retain no memory at all. It makes me feel most strange. I'm a place person: emotions and memories attach to places, not events or people, so when I see a familiar house or room there's automatically a bunch of old feelings there, like ghosts, unattached to the present and usually vaguely kimoi. (Austen was mad when she said one doesn't necessarily dislike a place because one has been unhappy there. Huh? If I was unhappy there then I'll be unhappy there now, no question. The unhappiness becomes part of the place.) (Also, that race in Cherryh that never forgets anything. Bet if I had total recall I'd have no sense of transcendence at all. Anything ineffable I can think of usually seems to link back to something seen in childhood of which only the most distant outlines remain.)
Clarke's England, her unchancy and not terribly nice England, is something I know, possibly because the places I was in had the same psychic unease to them. Traveller's distress, maybe, the depression of the dépaysée, or just the way England normally operates. Stuff seen out the corner of the eye, ancient emotions overlaying the landscape like smog, a vague and unplaceable sense of menace. Whatever, it makes reading Clarke a weirder exercise than reading Ima Ichiko, whose bogles walk around in the light of day like anyone else, looking honestly bogley to anyone who can see them.
deep, dark places
Maybe because coming from historically starved LRD, it was some kind of romantic, historical place with all this aura and an immense-ness of everything that awed me. Once I got there, I was happy to discover for myself and have my favourites and thankfully I just get nostalgic these days about places I have visited.
I guess I will pick up more again as the children get older and ask about where Granny and Grandad live and where Daddy is from. Although trying to be objective will be quite hard I think.
Stuff seen out the corner of the eye, ancient emotions overlaying the landscape like smog, a vague and unplaceable sense of menace
I got these only when I visited the dungeons of Warwick Castle and the ones at St. Alban's. (I am not sure why a cathedral would have dungeons, so I could be wrong, I was told they were dungeons, but they were little alcoves with only space for a very small person or one kneeling...with the bars still surprisingly intact. *shudders*)
Re: deep, dark places
Cathedrals should have crypts, not dungeons. Why you'd have coffins put upright in a crypt I don't know- unless they were actually bodies... Me, I got it everywhere at the Tower of London: well, just about everywhere *in* London as well, at least when I was a kid. Maybe not the menace so much, but the sense of past leaning on you, certainly.
Re: deep, dark places
because France was far too rational to do any of (sniff) that stuff.
Not even with echoes of the revolution and the swish of the guilottine? ^_~
What I really was not keen on surprisingly were the waxworks that seemed to make everybody go 'Ooh' and 'Aah!'. They simply freaked me out. I. DO. NOT. LIKE. THEM.
Could be a throwback from Hammer House films though! ^___^
Re: deep, dark places
Not even with the Revolution and the guillotine. When France goes mad- and it did in the Terror- it goes mad without psychic fallout. Do not ask me how. But certainly there are no ghosts in Paris, that has seen more than one massacre.
Waxworks are just yucky. They look like embalmed corpses, for one thing: the colouring is always bloodless.
Re: deep, dark places
I liked England, though I don't think I made it to the Tower of London. But I was looking at the structural engineering and am completely ignorant of the history ... which is pretty much true of all my experiences of GB, I'm sorry to admit. And I kept going in the summer during heat waves, which I'm sure doesn't add to the atmosphere.
Re: deep, dark places
A dry-eyed practical interest will kill just about any spooky atmosphere.
Funny, isn't it. Way back in the early 60's when we went to England, there was a heat wave on. It was bad as Rome where we went subsequently. England isn't made to handle heat waves- wasn't then, isn't now. But all that sun still gave me the fantods.