The Night Land [ペーパーバック]

The ideas in The Night Land and in Hodgson's other early novel The House On The Borderland seem to have been derived from Wells The Time Machine. You can imagine the book as an attempt to map out the survival of humanity into, and beyond, the time of end of that story - the red sun, the beach, the swollen, flopping, things. Wells believed (with educated men of his time) that the sun had a lifetime of the order of 50 million years: therefore the idea of human survival into the Night was not as implausible as it might seem today.

What is unique about Hodgson is the fertility of his imagination and - and I find this extremely attractive - the way he mixes supernatural and scientific explanations for everything so completely there is really no separation. Some of the things that besiege the Last Redoubt are degenerate humans; some are animal; some come from other dimensions and have been let into this world by corrupt future sciences; many are hybrid of all three sources. Yet the most formidible, carnivorous psychic entities which will eat the souls of any human being they catch, are kept off from the Redoubt by what is unquestionably a technologically produced force field (maybe the first time this idea has ever been used in fantasy?).

The book has a flavour of ideas which no other has ever duplicated. There are things in it, merely thrown away, that could create whole sub-genres of fantastic and imaginative literature. For example, there is one point in the return journey where the heroine (remembering one of her many past lives) remembers a time when The Cities went always to the Westwards - a vision of a great metal roadway with cities on it moving round the slowed-rotation world in time with the Sun. These cities take in the harvest; others (forward on the road) have sewn the seeds; and behind comes a year-long night. The hero strains to remember his own life in that age, and cannot. And this - tremendous image - is one paragraph.

I cannot excuse the writing style, or the author's attitude to women, but I deny that these things are enough to make the book worthless. As well as being a tremendous adventure story it is a picture of THE END of humanity, as we are the beginning - and it succeeds in implying the whole span of humanity between those two points. For all its faults, I have never found a book to compare with it.

But it's childishness is also its greatest strength, since Hodgson is the only author I know who can so potently conjure up the childhood terror of the dark.

Some of the visible monsters and hazards that are described are almost laughably preposterous, but Hodgson never blinks and ended up convincing me to suspend my disbelief.

One significant drawback is the meglomaniacal importance placed on the hero and his quest, it just doesn't quite ring true. A modern anology would be the Apollo 13 moon mission, I suppose, when millions of people were all thinking and worrying and hoping for the safe return of a handful of astronauts. So the phenomenon is not unprecedented, I just found that Hodgson treated it in an overly grandiose, facile and unconvincing way.

I read the same edition as one of the other reviewers below, the Ballantine one, and the second volume was somewhat edited, according to the preface. A lot of the excess romantic stuff was deleted. Even so, there are many long passages that are well nigh unreadable, because they are so over-the-top cutesy and mushy.

The faux 17th century writing style gets very wearing, as well, but it does succeed in significantly adding to the larger than life grandeur of the tale. It's a pity that Hodgson was killed in WWI, if he had lived to edit it, and clean up the style to make it more convincingly 17th century, the book would have benefited tremendously.

And another of the endearing qualities of the story is that the landscape and basic story premise is very psychologically evocative of any person living a hopeless, dispirited existence. It really succeeds as a psychological allegory, in my opinion.

Speaking of psychological things, Hodgson succeeds in describing many human emotions in a very tangible and palpable way. His

description of telepathic "good vibrations" pre-dates the hippies by many decades. And he is also very good as evoking how one's emotional state can drastically alter one's life in a very marked, and even physical, way. He was a writer of rare insight and sensitivity, and the world suffered a great loss when he died so young and needlessly.

It's been said in other places on the web, maybe not in these reviews here, that one of the most remarkable things about this book is that the tension is sustained for so long a time. I have to agree. One way that Hodgson does this is to adopt an almost journal-like structure for the story, each meal time in every day is covered, all along the quest. This keeps the focus of the story narrow and close down on the hero's level, so you never stop empathizing heavily with him.

All in all, I would say, that if you are a fan of fantasy, then you should definitely give this a try, it's an amazingly original and engrossing fantasy.

The language in Mr. Hodgson's work if formal and archaic, hence will be found difficult or boring for some readers. There characters are mere viewpoints, without any personality whatever. The plot is so simple as to be nonexistent: the hero voyages across the eerie landscape, avoiding monstrous beings and hulking troglodytes, finds the girl, and returns.

For me the main interest in the book was the depiction, all in hints and adumbration, of the supernatural entities ! ! looming, vast and inhuman, throughout the dead and wasted l! andscape: but since, during the second half of his odyssey, the hero returns by the same route he passed in the first half, no new spectacles are seen. Therefore the second half of this long book I found boring.

Night Lands is memorable, strange, quaint and horrid, and conveys a lingering sense of cosmic inhumanity, but so flawed in its lack of plot and character, its affected prose, that this book may only appeal to devoted aficionados of strange fantasy.