Strange Radio
Jeremy Dyson is the fourth member of The League of Gentlemen, the one who doesn’t act. His only appearance in the series is in the fourth-wall breaking League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse, where he’s played by the actor Michael Sheen, putting Dyson in the unusual position of having written dialogue for an actor playing himself. In addition to his work on the League, he co-created the dementedly dark Funland for BBC 3 and was the script editor for The Armstrong and Miller Show. More recently he co-wrote the stage play Ghost Stories with Andy Nyman and adapted several of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected into the play Roald Dahl’s Twisted Tales. He’s also written several books – Bright Darkness, a non-fiction book on the lost art of supernatural horror in cinema, two anthologies of short stories, and the novel What Happens Now, all of which are very good. Clearly a fellow admirer of the macabre, I’m always interested in what Dyson gets up to, however I was particularly excited to see the subject of his latest radio documentary was Robert Aickman.
A few years ago I attended the UK premiere of Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water at the Frightfest film festival, and as a fan of the League, was pleased when Dyson and Mark Gatiss turned up to premiere their short film The Cicerones before the main feature. As Dyson explained, the film was an adaptation of a short story by Robert Aickman, one of his favourite authors. I’d heard the name before – I think Ramsey Campbell had cited him as an influence in an interview once and I almost certainly must have read several of the horror anthologies he edited later in life, but I was otherwise unfamiliar with his work. Dyson’s obvious enthusiasm, coupled with the effectiveness of the short (it’s available here) intrigued me, however.
Dyson’s thesis in The Unsettled Dust: The Strange Stories of Robert Aickman is that Aickman is the best writer you’ve never heard of, and if you’re in the unenviable position of never having heard of Aickman, there’s a good chance that’s true – I can only describe my introduction to him as relevatory. You can detect his influence on writers of fantastic fiction of a certain age – Ramsey Campbell, T.E.D Klein, Neil Gaiman, just to name but three, but Aickman wrote most of his stories in a pre-genre market, and so succeeds in eschewing many of its conventions, thoroughly thwarting the expectations of the modern reader. Aickman’s ‘strange stories’ (his preferred term for his fiction) are intelligently and skillfully written, deeply psychological, laced with a keen awareness of human fragility and weakness and a pervading sense of melancholy. They’re strangely affecting, haunting works, deftly and expertly constructed by an obvious master of the form. When you’re broadly familiar with the canon of a particular sort of literature, it’s a rare thing to suddenly discover an author so complete.
“But there was something supernatural?” responded Gamble, often a little too much the cross-examining barrister when all the circumstances were considered.
“Yes,” said the old man in his quiet and simple way. “At least I think so. It was concerned with this.” He put his fingers in his left waistcoat pocket and produced a coin or medal. It was dull rather than bright as it lay on his palm in the dim light of the bar, and a fraction smaller, I should say, than a penny.
The barman got in first. “Can I hold it?”
“Certainly,” said the old man, passing it over. “But it has no intrinsic value.”
“Just a lucky charm?” said the barman.
“More a token. The visible symbol of an invisible grace.”
“My mother has one. Given her when she married my father, by my gran, who got it from the gypsies. I suppose these marks are the Romany?”
“No,” said the old man. “That’s Russian.”
“Have another drink,” said Gamble, “and tell us about Russia.”
“Tell us the whole story,” said Dyson.
– THE HOUSES OF THE RUSSIANS
As Dyson’s programme shows, Aickman was, unsurprisingly, an extremely cultured man with a wide range of interests – trained as an architect, he wrote extensively on art, theatre, music, food and wine. He was chairman of the London Opera Society, and his writing aside, is probably best known for founding the Inland Waterways Association, which was responsible for restoring and maintaining much of England’s once-derelict inland canal system. This cultured world view clearly informed and strengthened his writing. That his books have been largely out of print for most of my lifetime is a crime against one of the greatest British writers of the twentieth century, so it’s good to hear an author of Dyson’s stature expounding his virtues on national radio and hopefully going some way to redressing the balance.
“They’re ringing to wake the dead.”
A tremor of wind in the flue momentarily drew on the already roaring fire. Gerald had turned very pale.
“That’s a figure of speech,” he said, hardly to be heard.
“Not in Holihaven.” The commandant’s gaze had returned to the fire.
Gerald looked at Phrynne. She was breathing less heavily. His voice dropped to a whisper. “What happens?”
The commandant also was nearly whispering. “No one can tell how long they have to go on ringing. It varies from year to year. I don’t know why. You should be all right up till midnight. Probably for some while after. In the end the dead awake. First one or two, then all of them. Tonight even the se draws back. You have seen that for yourself. In a place like this there are always several drowned each year. this year there’ve been more than several. But even so that’s only a few. Most of them come not from the water but from the earth. It is not a pretty sight.”
“Where do they go?”
“I’ve never followed them to see. I’m not stark raving mad.” The red of the fire reflected in the commandant’s eyes. There was a long pause.
– RINGING THE CHANGES
Several of Aickman’s anthologies were republished by Faber a year or two ago, and are still available. The Unsettled Dust: The Strange Stories of Robert Aickman is available to listen to in the UK via the link above.