THE WISE FRIEND by Ramsey Campbell -- a review

THE WISE FRIEND by Ramsey Campbell

Review by Gary Fry

If you ask the average person in the street to define horror fiction, s/he will almost certainly say something like “blood, gore, screams, monsters, killings” – in short, all the stuff s/he’s come to expect from mass market films. Well, horror literature doesn’t (always) work that way. On the printed page, practitioners have to be more artful. They cannot resort to the jump scare. They have no thunderous soundtrack to enhance suspense. If they’re doing their job well, they must rely on atmosphere and canny descriptions of frightening events.

Of course, some authors are better at achieving this kind of thing than others. And if the horror field has a living master, a writer all of us in-the-know – we aficionados of the dark – consider the finest of all, it’s Ramsey Campbell. For decades, Campbell has been writing the kind of work that relies on the unique aspects of literary prose: its capacity to suggest and allude (perhaps impossible to achieve with the unambiguous visuals of cinema); its exposition of the inner lives of characters; its evocation of imagery that becomes unique for each individual reader. His work is subtle, teasing, accumulative, and commonly characterised more by what isn’t seen than what is.

In this latest work, The Wise Friend, Campbell may well have exceeded his previous reticence. The story of a man dealing with the posthumous legacy of an eccentric aunt who was a surreal artist, the novel plays hardly any traditional horror cards at all, rather relies upon a series of delicate set-pieces which involve very old magic, its nefarious practitioners, and those in the latter-day affected by such attempts to draw back a quotidian veil in search of the numinous.

The book’s narrator Patrick Semple is the divorced father of Roy, who, while researching Patrick’s aunt’s work, befriends a young woman called Bella. Although Patrick and his son had previously bonded through this mutual interest, things start getting tugged awry when their investigations turn up some unsettling facts, leading Bella to become so suspiciously interested that she problematises Patrick and Roy’s relationship. Gradually, tragic events begin to compromise Patrick’s already fragmented family, and he is left to discover what role his past might have in such escalating developments.

There is much domestic drama to be relished in this unfolding narrative. A fair few of Campbell’s novels – The Count of Eleven, Creatures of the Pool, Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach, the whole of his Brichester trilogy – involve a bewildered family member, usually male, struggling to persuade others of their clan that sinister interlopers bedevil them all; as a consequence of which, they commonly become ostracised or are even considered a danger to the family. This could be considered a core trope in Campbell’s work, just as central to his preoccupations as “the wrong man” was to Hitchcock’s.

Indeed, the more Patrick delves into his past and its negative persistence in later life, the more others around him question his motivations, and the more a certain character can drive a wedge between him and his estranged family. All of this helps readers to root for the guy, and such close identification makes the outre elements of the novel – particularly those involving Patrick’s visits to locations closely associated with an occult past – all the more sinuous and effective.

As I’ve said, this is a restrained book. Its horrors – if that’s even the right word to use here – are so allusive as to be almost background noise, the low hum of the otherworldly lying behind the veneer of our collectively consensual world. In order to suggest such elusive material, that’s as it should be, and Campbell achieves just the right balance of revelation and reticence. He might be consciously eschewing all the standard tricks of horror practitioners in search of new forms of mind-invasion, material that is uniquely Campbellian, where language in service of off-centre perceptions is the major strategy.

The result is, very squarely, a literary experience. The novel put me in mind of many of Blackwood’s or Machen’s occult tales, where the evocation of ancient landscapes and the intense folk who are drawn to them are the works’ central subjects. Little in this book will make you recoil with horror (and I mean that not in a pejorative sense; many of Campbell’s previous fictions have honourably achieved this); the events will instead settle disarmingly into your thoughts, hinting at possible visions rather than casting them conveniently before you. Even the novel’s ending is underplayed – quite deliberately so, I should add. It’s as if Campbell were determined to make this his quietest book, but I needn’t add that quiet doesn’t mean inaudible. As ever with this author, those with the keenest senses will take the most from The Wise Friend. It’s a collaborative effort, and isn’t that the best kind of reading experience, the principal reason we go to such high quality written fiction?

Elsewhere, all the idiosyncratic techniques of Campbell’s mature prose are evident. His edgy dialogue, where exchanges perpetually feel on the edge of misunderstandings and attendant anxiety. The way he’ll begin a chapter without making it immediately apparent who is talking and with whom and where the characters are located – all deliberate methods to further disorient the reader. Recurrent imagery or motifs that gradually gain accumulative meaning: in this book, repeated allusions to genderlessness is one striking example, and ultimately a significant one. Knowing references to contemporary cultural mores (here we have “trigger warnings”, feminist reinterpretations of “patriarchal” literature, and more). Wordplay that transforms the innocuous into the sinister (for example, the damaged sign of a hotel called THE IMPERIAL is suggestively misread by the narrator as IMP REAL). Collectively, all these quirky tricks offer Campbell’s work its special qualities, the kind I can derive from no other author.

As for niggles in this particular novel? Well, in order to achieve one effect – concerning the suspected identity of a certain character – the first-person narrator had to suggest enough to the reader along those lines while demonstrating his concurrent ignorance. If, like several of Campbell’s previous novels, the events had been narrated in the present tense, readers might assume that Patrick is engaged during these passages in motivated forgetting, as if his subconscious is both alluding to troubling ruminations and yet simultaneously hiding them from him. In the past tense, however, we must assume that the narrator is toying with us – referring to events of which he is, during composition, already cognisant. For me, this led Patrick’s earnest reflections on events to possess a novelistic artifice that slightly marred verisimilitude. But this is perhaps the kind of technical detail that only a literary fusspot like me might entertain, and it’s hardly going to mar anyone’s enjoyment of the tale. And additionally, come the end of the book, we might also wonder whether the narrator is to be entirely trusted anyway?

In conclusion, then, here we have another sterling entry in the Campbell canon, the most restrained book he’s written to date, one embedded in a long, rich history of British occult fiction and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with any number of the best. The Wise Friend is, in short, more required reading for all of us who love the dark.


The Wise Friend is now available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wise-Friend-Fiction-Without-Frontiers/dp/1787584038/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1588148132&sr=8-1