FELLSTONES by Ramsey Campbell -- review and interview (both spoiler free)

FELLSTONES by Ramsey Campbell

A review by Gary Fry

 

After last year’s gripping excursion into (what we might clumsily call) social realist territory, SOMEBODY’S VOICE, Ramsey Campbell is back where perhaps he truly feels he belongs: the supernatural weird with more than a hint of cosmicism. Story-wise, FELLSTONES is relatively easy to describe: following the deaths of his parents, the care and supervision of young Paul is taken on by his music teachers, a family – mother, father, daughter – rather more expectant than the role ought to involve. Why on earth are they so insistent that he orient his whole life around music, especially his capacity to sing? We the readers join the story with Paul in later life, having fled the manipulative Staveleys, but he’s about to be brought back into the fold – a return to his native village, where seven mysterious stones stand, each a prompt to memories he’d rather remain dormant.

Thus begins one of Campbell’s typically accumulative narratives. Lurching back and forth in time, with childhood episodes running cheek-by-jowl with Paul’s current existence, it builds up a suggestive energy in much the way, say, THE WICKER MAN does. Indeed, with its evocation of prehistorical artefacts and the ancient traditions they have locally inspired, FELLSTONES bears more than a passing resemblance to that quintessential example of British strangeness. The villagers he encounters, certainly including his surrogate family, exhibit an offbeat care that is insidiously Oedipal. Police advise on legal matters and a doctor tends to injuries. But it is the Staveley parents and Paul’s pseudo sister (Adele) who wield the most menace. They seem so devoted to him that it would be rude to tell them to bugger off, and although an increasingly exasperated Paul tries to do so on several occasions throughout his life, he never quite manages to sever the connection.

The Staveleys put me in mind of the Denton family in THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN, with Paul cast as the beleaguered Benjamin and Adele as a creepy daughter. And I consider this comparison apposite as Campbell wrings more than a little dark comedy from the events that constitute Paul’s capture. There’s something rather funny and yet unsettling about the way ostensible love can have such a sinister undercurrent. Later in the book, an attempted escape from a house might be read as a novelistic depiction of a classic slapstick routine, complete with a comic telephone call packed with misunderstandings. As is often the case in later Campbell, the line between laughter and unease is blurred to forge something tantalisingly unique.

Elsewhere in the book, the comedy is much more explicit, particularly in the depiction of a Beatles scholar who seems so typical of latter-day revisionist types with an anti-elitist agenda that he might not even qualify as satire. The theme of music is crucial to the novel, as indeed it is important to Campbell himself, and the author has all kinds of dark fun lampooning an idiot who claims that, for example, the three bolted together song fragments at the end of ABBEY ROAD are as artistically weighty as Schubert’s song cycles. Now, please don’t get me wrong; I love The Beatles – I find them inventive, varied, joyful, witty, clever, eccentric, moving, brilliant and barbed. But I also know, say, the final movement of Mozart’s “Jupiter” symphony, and if anyone seriously believes that there is anything in the Fab Four’s oeuvre that matches up to this structurally miraculous masterwork, then back to school they must hie.

In short, a great deal of nonsense has been spouted about popular art, with The Beatles commonly cited as evidence in favour of erasing the distinction between High and Low culture (in the recent film YESTERDAY, Mr Richard Curtis in all earnestness compares the opening bars of “Let It Be” to the brush strokes of Leonardo da Vinci). In fairness, The Beatles themselves recognised this effusive critical excess: “we were just a great little band,” said Paul; “all we did is get dressed up,” said John; “he [Paul] goes on about that song [“Yesterday”] as if he’s Beethoven,” said George; Ringo has perhaps remained wisely silent on the matter. But these are the culturally complex times in which we live, where the Western canon has justifiably been stress-tested according to the political imperatives of socioeconomics, race and ethnicity, gender, and other crucial demographic considerations. 

I might appear to be digressing, but please bear with me. What I mean to say is that the work of few artists, especially in the horror genre, is as mindful of such broad social trends as that of Ramsey Campbell. Which is not to say that he thumps a tub in any essayist manner. These themes are properly dramatised, become the discursive waters in which his characters sink or swim. In FELLSTONES, Paul works in a branch of Texts (you may remember this bookselling company from Campbell’s novel THE OVERNIGHT), and despite his best efforts to stock what he considers important music, he is forced by management to conform to mass market mediocrity. Which means that any attempt on his part to achieve authenticity is compromised. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, we might think, especially as we learn more about similar (and yet artistically inverted) restrictions imposed in his past by the ghastly Staveleys. What I’m suggesting is that, as in other later Campbell novels (for example, THIEVING FEAR), Paul’s tussles with a dumbed-down social realm tenderise him ahead of an engagement with the cosmic: at least the powers at work back home demand the profundity of great art.

And what an engagement that is. I’ll crave indulgence in advance of this line, but once Paul returns to his native village, the stones really are better than The Beatles. Across a sequence of tension-filled episodes – I particularly enjoyed the festival performances, during which the limitations of magic, science and religion are artfully elucidated – Paul’s appointment with sheer otherness draws ever closer. Again in more recent novels, Campbell has grown increasingly fond of lengthy set-pieces (memorable examples include the search of the house that concludes BORN TO THE DARK and that of the deserted hotel in “The Wrong Game”), and he’s outdone himself here. I read the final part of FELLSTONES with a relentless feeling of intoxication, an experience that no other writer (and last year I read over 200) can ever offer me. I’ll give nothing away, and state only that it’s a triumph of technique, tone, characterisation, and theme. And if that’s not enough, what serves as the novel’s epilogue is every bit as weird – just weird. The pure stuff. What we true fans of the field un-secretly crave. 

I might end this review here, but I’d like to qualify an arguably contentious position I took earlier. Campbell’s prose these days is so tricksy and refined that I find little to equal it in modern literature. Let’s look at one brief extract: 

The car swept like a gale through the tangled country lanes, and Michael fought to stay convinced that Cyprian was winning the computer game they were trapped in. “Let me hear from you,” Cyprian said when they reached the deserted stage set of a station. Nobody connected with the production showed up while Michael waited for the train, which saved him from having to deliver a performance, though they cast him as a man wielding a credit card to buy a ticket once he was aboard. As the train raced south he sensed Fellstones creeping to meet him, which surely ought to be a relief. Bartholomew’s Reach felt like a gateway to Fellstones. Michael phoned the number on a dwarfish poster that welcomed him with all its corners outstretched opposite the shuttered ticket office. A taxi driven by a man who smelled of the tobacco that constituted his reddish eyebrows took him home. As it passed Kingseen Lane somebody among the ruins stooped out of sight behind a chunk of wall, and he wondered what prize they’d found. A leafy quiff drooped over the village sign, revising the first word to WE COME.

This is a depiction of a character negotiating reality after having smoked some particularly strong weed. In my experience, it effortlessly captures that feeling of existing in a slightly unreal reality. This is all grist to the novel’s mill, of course, and it’s by no means the only example of that sense of dislocation Campbell seemingly alone can induce. The point I’m trying to make is that what we crudely call popular fiction can sometimes achieve – hell, quite often, in the hands of Stephen King, John le Carré, James Lee Burke, Ruth Rendell, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, and many others – anything that so-called literary work can. And so, no, I’m not an artistic snob. I recognise greatness outside of artificial marketing categories. The artistic weight of the pop song is limited by its inherently simple ABACA form; who knows what Paul McCartney might have achieved with a formal musical education?* But the novel allows for more structural complexity, and for those who really know what they’re doing – peasant or king, PoC or Caucasian, lady or gent – art will manifest. 

Ramsey Campbell really knows what he’s doing, and I offer FELLSTONES as evidence of his unique craft. 

 

FELLSTONES can be ordered in hardcover, paperback and ebook editions here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fellstones-Ramsey-Campbell/dp/1787587568/ref=sr_1_1?crid=27YQXDG0CGJ9V&keywords=fellstones&qid=1656758606&sprefix=fellstones%2Caps%2C78&sr=8-1

 

* Not to belabour the point, not least because it’s relatively tangential to this review, but let me just add on this matter that when Paul McCartney announced in the late 1990s that he would write an orchestral work called STANDING STONE, he said in response to a question about his influences that he didn’t know a lot of classical music and for that reason he felt his piece might be “more original” than others. This is patently ridiculous. Mozart studied Bach, Beethoven studied Mozart, Wagner studied Beethoven, Mahler studied Wagner, and so on. Great work arises from standing on the shoulders of giants and not ignoring them. McCartney’s ignorant comment reminds me of Robert Ludlum’s claim that he never read other authors while he wrote his own work in case he was unduly influenced. I’d suggest that if your style is that vulnerable, it’s probably not much of a style. Readers of Ludlum are welcome to challenge me, but I’d kindly request extracts in support of their view. And in case anyone is curious, I’m a huge McCartney fan – know even his B-sides and unpublished rarities, probably about 800 songs – but I’m also aware of his (current) artistic limitations.

 

 

An interview with Ramsey Campbell about Fellstones

 

Gary: Perhaps we can start with you telling me a little bit about the genesis of Fellstones? 

Ramsey: I may as well admit that Fellstones initially gave me more problems than any other novel has for many years. While I don’t plot in advance, I do gather material until it exerts enough pressure on me that I feel driven to start writing. By this stage I’ve developed a general sense of the structure and of some of the major events of the narrative, and the order of the early events of the tale (though all this can change in the writing). The closer I approached the first draft, the more I realised I had insufficient sense of its shape. In particular I couldn’t figure out how to introduce the Croucher figure and locate it within the overall structure. I even thought of constructing the book from different documents and bits of evidence, or writing it as a novella, but none of this seemed to work. The idea for Somebody’s Voice then presented itself, and generated material so rapidly that I wrote that novel instead. It gave me time to stand back far enough from the Fellstones problems to see which elements should be historical, not contemporary. You may be amazed I could miss such an obvious point. Alas, these can be the drawbacks of trusting one’s instincts, but better that for me than use mechanical tricks and techniques.

Gary: I did think while reading that perhaps Somebody’s Voice had encouraged you to explore the back and forth narrative (though I realise you’d already done so in The Last Voice They Hear). Speaking of back and forth, although some of Fellstones takes place in your native Liverpool, much of it revels in a rural location further north, near the Lakes. Was that a setting you’d been keen to inhabit? 

Ramsey: To be honest, it was more a matter of finding somewhere sufficiently remote from its neighbours that its oddities would go unobserved, and I also wanted a setting reasonably close to the library archive that holds Peter Grace’s manuscript, so that our protagonist would pass nearby on his route north. I think there’s more of a sense of the Lakes in tales such as “The Fit” and especially “Above the World”, drawn in detail from actual Lakeland stays of ours. 

Gary: The isolated rural location put me in mind of some of the classics in the great British folk horror tradition. Were you mindful of, say, The Wicker Man while writing Fellstones? 

Ramsey: I’m fond of the sub-genre—not just British but in such American instances as “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and Harvest Home—but I don’t believe I was conscious of predecessors while writing the novel. If any had come to mind, a favourite by Errol Undercliffe might have been uppermost (“The Steeple on the Hill”, from which I fear I borrowed the basic theme of “Potential”). Come to think, I’d had a go at trapping a character in a remote town in my first published book, and so the story (“The Moon-Lens”) may be hovering indistinctly in the background too. 

Gary: Let me ask about the Staveleys. You've previously written about ghastly families – e.g. the Fancys in The One Safe Place – but this one wields quite a different form of menace. I’m perhaps being impish, but the notion of how to deal with forceful people who claim to have your best interests at heart is quite topical. Can you tell me something about your creation of the family? 

Ramsey: Indeed yes, the phenomenon of family members or indeed others who want to force you to conform to their perceived image of what you are or ought to be is dismayingly common, across many cultures, certainly not least ours. I fear it never goes away but merely mutates in whatever form is presently active. The Staveleys have their own reasons, though, and I imagine they would acknowledge those to themselves and those involved in a way most of the kind of people you cited are unlikely to. They just know best—better than their victims—but the Staveleys grew from their own motives.

Gary: At last, your love of great music takes centre stage in one of your novels (there have been a few short stories). I’ve always felt that the abstract power of music (as opposed to the tinker-toy reductionism of language-oriented disciplines) resonates with themes of cosmicism. Would you care to comment on this issue? 

Ramsey: Some works certainly come to mind—Janáček’s Sinfonietta and the Angus Dei from his Missa Glagolitica, both of which I found terrifying in the Kubelik recordings, some of Messiaen, some of Scriabin and others. I think Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony reaches towards higher peaks than the merely mountainous, and the final pages of Beethoven’s 9^th past the simply human.

If I can throw in another observation, I’ve come to believe that horror fiction can have quite a lot in common with music—the rhythm of language (which can border on the musical) is frequently important, and timing (instinctive rather than over-deliberate) is crucial, just as with music. It occurs to me that in both cases our awareness of the forms employed can add to rather than detract from the power of the work, at any rate for me.

Gary: If I may move from the sublime to the ridiculous, you have a lot of fun with the Beatles scholar. Did that part of Fellstones derive from any particular real world counterpart? 

Ramsey: While the character wasn’t based on Tony Palmer, I did have in mind his absurd (and by now perhaps justly forgotten) comment on the White Album: “If there is still any doubt that Lennon and McCartney are the greatest songwriters since Schubert, then [the album] should surely see the last vestiges of cultural snobbery and bourgeois prejudice swept away in a deluge of joyful music making.” Not Schumann? Mahler? Vaughan Williams? Britten? Mind you, my vote would be for Richard Strauss. In a more general sense I was trying to address the snobbery towards literature that too many fans and writers of popular (often an ironic term) fiction display—I don’t subscribe to it or its mirror image, and all genres have contributed to literature and have produced real art. To return to the issue of music, I do think Gingerbread Man by the Residents is a kind of song cycle. Seek out the official video and be disquieted.

Gary: A few familiar names appear in the novel – Peter Grace, of course, who’s cropped up in several of your pieces, and also the bookstore Texts, still in business since the days of The Overnight. I’ve asked you previously about recurring characters and you said that you didn't go in for that very much. But would you agree that, what with the likes of Frugish too, your individual works are increasingly occupying a shared world? 

Ramsey: I think so—indeed, Frugish and Texts appear to be bidding to take over the high street—but I’m more conscious of the gradual development of the Brichester Mythos (which isn’t as localised as that sounds; I have in mind the entities I scattered around that part of the country, but their reach is a lot wider). I have grown fond lately of referring back to occult notions in my earlier tales, the likes of Peter Grace included. I’m trying to codify the mythos to an extent without losing its suggestiveness. 

Gary: Your style has altered enormously down the years – and is currently capable of inducing intoxication at the end of Fellstones – but looking back across your whole career, do you perceive a unity in all your work? That is, do earlier pieces feel organically related to later material?  

Ramsey: I’d like to think that my recent writing represents a process of refining the prose, much as we see in Graham Greene’s development as a writer, but I’m not sure when I would date my process from, and at times I feel excessively locked into my usage, especially in terms of sentence construction. Perhaps it’s time I tried that useful exercise of writing in a different voice. I suppose all this implies that I’m trying to keep whatever’s valid from the early stuff and build on it, and address earlier themes with more maturity (assuming I have any) of vision and technique. One thing that’s pretty constant is my delight in pastiche within the narrative—Ben Sterling’s tale of the ice spirits in Midnight Sun, “Mad Hepzibah” in The House on Nazareth Hill, the various journals of occultists, in Fellstones the village play. In these sections I feel my imagination grow more vital. 

Gary: The ending of Fellstones is one of your most beguiling, up there with those of Darkest Part of the Woods, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, and others of this stripe. Do you often (or ever) reread previous works and, with the fading of memories, re-experience such material from we readers’ perspective? If so, how do you find these concluding set-pieces? 

Ramsey: Pretty well on the whole (and I ought to admit that if I reread even quite recent work these days, I have the experience of reading someone else’s writing). Scenes like those (not only final climaxes) generally take several days and quite a lot of deliberation to write, because I want to ensure they contain enough substance and are paced as the material requires.

Gary: Just round up, perhaps you could say a little about your next novel, The Lonely Lands. What can we expect? 

Ramsey: I believe it concerns someone who may be too obsessed with the afterlife, which traps him in a series of encounters that lead further and further away from any means of escape.

 

FELLSTONES can be ordered in hardcover, paperback and ebook editions here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fellstones-Ramsey-Campbell/dp/1787587568/ref=sr_1_1?crid=27YQXDG0CGJ9V&keywords=fellstones&qid=1656758606&sprefix=fellstones%2Caps%2C78&sr=8-1