THE LONELY LANDS by Ramsey Campbell -- review and interview with the author

 

The Lonely Lands by Ramsey Campbell

Review by Gary Fry

 

I’ve been reading the fiction of Ramsey Campbell for well over thirty years, and there are many observations I might make on it. For the purposes of this review, however, I’ll say only one thing: you never quite know what you’re going to get from one book to the next. That isn’t true of many of his weight-by-weight contemporaries. For instance, with Stephen King, except for a few exceptions down the years – the structural peculiarities of Gerald’s Game, the multi-novella composite that is Hearts in Atlantis, and the recent oddity “Life of Chuck” – you can pretty much guarantee that you’ll remain in familiar literary territory: everyday folk in everyday locales dealing with the outlandish.

Not so much with Campbell. Yes, the stories usually occupy the north of England, boast quirky characters battling some form of badness, and are related in richly lyrical and ambiguous language. But the tales themselves often come from leftfield. Take The Overnight as an example, a haunted place novel unlike any other you’ll ever read. Or maybe The Kind Folk, a book so strange as to be almost like a recollected dream. And now here we have The Lonely Lands, which I assure you is as distinct as any the author has ever written.

Joe Hunter meets Olivia at a library, and they soon wed. Life is good until, during a Covid anti-masking protest, the shop next-door to Olivia’s is broken into by a thug, Darrell Swann, who inadvertently coughs into her face as she tries to intervene and communicates the virus to her. Later at hospital, Olivia dies, and thus begins a nightmarish period of grief during which Joe simultaneously engages in Swann’s trial while also experiencing intimations of the afterlife, at first Olivia’s voice drawing him into her new realm and then less welcome denizens emerging from beyond that veil.

Campbell’s depiction of two worlds – the socially real and the spectrally unreal – hint at something like hell and heaven. For all the sordid activities of earthbound thugs, there’s an idyllic balcony in a sun-soaked hotel (the location of a honeymoon) to which Joe is first drawn and where he believes Olivia is safe. But soon the darker world starts bleeding into this other. It begins with irrepressible memories from Joe’s youth, a grandfather rather more interested in bullish games like football than studious pursuits such as reading. The older man and his ignoble cronies seem to represent the same kind of attitudes unworthy folk in the present day uphold, and on his death bed, the cranky grandfather threatens Joe with a visitation after he's passed on.

And so it goes. In the early sequences, some of the newfound amorphous imagery Campbell has evoked in later books – the finale of The Way of the Worm, especially – is drawn upon to depict a frightening lack of coherent form among the realm of the dead. For example, Joe’s grandfather, finally putting in his promised appearance, shapelessly lopes around a room before disappearing through a hole no larger than that of a mouse. That’s unsettling enough, but it’s only a start of the shape-shifting menace our lead character endures.

Then there’s Olivia’s sternly religious parents who seem determined to communicate their loss through passive aggressive meddling. There’s the court case, which, owing to a sharkish solicitor, soon becomes less clearcut than Joe had hoped. There’s also Joe’s female next-door neighbour, on the surface a sympathetically benevolent other, who often appears to be spying on him – or at least to know his every move. And worst of all, there’s the dead, who gradually, as Joe’s mind starts buckling beneath so much strain, start gaining a tenuous grip on his memories.

Memories is the prevalent theme of The Lonely Lands. From the name and nature of Olivia’s shop – Made of Memories, an outlet stocking nostalgic artefacts – to the struggle Joe has in keeping his recollections of his late wife untarnished by negativity. The chief threat is of course his late grandfather and his wastrel companions, but later, in a truly disturbing scene, quite another pursuer becomes involved, leading to a grim climax that involves a sacrifice perhaps representing the insuperable power of grief.

I shan’t give away more of the story, except to say that the whole experience is evoked in Campbell’s increasingly majestic command of prose. Some of the sentences here have a grandeur about them, being unashamedly adjectival and richly tessellated in their construction. Take this one, for instance:

He found himself wishing she could see the sights he saw, which might almost have been tributes the September afternoon was staging: a delicate intricate dance of butterflies kept in the air by an invisible juggler, an unstable elongated skein of geese high overhead like a hairpin reflected in rippling water, the comic relief of an extravagantly loose-limbed hound that had to keep halting to sneeze as it lolloped through the empurpled heather.

Just a few months ago, we literary folk said our sad farewells to Martin Amis, but with writing like this still in the world, our own grief needn’t be suffered so heavily.

Mix in a typically Campbellian collection of menaces and we’re treated to a claustrophobic narrative that veers between the ethereal spookiness of its dreamlike afterlife sequences and the gritty nastiness of its real world counterparts. The Covid-related protest activities out in the streets invoke a sense of things not being right in our familiar world. The court case, with its sleight-of-hand defence, adds further woe to Joe’s mental environment. A cold-call scam attempt shows how duress is unavoidable even when you think you’re being private.

It’s no wonder that Joe wants to keep Olivia where she is, free from such persistent unpleasantness. The visions of heavenliness in which she appears hint at the sanctuary of love, that unfailing refuge in the crisscrossing bullishness of life at large. Are we the readers encouraged to conclude that even the happiest times are shadowed by the imperiousness of death, its unknowable nature? If so, that would make Joe’s attempts throughout the book to wrestle with the terror of the void pitiably universal.

As I said earlier, this is an especially strange book, even for Campbell, and one that creeps inside you, slowly encouraging you to decode its dreamlike enigmas. Part paean to love, part meditation on death, it dramatises how the heavenly – communion with another – can only exist in the context of the grim: an inevitable termination of that bond. And I have a sense that, somewhat fittingly given its themes, The Lonely Lands will linger long in memory and stand alongside some of Campbell’s more idiosyncratic works, the kind of fiction only he can write.

 

An interview with Ramsey Campbell about The Lonely Lands

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

Ramsey: Though I don’t think any particular influence is at work here, perhaps tales of the afterlife I read when young may have left traces to peer over my shoulder – Vincent O’Sullivan’s “When I was Dead”, May Sinclair’s “Where Their Fire is not Quenched”, William Golding’s Pincher Martin, Beckett’s The Unnamable – who knows? More personally, I notice that the theme has shown up in quite a few recent tales: “Double Room”, “Recently Used”, “Speaking Still”, all of which involve a surviving partner’s attempts to communicate in some way with those they’ve lost. I fear the preoccupation may come with age. Once I saw the theme was worth developing in a novel I realised the development could draw upon the mythos of my trilogy as well – I’ve recently enjoyed establishing connections between earlier tales and later ones – but the issue that became central was the notion that the living may somehow be able to affect the experiences of the dead, a disturbing thought, I think.

Gary: I wondered whether the inherent fragility of memory, the way we’re often vulnerable to revising personal history, was also a conscious concern while exploring your theme of grief? 

Ramsey: I suspect it was looming in the shadows of my mind, although it wasn’t consciously employed. Certainly the fear of forgetting troubles me as I age, and I think these nagging preoccupations colour or at least tint what I write. And I’m often confronted with the difference between what I remember and what proves to have been the case. In The Lonely Lands, perhaps the uncertainty of shared memories – the different ways people recollect incidents they’ve both or all been part of – is more central, particularly in the sunset scenes. We may think I’ve never shaken off the influence of Last Year in Marienbad, not that I’d want to.

Gary: Was the decision to set the novel around the period of the pandemic something you’d had in mind during its conception? 

Ramsey: To begin with, not at all. I think many of us had to confront the question of whether to use or acknowledge the pandemic in our fiction – indeed, whether it was in some sense mandatory. I decided not, on the basis that we search in vain for appearances of the Spanish flu in the twenties work of Woolf and Fitzgerald and Hemingway (at least, I recall none). I didn’t think it right to reach for themes based on our pandemic either. However, once the loss that’s central to The Lonely Lands began to define itself in my mind I felt it could only emerge from the present context. I just hope I’ve done justice to both.

Gary: Quite a few of your later books involve court cases – The Way of the Worm, Somebody’s Voice, and now The Lonely Lands (I also recall The One Safe Place many years ago). I imagine that debate over contested perceptions appeals to you. Do you enjoy writing them? 

Ramsey: I hope it shows. I think they epitomise a motif of mine, in fact one so persistent we might call it a theme – the unreliability of perception, of looking again to see either the truth or a mutation of it, and the comedy of miscommunication. It occurs to me that the courtroom setting recalls (at least to me) the classical detective story and the way writers such as Agatha Christie would show us things we took for granted, only to reveal we didn’t see what’s there (the kind of linguistic magical trick I tried to employ and analyse in The Village Killings, though I’m sure it has been here and there throughout my career).

Gary: And the flipping back-and-forth from the present to the past is a recent strand in your work – The Wise Friend, Somebody’s Voice, Fellstones, and now The Lonely Lands employ this device (though again I recalled an earlier work, The Last Voice They Hear). Would you say this was a new aesthetic preference or is it rather dictated by the demands of certain material? 

Ramsey: I think the material tends to shape the form. It’s a basic theme of the field, of course, and of many tales of mine—the past invading the present in some fashion, spectral or other. In The Lonely Lands the past grows as unreliable as other aspects of our protagonist’s experience, and I wonder if the influence of Alain Resnais (first apparent in my old tale “Concussion”) may still be at work.

Gary: In an interview I conducted with you many years ago, you described yourself as a “wobbling agonistic”. In terms of the afterlife in the context of The Lonely Lands, have your thoughts about the matter altered more recently? 

Ramsey: Not significantly wobblier despite my age and vinous intake. I suppose I’m a don’t know veering towards a don’t think so.

Gary: I was very struck, as I had been at the end of the trilogy, with the amorphous transformations of the human form depicted in The Lonely Lands. This seems to be a recurrent image of yours – for instance, the suggestiveness of the game of exquisite corpse in Midnight Sun. I might suggest that posthumous mutability of the body troubles you as much as any suffering of a non-corporeal soul might. Would you care to comment? 

Ramsey: It doesn’t so much trouble me as engage my imagination. Perhaps it has its roots in concerns about body image, the kind of thing that showed up in Thieving Fear, for instance. As anyone who’s seen me will know, I care less about mine than about having a good time. In The Lonely Lands I think it relates to The Searching Dead, reviving the idea that the afterlife might give one very little purchase on oneself, either the sense of identity or any illusion of the physical.

Gary: Another thing I’ve seen recurring in the later books are chase sequences. Thieving Fear and Creatures of the Pool have examples, and there’s a few more in the trilogy and now another in The Lonely Lands. I’m reminded of course of the famous scene in The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Do you relish creating the kind of tension we usually consider the exclusive domain of film? 

Ramsey: I do indeed! Mind you, there are literary antecedents too. The climactic bus journey in Lucky Jim remains a favourite of mine, not least in its merging of the suspenseful and the linguistically comical. And there’s Krug’s fraught journey to save his son in Bend Sinister, and the tower scene in The Sandcastle, three instances that exemplify various prose approaches to suspense (Iris Murdoch’s being the use of hundreds of terse sentences).

Gary: Some of the sentences in The Lonely Lands, such as the one I single out in my review, are wonderfully wordy and evocative. Kingsley Amis often described Martin’s prose as “smelling of the lamp”. Does this kind of thing come directly to you, or does it require some labour? 

Ramsey: It can be either. Sometimes seeing a common sight or having a common experience as if for the first time seems to prompt the precise words to describe it, or at any rate the language that immediately occurs to me needs very little reworking. That’s the case with the butterfly image in the passage you’ve cited in the review. Sometimes I feel compelled to find words to fix a particular observation, whether of something that’s present or a passing thought, but in general the language doesn’t prove too elusive. Sometimes I try to grasp something linguistically in retrospect, such as the dog that rounds off that paragraph. In fact the passage is a composite of images I’d written down in my notebooks, very possibly years apart.

Gary: Thanks for sharing your thoughts on The Lonely Lands! Finally, I wonder if I can persuade you to tell me something about your next novel, which I believe will be called Its Gift is Dread?

Ramsey: That was indeed the title that occurred to me early on. When the development of the novel made Their Gift is Dread more appropriate I realised this would sound more like a collection, as Secret Stories originally did, and so I’ve saved the title for use elsewhere and called the novel The Incubations. It concerns a chap who visits a childhood correspondent in the Alpine town his town is twinned with, only to bring home an uncanny infestation.

 

 

You can buy a copy of The Lonely Lands in hardcover, paperback and ebook format here by clicking HERE.