The Incubations by Ramsey Campbell - a review and an interview with the author

 The Incubations by Ramsey Campbell 

Review by Gary Fry 

 

 

In a relatively recent review, I suggested that, just as "the wrong man" had become a central, recurring theme in the work of Hitchcock, the "misunderstood doomsayer" has similarly come to preoccupy Ramsey Campbell's later novels. By this I mean that there's usually a character who perceives a truth that others are unwilling to accept, resulting in much frustration and, ultimately, enforced isolation on the part of he (and it usually is a he) who cries wolf.  

But now, in his latest work, Campbell appears to be pushing that sense of social exclusion even further. Without giving too much away, the central character of his previous novel, The Lonely Lands, is forced to avoid integration with others in fear of contaminating them with a mysterious ailment that has befallen him. And indeed, something of the same stripe seems to be occurring in this, his new book, a genuinely surreal escalation of unease entitled The Incubations.  

The premise is relatively straightforward. As a boy, Leo Parker had become a pen pal of a young German female student as part of a school cultural exchange program. A trip to Germany as an adult revives this relationship but Leo's experiences in the country, including an outing to a location once associated with the Nazis, result in him returning home to the UK and becoming dogged by something nefarious he may well have attracted overseas. 

Thereafter, the book becomes loaded with a variety of interpretive possibilities. Addressing issues relating to post-war Anglo-German reconciliation, as well as hinting at a revival of intracontinental tensions arising from Brexit, Campbell dramatises a sequence of scenes that can be read as traditional horror material – a demonic contaminant at work in Leo's native environment – or rather interpreted as a series of artfully elusive metaphors. For instance, a labyrinthine attempt to negotiate the UK border in an airport might suggest contemporaneous issues of migration. Language mangled in its everyday usage (as revealed in the novel’s opening chapter) could suggest the inadvertent offence we can cause lately simply by speaking.  

The presence of other characters, sometimes satirical in orientation, only adds to this way-we're-living-now thematic dimension. The aptly named English councillor Patrick Bloore (do I hear "patriotic bore" in there?) espouses all the predictable latter-day nationalist rhetoric, and he's pitiably complemented from an academic point of view by a Nazi-sympathising lecturer called Jerome Pugh. On the basis of his surname, I'll leave it to you to decide what that particular chap is full of.  

But let me not suggest that the novel welshes on its spooky content. There are more than enough suggestions of distorted perceptions, mutated skillsets, bodily disfigurements, and bizarre geographical transformations to satisfy all of us who seek communion with the outré. One particular episode set inside a cinema is especially memorable, and upholds the author’s commitment to avoiding overly familiar tropes in the genre, and rather keeping his imaginings unsettlingly leftfield. That is to say, although the novel’s premise is broadly familiar, its execution is uniquely Campbellian.  

As ever, the masterly prose style is more than up to the task of conjuring this sort of unease. As I've documented many times before, it's the offbeat nature of the dialogue and descriptions that makes readers feel as if they're in quite a peculiar world. When Leo finds himself in the presence of a lost child in an airport, "the hall appeared to be deserted except for him and his charge, him and his trusting charge, him and his trusting not yet tearful charge." A moment later, we're told that he's seeing the lad in a series of mirrors, but not before our own interpretation of the scene has been rendered unstable. 

Elsewhere in the same location, a trolley being dragged across the airport floor is heard as a "grumpy bumbling rumble" – now you tell me if that isn't exactly the sound you'd hear. In a later scene, when Leo sends a text message to his lover, he signs off thus: "He tapped the X thrice, producing an adult and its twin small offspring, and then headed for the bathroom. Ellen had responded by the time he came back. Happy for you, then. Keep up the sterling work. Her trio of Xs had all attained maturity". It's this persistent, original way of depicting commonplace reality that accumulates to produce such a pleasing dislocation. 

All in all in The Incubations, Campbell has drawn on his considerable technique to craft a novel that not only honours the fine traditions of our field but also one that is thoroughly embedded in contemporaneous life. As I suggested earlier, his central character’s unusual malaise, the terror he suffers of contaminating anyone he chances upon, might easily be interpreted as a reflection of what it is to be a conscientious person in the modern social climate, where one off-colour remark can have you cancelled, or an involuntary sneeze can unwittingly pass on who knows what latest strain of which pandemic.  

Campbell, whose work over the last sixty years has always reflected cultural upheavals, might even be considered one of the foremost chroniclers of our ever-mutating human condition. But he never achieves this in any obvious, expositional way. Rather, you come to his fiction to experience such matters of being-in-the-world through his own peculiar, multisensorial, perceptually oblique, and thematically nonreductive style. In that sense, he remains an artist of the first water, refusing to let his work become anchored in time by the kitschy ideologies so many of his contemporaries yield to. And that’s ultimately why he’ll last.  

 

An interview with Ramsey Campbell about The Incubations 

 

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

Ramsey: It started life in a wholly different form, and more than thirty years ago. I was consulting the notes I’d made for Midnight Sun to help me write the afterword to a recent reissue when I discovered I’d made notes at the opposite end of the notebook for an altogether different project as well. I’d played with the idea of a twin town but tried to work out a development where it’s a town of magicians, presumably along the lines of Blackwood’s “Ancient Sorceries”. The development had petered out, but now I thought the basic notion was worth another look. When I reflected on why twinning had originally taken place—to restore international relations after the war—the present novel began to take shape, and when my research turned up the other meaning of an alp I was delighted by yet another happy coincidence. I find there are many in this business. 

Gary: Your fiction has often ventured outside the UK in the short stories, and usually to the Mediterranean. What was your experience of writing significant sections of a novel set in northern Europe? 

Ramsey: It drew on the same experiences as my clumsy old tome The Parasite—our stay outside Munich with our friends Gary and Uschi Klüpfel. (I recall Gary reading The Doll Who Ate His Mother while Uschi went through the German translation, and how they marvelled at the butchery of my book.) One day they took us on an Alpine walk, and we also went on drives through the Alps, seeing small towns really quite like Alphafen (though not hiding similar secrets, we hope). I rarely waste an adventure that can provide material, and after most of half a century images from that Munich visit remain vital. 

Gary: And the issue of Germany also raises the matter of Nazism, which you address in the book. In the context of the enormous shadow it casts across our culture, some authors tread carefully here. How did you approach this aspect of the novel? 

Ramsey: The far right seems to be gaining power in many places around the world, not least here at home, which is why the Hitler sympathiser in the novel is English—I wouldn’t want anyone (me included) to reassure themselves Nazism and its relatives are safely distanced either by time or geography (though in the latter case, and in terms of global influence, the world is shrinking). I wouldn’t say I trod carefully—I hope my footfalls weren’t too heavy instead. 

Gary: The theme of some form of cultural contagion has all kinds of interpretive possibilities, especially in the current Brexit climate. But I'm interested in this recent turn in your novels, where a character is no longer merely menaced but, as in The Lonely Lands, also carries the menace inside him and unwittingly communicates it. There might even be shades of Covid-19 here, too. Am I on to anything, do you think?  

Ramsey: I think you definitely are. Indeed, we could regard you as almost spectrally prescient, given that a version of the motif shows up in my novel in progress, The Ancestral. Quite possibly the pandemic suggested it on a subconscious and, if you like, metaphorical level. The theme of inadvertence is pretty powerful, now I reflect on it—maybe that’s another reason why it keeps showing up. 

Gary: What I admire about your most recent work, especially the latest two novels, is your refusal to rely on anything that resembles a convention in the field. Despite drawing broadly on familiar premises, they feel strikingly strange in the execution. Do you at any stage strive consciously to be original or is that just where your imagination takes you? 

Ramsey: A bit of both, I think. I’ve come to the conclusion that a new piece of fiction should present a new set of problems to solve, otherwise I’m simply repeating myself or certainly in danger of doing so. I like to surprise myself with what I write, hence my avoidance of plotting rather than just amassing material. I feel that to convey the shock of the uncanny, the source of it should be as strange as I can make it (hence, for instance, how I tried to mutate an existing Alpine legend in The Incubations). 

Gary: You've talked about the novel being rooted in your early recollections of postwar tensions after the Second World War, but would you say that more recent developments between the UK and continental Europe played a significant role in this book? 

Ramsey: Indeed—they’re rather embodied in the person of the combative councillor and to a lesser extent his Alpine counterpart, do you think? And perhaps there’s an irony in that the character nearest to a Nazi is a British lecturer. 

Gary: Yes, and maybe the confusions at the airport might suggest labyrinthine border issues. Your work often affords such readings without ever being reducible to them. I suppose that's to do with your aversion to Loach-like didacticism? 

Ramsey: That may very well be at the back of my mind when writing—I don’t believe that as a writer I can or should try to dictate the reader’s response to what I write or indeed their understanding of it. I’m concerned rather to convey the imaginative experience I’ve had and hope that, having engaged my imagination, it engages theirs. I often find that on rereading (the copy-edit, say, or the proofs) I’ve changed my own interpretation. 

Gary: The prose in the novel is full of delightful phrases. For instance, a character has his "hands clamped to his hips while his elbows enclosed his impatience in quotes". Workmen on a house with scaffolding pose "on the structure like a diagram of snakes and ladders." Does this kind of thing emerge in first draft or is it worked at? 

Ramsey: Nearly always in the first draft. Often enough the words bring the image rather than the other way around, and it’s frequently spontaneous. Sometimes I may tinker with the wording, but usually not much. Sometimes the images just come to me and are noted down until I can find a context for them. 

Gary: I always find the names of your characters suggestive. Quite apart from its relevance to driving, "Leo Parker" suggests perhaps a lion-hearted keeper of the park, if not also the way he pries into aspects of another culture. This clearly ties in with the nation-oriented themes of the book. How important do you consider the choice of character names in fiction? 

Ramsey: Often crucial (in Dickens, say, or Mervyn Peake or Iris Murdoch). In my tales they often are. Sometimes they have an embedded meaning or more than one, but often it’s unconscious on my part—I’m just honoured that folk read me so closely they tease them out. In other cases the names are meant to be everyday, like the characters, but who knows what my subconscious may get up to while I’m not looking. 

Gary: Before we finish, could you tell us something about your next novel An Echo of Children? 

Ramsey: It returns to one of my recurring preoccupations, the vulnerability of children—in this case specifically my observation that attempts to exorcise children are a form of child abuse. That said, there may be an uncanny element to the tale as well. I leave the reader to decide. 

 

You can buy a copy of THE INCUBATIONS HERE.