Robert Aickman - Painted Devils

[jonathan122]

Painted Devils - Robert Aickman (Scribner's 1979)

Ravissante
The Houses of the Russians
The View
Ringing the Changes
The School Friend
The Waiting Room
Marriage
Larger than Oneself
My Poor Friend

An American "best of", with lovely jacket art by Edward Gorey.

[cw67q]

A sort of mid-career "best of" that doesn't include anything after "Sub Rosa" ecept for "Marriage" making its first appearing in a book.

The book club which brought this out also brought out an edition of "Cold Hand in Mine" around the same time.

PD does contain a good selection of stories (but IMHO it'd quite difficult to come up with an uninteresting collection of tales by Aickman).

I've never been all that keen on "the Houses of the Russians", I don't think it is a bad story, just not a favourite, but I think I'm in a minority here.

"Larger than Oneself" is quite funny, but not really Aickman at his most powerful, and "the Waiting Room" is an odd choice being a rather atypically straight short ghost story reminiscient of the kind written in the interwar period.

"Marriage" is another of Aickman's lesser efforts IMHO, although still worth a read (the only Aickman story to definately avoid is "Growing Boys") but is probably only here as the semi-obligatory new story for the collection (although how to second guess Aickman's own choices?).

Ravissante was the first story I read by Aickman, and I read it in Ramsey Campbell's excellent anthology "Walking Nightmares" as a youngster. It was one of those stories with images that would surface unbidden over the years, and I was delighted to encounter the story again as an adult and find out just who the author was. Still my favourite Aickman.

I think "the View" is another of Aickman's best, the version published here is different in several ways from the version in "We are for the Dark". I'm not observant enough to have noticed this myself, it was pointed out for me in a very interesting on-line essay (I've had a quick look, but can't find the link).

It is easy to take "Ringing the changes" for granted, as Aickman's best known and most reprinted tale, but it is a story that always repays rereading (and makes for a good introduction to Aickman's work).

The last two tales (the "Friends") are good solid (solid? surely not the best word for an aickman tale?) examples of aickman's work.

"My Poor friend" has generated its own soft spot of appreciation in me over the years. The narrator is one of the best examples of a typical Aickman's character: a sad, marginal-failure. To fail more spectacularly would actually confer a degree of success that doesn't fit with the Aickman view of humanity.

"The School Friend" is one of the Aickman tales that leaves me most frustrated. Whenever I read it, I feel I can just about place my finger on what it is about, the explanation is just about to cohese in my brain..., and then that little low key coda causes it all to crumble away. But it is an enjoyable frisson of frustration, and anyway nobody reads Aickman for answers, do they?

Very few authors pack the direct emotional punch that Aickman does. Reading his work can leave me feeling drained and yet elevated. I have no idea why his odd tales are so affecting, unless it is down to simple mastery of language & magic. There may be a couple of authors of supernatural fiction that I think are as good as Aickman. But I can't think of any that are better.

cheers - chris

[jonathan122]

I think that (in the UK) "Marriage" was published first in Tales of Love and Death (1977), although I would imagine this was the first time it was published in the US.

I think I agree with Chris on "Houses of the Russians" - there's nothing particularly wrong with it, but I think when Aickman takes on a conventional ghost story he never quite manages to better some of the Victorian and Edwardian writers that he's emulating. I had a similar feeling with "The Waiting Room" and "The Unsettled Dust".

For the record, I really like "Growing Boys", although admittedly it's a bit out of character. I'd have said, if there is one Aickman story you should avoid, it's definitely "Rosamund's Bower".

[weirdmonger]

THE HOUSES OF THE RUSSIANS by Robert Aickman

“I fancy that daylight all the time would be worse than darkness all the time.”

You all surely know this story of a surveying student / trainee estate agent, a story containing an attritionally told inner tale of a young man, told when old, as told amid “fish-talk” to a group of younger students in a pub, having been rescued by a strange crossing of himself, across his chest and earlier, in the tale he told, across an erstwhile sole ‘dangerous’ bridge to an island of empty houses that initially seemed full of house parties, and the lucky charm of a medal given to him by a strange boy on this swirly mist of a Finnish island when the old tale-teller was younger — then, along with an older, girl-watching estate agent called Mr PURVIS who was also “vain about maps”, conducting the combined mission of seeking a property on behalf of a Mr Danziger, both of them eating meals at every house they visited throughout each day with the appetite of those in this author’s Hospice, no doubt, conducting this mission near a place called Unilinna that has, as its name implies, ‘a size you can take in as a whole’, but also has a Ligottian warehouse area as well as this island’s different houses where the Russians used to live or still live before or after an indeterminate historical atrocity, an event that we are made to smell the blood of.

Some ‘squelchy , white creatures’, notwithstanding.

Empty houses or full houses, they all have a level of sadness, especially when a larger-than-life Orthodox priest with sunken eyes and a huge white beard is seen presiding. Not forgetting the woman whom the tale-teller saw, between the gaps, spinning or something.

Not forgetting, also, Mr Purvis’s footbath that later needed to be continuously adjusted for the optimum level of heat.

I only wish I also had a similar lucky charm medal now that I am old, too. And to rid me of the curse of this story itself since I read it during my youthful reading of it in the 1960s, long after the First World War.

[andydecker]

Robert Aickman - Painted Devils (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1979, hc, 234 pages)

Cover: Edward Corey
Cover found on the net. Thanks to the original scanner.

Another nice edition of Aickman's stories.