The Nightfarers by Mark Valentine

 


 
The Nightfarers - a collection of fourteen short stories by Mark Valentine composed with the British author's signature elegance, charm and suavity.

To add to my reading pleasure, I have the good fortune to own one of the 300 high quality hardback copies published by Tartarus Press. What a delight holding this book in my hands and turning the pages.

As a way of sharing the distinctive flavor and flair of these finely wrought tales, I'll turn to a trio of my personal favorites. Perhaps not surprisingly since I'm fond of stories revolving around books, that's the very subject of all three yarns. And since the tales are told in the first person by an unnamed narrator having more than a little in common with our author, I'll take the liberty of giving the narrator in each tale the name of Val.

THE 1909 PROSERPINE PRIZE
Youthful, radical Val was kicked out of college for writing too-free versions of Verlaine and thereafter retraced the steps of poet Rimbaud among the dross of Djibouti. But the gods looked after their young zealot in quest of the poetical by blessing him with the enduring friendship of his college chum Hugh, who made sure he recovered from fever and delirium once back in England.

Not only that, Hugh urged his uncle, a Mr Basil Lamport, to assign Val the position of secretary (complete with modest salary), when his wealthy uncle established, in the year 1901, the annual Prosperine Prize, to be awarded to a full length fiction written in the spirit of Lord Lytton, fiction that "most skillfully went into the dark and emerged with something of the light."

Past winners of the award include the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and M. P. Shiel. It's 1909 and we join Val along with the three judges he has chosen this year, all esteemed leaders of the British establishment: a reverend, an army major and a Cambridge don, as they convene at night in the candlelit library of one of Lamport's old mansions. Deliberations move apace but the three gentlemen are locked in a stalemate. Val urges them to review a book they have hitherto payed little attention. What eventually transpires could prompt readers to label this Valentine a strange story, a ghost story, a horror story, a tale of the supernatural or a story defying any attempt at categorization.

WHITE PAGES
With echoes of Italo Calvino addressing the reader about to embark on his new novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Val begins his own tale thusly: "Before you start reading this story, I suggest you riffle the pages of the book. Take them in your thumb and let them fall swiftly back into place, one after the other. It's always worth looking to see if there is anything between the leaves. I expect you've found some things before. Old bookmarks, certainly, and perhaps some very odd items used as bookmarks." So many discoveries you can make when you pick up a book.

And the joy you can have in the finding. Val goes on to tell us he is a discoverer of obscure old books, not as a professional who does it for the money but rather as one who engages in the pursuit for the sheer pleasure - and his discoveries have led him to unearth books that aren't even books, books that look like books but are not meant to be read, books he dubs Edwardian curios.

As by way of example, there's a book arranged by Cecil Henland with the title The Ghost of My Friends consisting of all blank sheets, each with a vertical fold. Cecil provides instructions: write your name with a full pen of ink and then fold over the paper. Val notes the result will remind one of a blurry skeletal image or a monstrous crushed insect. Cecil also includes a nappy poem that's a tad grim around the edges.

Val has uncovered more, much more: a blank book where friends are encouraged to draw an outline of their hand on a page and sign their name in the palm; another blank book for young ladies to write down the complements they've been paid over the years as well as all the dances they accepted and declined, and still another, The Faces of My Friends, where the author's friends were urged to draw a self-portrait and sign their name beneath.

More curios: a publisher specializing in forgotten authors, forgotten, that is, outside of a brief list of their eccentricities, as in a woman writer who mended injured jackdaws, who always wore black and who usually slept on the roof of her bay window. More books: a book devoted to day nurseries, a guide book for ladies hostesses and one dedicated to the role that fate plays in our lives.

Where is all this leading? Please keep in mind Mark Valentine draws inspiration from writers such as Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare and Robert Aickman. Thus, toward the end of the tale, Val observes one of his prize finds: "I looked at the book, so long sought, and saw the shadows from the ivy sway over it, with a hiss of whispers." What happens next is veiled in those shadows and whispers.

UNDERGROWTH
"There are some second-hand bookshops where the proprietor makes the mistake of asking what you want." Val recollects his best finds in such bookshops come about when he's not looking for any book in particular. But he's learned from experience he dare not tell the proprietor this and has subsequently devised a plan to effectively deal with bookshop owners: he baits them.

Oh, yes, all is fair when it comes to a book collector's love of books. So Val asks the bushy-eyebrowed men or cardigan women, just the type of people who own those bookshops, if they perchance have anything by Hubert Crackanthorpe. The oldsters invariably shake their heads and walk off muttering thus leaving him free to examine the shelves.

But on a return visit to the bookstore, a second approach must be employed: Val now inquires if they have any books by Francis Brett Young. Do we ever, my boy! The keen bookseller will now lead Val to a remote shelf and crouch down to the bottom where there will be an entire row of books by the author. But then Val poses his main question: Do you happen to have the Young book I'm really after, his Undergrowth? No they don't have Undergrowth! At this point, the bookseller stands up and stalks off. Ah, left to scrutinize the bookshelves in peace!

But when Val pulls his Undergrowth ploy at one bookshop, the owner confides in Val what booksellers term their undergrowth - books they know will never sell but are there to simply fill up the bottom shelves. And not only that - undergrowth can have other, murkier meanings: literal undergrowth, as in the snails and toadstools in a garden and literary undergrowth, as in an author's early works best either pushed to obscurity or forgotten entirely. Then there's a third mysterious meaning for bibliophile Val who desires to be with books forever. And that's forever as in a mystical (or diabolical) union with the objects of his passion. To say more would be to say too much.


British author Mark Valentine, born 1960