Review by V.J. WAKS, 12 28 14

M.R. James has been called the master of many things. One of them is allusion – what is suggested but not necessarily made clear. I for one believe this is the essence of most horror, and classic horror epitomizes this, a determination to allow the reader to see into the tale whatever is suggested, whatever will frighten them the most.

OH, WHISTLE AND I’LL COME TO YOU MY LAD was published in 1904. For perspective: the notorious Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society ruled supreme nearly everywhere during this time. Harry Houdini regaled the modern world with his sleights of hand, his sheer bravado in magic, as well as his presentation of himself as the ‘scourge of spiritualists’. He himself would come to recant somewhat, telling his wife that he would attempt to contact her after his death; he believed in some kind of afterlife that would somehow make this a possibility. And Crowley, creator of the Order of the Golden Dawn, occultist, savagely and destructively inquisitive, had his heyday in this period. Europe was rife with spiritualists, their beliefs, the need to examine, to prove some kind of life after death. It was everywhere. To have a protagonist in a story of this power who is NOT a believer, who stands adamantly against all spirituality and esoteric belief, is perfect. Our protagonist contends that truth is never offensive. By the end of the story, both he and the reader will be convinced that truth has many forms, that it wears many colours, and some of them are dark and terrifying.

Again, we have powerfully evocative and real settings. Burnstow is cited; it is in fact standing in for a real place with a real, very dark history. The town of Felixstowe, on the coast of Suffolk is generally suggested as what James had in mind for the town on the beach, a town whose church and pub predate the Norman invasion of the 11th century. In point of actual fact; the setting of the action in the area of a ruined Templar preceptory evokes Dunwich, which had the association, which boasted the Templar ruins in all their awful, incomprehensible majesty and mystery. For Dunwich also had a coastline disappearing into the sea, its churches being washed away, its coffins rising through the sand before being tipped over the cliffs into the maw of living ocean. There is another eerie evocation. The title is also found in a poem by Robert Burns, published 1783, whose line ‘Tho’ father an’ mother an’ a’ should gae mad – oh, whistle, an’ I’ll come to ye, my lad…’ mirrors the sense of helplessness, of loss of rational explanation that permeates James’ tale.

Our hero this time is a professor, a man whose life’s limits are set by what he can see, hear, touch, understand. What he can prove. He does not believe in ghosts and has no tolerance for those that do. Again we have the narrative of a story that is told to James – again, his admirable elimination of his own voice in favour of his character, a man placed in a location not more than sixty yards from an ocean greedily devouring the land, taking back the simple, superficial vestiges of civilisation that man rears in defiance of natural law.

Or unnatural law; the rule will be that primal forces, whatever we intend, remain both primal and forceful. And they will be inexplicable, as our protagonist, the prim, control oriented professor on a work holiday in winter at the local inn is about to learn.

For the windows in his room look out on that ocean – and the beach, the last vestige of familiar turf, will become a twilight zone of uncanny terror.

Again, as in CANON ALBERIC’S SCRAPBOOK, the tale starts deceptively naturally, grounded in whatever we have come to envisage as normal life – predictable, rote – harmless. Once more, reality frays apart as the exploration of a ruined Templar preceptory and the discovery of an antique whistle opens up a vista of not just a beach – a spit of land being invaded by an ancient ocean – but a place where horror wanders freely, unencumbered by our expectations of that ‘natural law’. We will watch as our protagonist walks home under the yellow sky of dusk, along an isolated – not quite empty beach. Here the skill of the writer is sublime. We feel the wind biting at his back, moaning, and we come to realise that one single look behind him – along the path he has just left, that path from the ruins – will come at the same terrible price that was paid by Lot’s wife when she looked back at Sodom burning in the distance behind her.

The Templars are known to have built their houses of command, of study – of a great deal more, all across England. Around these houses, legendary for their location along the lines of so-called power – arose other legends, in particular that of the Black Dog, a supernatural (and by this I mean more than natural) entity, consistently seen in the folklore of the British Isles and elsewhere. It is a nocturnal apparition, associated with demonic forces – a portent of death – it is a creature of the cross roads, of ancient pathways, dark with the shadows of antiquity. This is a story about a whistle, just a simple antique whistle. I leave it to the reader to explore how MR James took the two ends of deeply disturbing local legends, plaited them with the sinews of long dead spirits, and wove a rope, one of insurmountable dread, as eager for our throat as a hangman’s noose.

James has been described as the penultimate master of the horror of the inanimate object. It pays to remember that objects can move, they can travel – they go forward and backward in place and time. Not everything that is lost is meant to be found.

Here again is a story to be read in the full light of day.

Do so at your leisure, but do so in a bedroom where there is no second bed.

Thank you Victoria.

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