Gambier by Oliver Onions
I intend shortly to empirically real-time review this novella recently published by Tartarus Press in the new collection of this author’s work here: http://www.tartaruspress.com/onions-ghost-stories.html
My previous reviews of this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/r-b-russell-tartarus-press/
My recent detailed review of The Beckoning Fair One: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/28/the-3rd-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories-edited-by-robert-aickman/
My public comments about OO’s collected works, comments made yonks ago: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/08/09/tentacles-across-the-atlantic/
“There is no dream that has not been dreamed before.”
– Oliver Onions
THE ASCENDING DREAM
When I read Gambier, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
I
“It was as sour a spot as you would meet with. Wet weeds and nettles stood stirrup-high on either side of the path.”
Upon a journey to Wastley, I the narrator encounter on the way a deserted mansion and its private chapel, Lepers’ Squints to peer through warily and a chapel bell tempting to be pulled. So, impishly, prankishly, I did so, as is my wont…as is now my dread?
A very stylish opening that is tempting to be fully read, fully wrung, too. But it also demands being eked out, this novella does, over time…?
II
I will not make a habit of giving large quotes from this text, but I could not resist this taster…
“I was not over-pleased to find myself in a priest-ridden village; and as I picked up the current gossip I was still less pleased at the superstitions of the folk. Their beliefs amounted to such an unsortable mumbo-jumbo of evil-eye, mirror-magic, puppet-roasting, and the like, as could be made nothing of; and it all seemed to centre in the priest.”
I am John Wilson, the new doctor in Wastley, and am perturbed by the eponymous village Priest upon meeting him. Equally, as a new reader of Gambier, I am staggered at how I have not read this work before, a work with powerful characterisation of a place and its people and, yes, of its priest. Reminds me so far of some of the greatest parts in John Cowper Powys. My instinct is that it will become considered as something quite waywardly literary or undefinable as well as being described as ‘folk horror’ — the latter term being the only previous reference I can find to this work.
III
“‘Gladly therefore let her glory in her infirmity.’
I saw little reason for glory, and said so.
‘You see after the manner of the flesh always,’ he returned. ‘Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats; but God shall destroy both it and them.’”
I am gobsmacked. Visceral slaughter of souls as well as of animals alongside a tension of relationship between a doctor and a priest, a text to have died for in hindsight of now having read it.
This can only be read within the text not described from outside it.
Strongest prose that I have read since first encountering that written by John Cowper Powys.
IV
“The parlour-door was ill hung, swinging open at times, and to pack it a number of paper wedges had been tacked to the border of the door.”
This chapter contains a fine word as description of this book that contains it: “yonderly”, beyond-wonder, as it were — yet beautiful words can contain nastiness and feud, too, as they do here, decorated with frost-sigils. And being snowed-in to reading it, there now being no escape route other than completing the close reading of it. One battleground of the feud between the eponymous priest and the doctor as myself is the well-being of a character who now lives fully in my mind: Crazy Alice Munn. A feud, too, involving, on my part, the ‘brandy-recruiting’ of compatriots to my side. And discovering thin edges of wedges as even thinner pages with words somehow to weigh.
Words in a book that create — but words within those words that also hopefully will serve to combat — the priest’s sermons of hell?
V
“Would use water from the well in which an unbaptised infant had been drowned; or some say the water in which have been put the lungs of an infant—“
The paper wedges written by James, the narrator’s predecessor as Wastley doctor as well as friend, with his addressing the narrator in these notes (“James’s unstrung, despairing sentences”) by an affectionate version of the narrator’s Christian name ….
Some accidental or wear-and-tear redacted notes telling as much as they conceal of the predecessor’s relationship with Gambier and their battleground over Alice.
Gambier whose own name I accidentally misread as Gambler when originally seeing this name on-line as title of the novella – and I wonder indeed if he is a man of extreme convictions about his role on earth, or simply a chancer!
Am I myself indeed a man of conviction or a chancer? Can one ever be unsure of the self one wields?
Shocked, too, as I assure you I am, by another battleground described in these notes, “a battleground for poison and antidote,…”
VI
“To this hour I cannot tell where the force lay; but I know now how one man can sway a mob to his will, for I have seen it done. Every phrase he uttered contained a lie, direct or implied; he used outworn tricks of oratory to domineer his hearers, and made them new; and there was naught for me to do but to admire and to yield him that field.”
But that is all we should yield. I quoted it all as it may help those themselves under the yoke of populist cults today.
Toward siege and mayhem….in crude physical conflict as well as in skewed spiritual or mental sides of good versus wrong, and the beliefs each side uses to underpin whichever side they believe they are on.
No subtlety has been maintained here. A word with a silent B. The story itself has been adulterated by the eponymous character it has created and used as its title. Wilson, meanwhile, as another Oleron infected by the fiction as a mire or mirage that created him as much as it created his dire opponent, an opponent who fights alongside the author as the fiction’s omniscient ‘god’, just to trap Wilson in it?
My subtleties as reader against a fiction’s apparent blatancy. Only by reading it piecemeal can you change the bits not yet read?
VII
Shall we blame this publication for bringing Gambier alive after his many years of lurking somewhere else? Or shall we simply pray for its narrator, and hope for the best?
“Maybe they expected our excommunication to be followed immediately by something dire and unknown;…”
Perhaps ‘excommunication’ is the key word of this astounding, outstanding novellette, with ‘gibberish’ and words ‘unblessed’ that even OUTDO John Cowper Powys! The final scenes of the Mass at the chapel with the Squint where the narrator had originally played a prank with its bell, are not not ex- but literally transcending communication itself? And the eventual issuing of a prayer — between the rational doctor and the (place your own adjective of choice here) priest, as two apparent dire foes on the point, I infer, of the death of one of them — has convulsed and blind-sided me. This work needs investigation or triangulation by as many others as possible interested in such literature, literature that is also beyond labels such as ‘folk-horror’. Onions deserves to be well-known for this work alone or, at least, as well as for some of his more ‘famous’ strange stories we have long loved.
“I felt a low savage pleasure in the thought that Gambier should do this thing, should do it at the bidding of this gross ignorant folk”
end