A Choice of Weapons by Robert Aickman

 

A CHOICE OF WEAPONS by Robert Aickman

“You must have heard that love doesn’t go by desserts.”

In the context, I assumed it should be ‘deserts’. Well, this desiccated Des at least would prefer the smell of desserts to the later one in this story of “charred bloaters.” Meanwhile, to unpick this astoundingly associative work (free association or determined?), it starts with a posh restaurant where there is  an ante-room with three-legged tables, presumably leaning against walls. And Malcolm, the main protagonist with an overt Macbeth connection, falls in love, by Aickmanly obsession, with a woman he sees in that ante-room who turns out — with the intermediary help of Dr Bermuda’s hypnotic ‘magnetic undermind’  — to be called Dorabelle and living in Arcadia Gardens in a house of sphinxes and a strangely slow servant — but, later, uncharacteristically  quick, too — called Gunter.

 Malcolm falls so deeply in love with Dorabelle that  he ups and leaves his fiancée Ann in the restaurant (who later consequently  commits suicide and becomes an oracle for us all) and follows  Dorabelle in a taxi to where she lives; she is mourning her father, but later deeming Malcolm to be her father’s tutelary reincarnation….

“You know very well you can know.” Please compare the problem solving in ‘Letters to the Postman’. And Dorabelle  embroiders what she considers to be beautiful stuff but which, in truth, contains  ugly tangles:  and she weaves a black veil for her coming marriage to a man she first found in a mirror. It is with this man that Malcolm ends up having a duel, with a choice of weapons. The dreaded tasselled cane, notwithstanding. 

Wine that gives a shell of sobriety. Her tapping heels hard to hear whilst he can hear a darting cat’s ‘furtive footfalls in patchy dimness’. It is Dr Bermuda, though, who fascinates me most. He believes in masticating and biting and fully digesting the woman one loves (please see elsewhere John Magwitch’s theories on the theme of cannibalism in Aickman.) Also, Lewis Carroll’s   micropsia/ macropsia in a room at Arcadia Gardens. And biscuits that are large enough for serving at the Hospice, I guess.  Dessert enough, I say! 

Even banknotes cram and stifle at best. The “vilest anti-climax”, of all…not to speak of the ‘orange-coloured fungus’… all of this story proving  ‘free will is an illusion’ by simply saying it!  Dorabelle’s embroidery thus duly unpicked, if not the whole of this astounding cat’s cradle of a story.

“‘Gunter seems a little under the weather. That cough . . .’
‘I know he’s slow. I’m sorry.’” 

‘The ruined clock lay between them.”

All my reviews of Aickman: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/robert-aickman/