INTO THE WOOD by Robert Aickman

 

I previously reviewed INTO THE WOOD in 2013: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/aickmann/#comment-7243

I review it again today as follows: 

I recall I was earlier more interested in any comparison of the Aickman sanatorium with the sanatoriums in Thomas Mann and John Cowper Powys than with any transcending of Zeno’s Paradox as part of an acceptance of my then less apparent lingering imminence of death. More interested then, indeed, with Margaret ‘eating up her mört’, not as a complex symbol beyond any practical logic of eating fish in a hospice, but more, then,  as a clever play on words for its own sole sake. 

But today is different. 

INTO THE WOOD by Robert Aickman

“As men and women work more and more against nature, nature works more and more against men and women.”

“…with all these trees, it perhaps has no beginning or ending – at least in your sense of the words —“

This is the complex portrait of Margaret, an English woman who one moment glances at the spine of Daudet’s Sappho in the Swedish sanatorium and the next moment wanders into the Swedish wood whereunto the inmates of the rest home or sanatorium, as constantly unsleeping insomniacs, wander at night. Whether ‘vampires’ or ‘trolls.’ These excursions arguably  being various dress rehearsals for breaking the otherwise endless  circles of unsatisfactory life. She is ignited to make her first visit into that wood by following a slim young girl whose breasts are hidden away. Her husband, a JCB digger of a  nature-destroying road-maker business man,  visiting Sweden on that very business,  leaves her at the Swedish sanatorium when going to Stockholm for two nights, and he has already tellingly lost any erotic thoughts about his wife. She resists her final communion with the excursion’s maze of pathways and one wonders if she ever shall. At the end she seems prepared to do so. To find that once insufficient answer, “beyond logic, beyond words, above all beyond connection…” A marvellous work, that also involves the Aickmanly nature of gender interaction and marriage and the masculinity that poisons some of us, whether man or woman, with these following eclectic keynotes in this work of time’s own gluey resistance movement and incursions against excursions: “Don’t leave the road […] You’ll sink above your ankles.” — “People have no time for rest cures today.” — “It was along tracks such as the one below that all creation ran from darkness to darkness…” — “Marriage – anyway the usual kind of marriage – is one of the things that insomnia makes impossible.” — “to live with reality for twenty-four hours out of twenty-four…” — “…going round and round in a hopeless circle, as the lost are well known to do, owing (she had heard) to almost everybody having one leg shorter than the other.” — “…nothing but a perfume that lingers a little, as the dead linger here a little after death…”

Awaiting that ‘jolt’ of a final answer. Be you troll or not.

“The tinkling clock struck four and five and six, and Margaret never slept at all. It also struck a single, delicate not at the intermediate half-hours.”

***

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

EDIT: My final Aickman story review: The Hospice: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/the-hospice/