Part of my tour of Aickman: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/robert-aickman/
The Fully-Conducted Tour
My previous review over six years ago:
THE FULLY-CONDUCTED TOUR by Robert Aickman
“…it is no good looking for something strange. It only happens when you’re notlooking.”
An engaging, very English, true-seeming account of touring Italy by the narrator accompanied by his debilitated wife. A man with an eye for the ladies, it seems. Leaving his wife with Jane Austen back at their small hotel, he goes off alone on a coach tour to a Gothic style villa, where something quite simple happens to the rest of the coach party, something absurd, but effective. He escapes by the skin of his eyes, as it were, without much Persuasion.
“…how much time I managed to while away just sitting outside a cafe and watching the different women and girls pass by, all walking so differently from the way they walk in England.”
Something to do with their shoes?
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A masculinity subsumed, the beauty of a woman making him forget his sick wife reading Emma back at the hotel…
I quote today this passage at the point of subsumption, for now you have read all his stories, and can make of it what you will… glad he escaped to write more cathartic stories?
“I continued to sit, more and more uncomfortable no doubt, but hardly noticing it; and nothing more of any kind happened. Nothing at all. / In the end, I realised, simply by lifting my arm and looking at my watch, that I had sat there alone, in front of the doors and the scattered footwear, for more than three hours.”
Footwear makes walking through time’s glue easier or more difficult, slower or quicker?
Aickman does not fully conduct us through his stories, but more provocatively only halfway towards their meaning, and we take ourselves halfway again…each of us with our own share of that half, and of half of that half….
The Flying Anglo-Dutchman
3.Oct.21
My previous review over six years ago…
THE FLYING ANGLO-DUTCHMAN by Robert Aickman
“You know how it is. One’s womenfolk simply collapse by the wayside at four o’clock and you have to carry them home, if they can’t get their hands on and noses in a teapot.”
Once that particular paragraph is redacted, this story is unsullied joy as a piece of Aickmania. Seriously odd. But with a meaningful resonance that remembered dreams somehow have. Steeped in 1940s Britain, with evacuees, some derelict fairground amusements that were cheap and nasty at the best of times, a large Lyons Corner House for afternoon tea in the middle of nowhere reputed as serving refreshments to the many workers from the nearby canal. But what canal? A canal that seems to have long been unuseable, with a wrecked narrowboat across it that shares the name of the lady running the Lyons. With the valued first publication of this missing mini-masterpiece, I wonder if the train, too, has now not been missed!
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Not much today to add to that, other than drawing attention to the “naughty nineties” and the provision of ’Meat Teas’.
The Coffin House
3.Oct.21
I reviewed this story over six years ago…
THE COFFIN HOUSE by Robert Aickman
“Even the sugar basin contained only a discoloured slime.”
Now this is embryo Aickman as the quintessential ‘Strange Story’ writer, with, for me, foreshadowing ingredients of ‘The Trains’. Two land girls lost and finding themselves in a forbidding abode, sudden change of costume…
Actually, it is rather effective and if I’d read it in ‘Aickman’s Heirs’ (an anthology I happen to be simultaneously real-time reviewing HERE alongside this review), I would have called it an excellent Aickman pastiche!
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Today, it becomes even more insidious, as the two land girls seeking shelter in this woman’s house discover she is an evil policewoman (are there such?) with a whistle, and later she is dressed as a nurse with an empty syringe, with in between these events a man with a ‘coffin knife’ prepared to prepare them, but for what? — perhaps to flay and flense them, not just for the coffins straightaway, but for whatever hunger was borne for them…
A Disciple of Plato
3.Oct.21
A DISCIPLE OF PLATO by Robert Aickman
My previous review over six years ago…
“After sixty five, one remembers one’s eyes. Perhaps it was the gloom which had led the philosopher to omit the incident…”
For his posterity, his legacy? I am over 65 myself. I think it is fair to say that, so far, anyone solely after a new ‘Ringing the Changes’ or ‘Meeting Mr Millar’ will be disappointed by this book. However, it may be good if you are after the Aickman who immersed himself, I am imagining, in Thomas Mann or Henry James, and developing his puckish, sometimes surreal, humour (here ‘Santa Tomasina of the Sour Stomach’, ‘Santa Monica Long-in-the-Tooth’, ‘clodhopping brother’, ‘English breakfast,’ in Rome, ‘of bullock and pig’) and a sexual innuendo and wise asides to the reader about having doubts as to intentions. This meeting in an atmospherically described Rome of this character and a beautiful English woman on his intellectual level is couched in a prose as if Aickman is imitating, say, Henry James to a fustian nth degree, but it works, somehow, and the retrocausal nature of the revelation at the end is a masterstroke.
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SPOILER, today
This Disciple turns out to be Casanova, as his wooing the Englishwoman is as much for her philosophical mind, a mind he had never met in a woman before, as part of the menu with the ’subtle mental stimulus of sex.’. The perfect gestalt. Make of that as you will, and that it took an Aickman to tell of it, not Casanova himself. I liked again the Aickman eating images too — the Sour Stomach Convent and Santa Monica Long Tooth. And the woman’s breakfast of pork and bullock. Especially now after having since learnt a lot more of this Aickman syndrome!
And this sentence means much more to me today than six years ago, I guess… ”When there are fogs and movement is difficult, continuous night alone preserves the will to live, for the inconveniences of life are lost in dreams.”
The Whistler
3.10.21
My previous review over six years ago…
THE WHISTLER by Robert Aickman
“The sort of unpleasantness that most pleased Cave Bird was physical cruelty.”
Sometimes you touch things via Aickman fiction that you wouldn’t consider touching directly. This is a case in point, although some of the things this ‘fat’, ‘fly-blown’ man called Cave Bird touched are not necessarily bad, like quoting Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, or making references to Tale of Two Cities or to Mercutio in Romeo & Juliet, or to the raising of a flag. His nephew’s whistling was quite another thing, I guess.
“Cave Bird had had enough of boys at the moment…”
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Today, I wonder what Cave Bird intends to do with the dead body upstairs? Was it his pesky whistling nephew still whistling? A fat man needs food…
Time will tell, as he quotes Wilde’s READING Gaol:
“Fingering a watch whose little ticks / Are like horrible hammer-blows.”
The Case of Wallingford’s Tiger
3.Oct.21
My previous review over six years ago…
Until today, I didn’t know that my favourite authors (Robert Aickman and Elizabeth Bowen) had both written a story about a wild tiger and the middle-class machinations of gentle mischief it causes in the old-fashioned English community of the delightful Just William or Jane Turpin stories of yore.
This is Aickman’s…
THE CASE OF WALLINGFORD’S TIGER by Robert Aickman
“…leaving the search after Wallingford and his tiger to the brand new police box recently set up alongside the best esteemed of Upperwood’s public houses.”
Here a tiger is brought back to the rural town of Upperwood it seems by monied Wallingford thus creating romantic ambitions or underhand plots to disable the man’s smugness involving the RSPCA etc… Till the tiger is found dead and smelling…. With a crime suspected involving racial or perhaps liver-spotted (-striped?) repercussions? (Time for an early appearance of Dr Who to solve it?)
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I have just read it again and in tune with the Insufficient Answer’s 42, this has the Whovian time paradoxes that I have since found within the Aickman fiction canon, as well as now perception of dubious man-eating by a man as well as by a tiger — obliquely, at least, part of the cannibalistic themes in that canon. Also the village’s attitude, even taking a fiancée from a fiancé, Aickman style, and perhaps the inhabitants of the village and their attitude to Wallingford puckishly parallel some readers’ attitude to Aickman himself and his work
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