“Somewhere or other he’d picked up the word ‘osmosis’, and seemed to have some glimmering of its meaning. He dropped the molecules, and began to ask me about osmosis.”
I look at words with a sense of pareidolia, like the Vs and As in the wallpaper where the narrator stays with Rooum. And as you can see, I, too, had a ‘glimmering of the meaning’ of ‘OsmOsis’ when reviewing yesterday by chance OO’s TRAGIC CASEMENTS (HERE) and, synchronously also in that review, about a filter working both ways! A rum do of a review, with OO’s liquid through immurements, solids through solids, faces through casement panes, ROOUM a perfect name for the man whatever his sleight or slur of Aickman’s later gluey Zeno’s Paradox-type races, as well as the race in the face of Rooum from cloudy, greeny white to black and back again — re that filter, again…
“‘It means, doesn’t it,’ he demanded, ‘that liquids will work their way into one another – through a bladder or something? Say a thick fluid and a thin: you’ll find some of the thick in the thin, and the thin in the thick?’”
“‘What do you want to know that for?’ I said. ‘What does a chap like you, who can do it all backwards, want with molecules?’”
“…the engineers who are the architects nowadays. The chaps who think they’re the architects are only a sort of paperhangers, who hang brick and terra-cotta on our work…”
For engineers there please read leasehold readers and reviewers, for architects please read the freehold authors themselves? —
This story fills me with sublime awe again, after all the years from when I first read it. It is the essence of what I am seeking in stories. It is the rummest do of all. Rooum who is an instinctive man, and he has a gift for the art of materials-handling, especially in jobs of labouring, the skill of water-finding or what I call divining, dowsing, dreamcatching, yes, hawling! — Rooum, with a fear of echoes, and of someone running after him, and that someone then passing by him to go ahead, perhaps by passing through him rather than by-passing him, all this leading to a classic Hitchcockian climax where a crane races along girders in a cinematic set piece you will surely not forget. Till we reach the elbow trigger that clinches Rooum’s fate… “He threw up one elbow, and staggered to his feet as I made another clutch at him.” I think it would be, of course.
“We were walking in the direction of Lewisham (I think it would be),…”
***
My similar Horror reviews: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/separate-horror-stories-from-many-years-ago/
My recent detailed reviews of Oliver Onions, The Beckoning Fair One: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/28/the-3rd-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories-edited-by-robert-aickman/ and GAMBIER: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/06/11/gambier-by-oliver-onions/ and TRAGIC CASEMENTS: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/08/17/tragic-casements-by-oliver-onions/
PS And THE ASCENDING DREAM in the comment stream below!
Pingback: THE ROPE IN THE RAFTERS (1935) by Oliver Onions | The Gestalt Real-Time Reviews of Books Edit
THE ASCENDING DREAM by Oliver Onions
“A dream is but a dream.”
Three chapters as a sort of progression of reincarnation, from a young man in mythic days of surf, white boulders and magic and climbing a cliff, a girl with small children frolicking naked, and a man dreaming, soon to be the recurring eponymous dream over two further eras, the next one of suitors for a fair hand, the final being of aeroplanes and jazz and further derring-do to attract the ladies…
Most of this increasingly and ironically descends into a clutter of clotted incomprehensibilities as well as into the general slide that it is now obvious humanity has always been descending along not ascending at all, and even reincarnation itself forced to end when there is nowhere else to aspirationally climb to or, rather, to reluctantly descend to as is humanity’s wont, and the bit that will stay with me was towards the start: “…he stood on the ledge where they had seen the half-swallowed fish carry the bird back again into the water.”