Book 59: "The Night Land" by William Hope Hodgson
Monday, August 10th, 2009 12:10![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeAnd thus, in a while were they watched by all the mighty multitudes of the Great Pyramid, through millions of spy-glasses; for each human had a spying-glass, as may be thought; and some were an hundred years old, and some, maybe ten thousand, and handed down through many generations; and some but newly made, and very strange. But all those people had some instrument by which they might spy out upon the wonder of the Night Land; for so had it been ever through all the eternity of darkness, and a great diversion and wonder of life was it to behold the monsters about their work; and to know that they plotted always to our destruction; yet were ever foiled.
The first three stories in my Fantasy Masterworks copy of "The House in the Borderland and Other Novels" are really novellas, being barely 100 pages long, but this final tale is much longer. Unfortunately the reason that "The Night Land" is so much longer is due to the unnecessarily convoluted olde worlde language, which makes it a slow and tortuous read, or rather "that which does thus render it both slow and tortuous to read thereof". Since this book was written by an Edwardian man, I might have expected that sexism would still be going strong at the end of the world, but the way the protagonist describes Mine Own (who apparently is demure and loving but also impertinent, perverse and in need of a good whipping) is still exceedingly annoying
However the Night Land itself and the long journey of the protagonist through the landscape are mesmerising (while being tediously repetitive in parts) and even though it took about 10 times as long to read as a normal book of that length, I was never tempted to give up. The last remaining human beings on the dying earth live in impregnable pyramids in a hostile landscape, and are menaced by ab-humans and monstrous beings when they venture outside, and I just had to know whether the hero would manage to rescue the woman he loved and her companions from the Lesser Refuge and bring them back to the Great Redoubt.
And this thing did strike me very solemn, as I did lie; and I do trust that you conceive how that there was, in truth, afar above in the eternal and unknown night, the stupendous desolation of the dead world, and the eternal snow and starless dark. And, as I do think, a cold so bitter that it held death to all living that should come anigh to it. Yet, bethink you, if one had lived in that far height of the dead world, and come upon the edge of that mighty valley in which all life that was left of earth, did abide, they should have been like to look downward vaguely into so monstrous a deep that they had seen naught, mayhaps, save a dull and utter strange glowing far downward in the great night, in this place and in that.
The first three stories in my Fantasy Masterworks copy of "The House in the Borderland and Other Novels" are really novellas, being barely 100 pages long, but this final tale is much longer. Unfortunately the reason that "The Night Land" is so much longer is due to the unnecessarily convoluted olde worlde language, which makes it a slow and tortuous read, or rather "that which does thus render it both slow and tortuous to read thereof". Since this book was written by an Edwardian man, I might have expected that sexism would still be going strong at the end of the world, but the way the protagonist describes Mine Own (who apparently is demure and loving but also impertinent, perverse and in need of a good whipping) is still exceedingly annoying
However the Night Land itself and the long journey of the protagonist through the landscape are mesmerising (while being tediously repetitive in parts) and even though it took about 10 times as long to read as a normal book of that length, I was never tempted to give up. The last remaining human beings on the dying earth live in impregnable pyramids in a hostile landscape, and are menaced by ab-humans and monstrous beings when they venture outside, and I just had to know whether the hero would manage to rescue the woman he loved and her companions from the Lesser Refuge and bring them back to the Great Redoubt.
And this thing did strike me very solemn, as I did lie; and I do trust that you conceive how that there was, in truth, afar above in the eternal and unknown night, the stupendous desolation of the dead world, and the eternal snow and starless dark. And, as I do think, a cold so bitter that it held death to all living that should come anigh to it. Yet, bethink you, if one had lived in that far height of the dead world, and come upon the edge of that mighty valley in which all life that was left of earth, did abide, they should have been like to look downward vaguely into so monstrous a deep that they had seen naught, mayhaps, save a dull and utter strange glowing far downward in the great night, in this place and in that.
