Fludd

"This is the book I wish I had written of all the contemporary novels I’ve read. It’s set in the fifties, in a small, rainy Yorkshire town. The local Catholic church is still very old-fashioned, and the priest receives a letter saying someone’s going to come along and shake you up. So he is expecting someone to come along and guide them into the 20th century, and one dark and stormy night there is a knock on the door, and standing on the doorstep is a priest with a neat little dog collar and his black hair combed very tidily. It soon becomes apparent that this is a form of the devil. It’s absolutely extraordinary because you have, in the slightly suspicious small Yorkshire town, this fantastically seductive and sexy and villainous priest character who sets about causing havoc. But you can’t really loathe and despise him, because you want the havoc to be caused. There’s an amazing scene where he seduces a nun, and he removes one-by-one the pins that hold her wimple to her hair. It inhabits that place we were talking about between the marvellous and the fantastic. It’s in the uncanny. For much of it, you’re never really sure whether you’re seeing this interloper through the eyes of the mistrustful villagers, who would be inclined to see anybody shaking things up as being little devilish, or whether he actually is the actual devil. It does that great Gothic thing of playing with your emotions and sympathies. You should be shocked and appalled, but you really want him to seduce a nun in a bed and breakfast. I think what the Gothic does is provide a space where we are able to explore strangeness and wonder, what the critic Rudolf Otto called the numinous, this feeling that there is something beyond the comprehension of the intellect, something sublime, strange and wonderful. We want to explore it away from the rigours either of organised religion or science. I know why it’s so important for me. I am in a post-religious state, effectively. I had this very rigorously structured religious background. For the first twenty years of my life, I was a Biblical fundamentalist, who had faith, but a faith written out like a manual. It’s very hard to explain to people how you can have a faith that’s not strange, that’s not supernatural. You read the Bible like a manual for operating a piece of machinery. So you believe in the divine being, but strangeness and mystery have been removed from it all because everything’s been explained. I’m now in a state post that, where I don’t have that religious feeling, and I don’t have that religious practice, and yet I still feel that there is something that can’t be accounted for by atoms, and neurons firing in my brain. The Gothic enables me to explore that feeling away from the structure of religion. I think that’s one of the important functions of the Gothic. I have a theory that the Gothic thrives in the immediate aftermath of a trend towards absolute certainty. The first blooming of the Gothic—starting with Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto at the end of the eighteenth century—came in the wake of the Enlightenment . The Enlightenment started to make the strange unstrange, the inexplicable understandable. So there’s a blooming of the Gothic. Then in the nineteenth century, we have Darwin and the Industrial Revolution , and another era of rationality, of people becoming amateur naturalists. In the wake of scientific discovery, the Gothic has another booming with Dracula and The Island of Dr Moreau , and the mid-to-late-Victorian Gothic. Now we have new atheism, this rather strident, insistent, against-strangeness and suddenly the Gothic is appearing again. It’s as though it’s always there at the moment when people are keen to retrieve the strange, the wonderful, the fantastic, and the sublime from an attempt to explain everything away. When I first started studying the Gothic for my PhD in 2009, there wasn’t much in the way of contemporary Gothic fiction being written. I’m seeing more and more of it now, Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney being a superb example. Lucy Wood’s The Weathering is another. I wonder whether it’s always going to be there as a recourse for those who are slightly repulsed by an attempt to explain everything away."