Alex Sarll's Reviews > Necromancer

Scanning my shelves for a suitably spooky Hallowe'en week read, I spotted this, which I bought nearly 30 years ago and of which I never read more than a few pages – so there's hope yet for every long-suffering inmate of our To Read piles. Given how much I loved some of Holdstock's other books, especially Lavondyss, and even persevered through a couple of the wobblier ones, I honestly can't recall whether I abandoned this because it was boring me, because it shat the younger me up too much, or simply because I got distracted. Though with the intervening decades a new and greater problem has arisen. To wit, as the story of a small Berkshire town menaced by a cursed font, this is in places one of the most Garth Marenghi books I have ever read, and I was thinking that even before the hero turned up – maverick historian Dr Liam Kline, a man people can't help liking despite his abrasive side. Irresistibly attractive to traumatised women he's upset not five minutes prior, and prone to coming out with lines like "That's why I came back. I said that already. I just don't promise that I'll be able to do anything. Why should I? I'm just a crazy historian who wandered in by chance." And if you think that's a bit old-fashioned, well, just wait until you get to the crux of the plot. The first traumatised woman who's irresistibly compelled to make out with Dagless, sorry, Kline, is June Hunter. Years before, when her son Adrian was being baptised in St Mary's church, the vicar dropped him, he banged his head on the font, and he's never been right since. Edward, the dad, is always looking on the bright side, convinced Adrian will start speaking and moving any day now. June, on the other hand, thinks the font is a demon rock which has trapped his soul. From a modern perspective, there are a few obvious issues with this, and it's by no means the only thing in the book which reads as deeply problematic now. But even upon first publication in 1978, with an acknowledged debt to the then comparatively recent Stone Tape, it must surely have verged on the silly. It doesn't help that while Stephen King (still a big new thing at that point, I suppose) makes this kind of modern small-town horror look easy, settling us within the issues of a recognisable family before gradually amping up the strange events encircling them, the young-ish Holdstock lacks anything like the same fluency in that mode; with their qualms, circular rows and leaps of logic, the Hunters and associates can often come across as at best the duller cousins of Iris Murdoch characters, and at worst refugees from some entirely forgettable litfic. And as for the undigested research delivered as exposition...

Set against which, at its best it can be very creepy. Yes, it may have helped that I've been able to read decent chunks of it in churchyards and churches, one of them also half-destroyed by fire, but for all the sentences which don't hold together, the awkward scenes and leaden lines, there's still that ability to write powerfully about the land and the wild places, the stones and deep time, which made Holdstock's Mythago stories so compelling, that knack of conjuring up ancient ceremonies which seem both horrifyingly barbarous and entirely understandable, even seductive. Which can sometimes verge on Men Writing Women territory, it's true, but anyone who remembers what 'touching Earth' meant in Moorcock's other works will know he can write just as weirdly about the male body. Similarly, it gradually becomes clear that the story has a lot less sympathy for Kline than those Darkplace echoes had initially made me assume. The central idea, of a megalith which has been carved into a font, and a corrupted power within it, is a compelling riff on the Christian repurposing of old sacred sites. Kline's notions of approaching research into standing stones scientifically, finding out whether eg another stone would have the same effect in the same spot, prefigures that fascinating though shocking idea the KLF had of giving Stonehenge a tune-up. There's something strong here, buried under a load of excrescences, and I suppose in a sense that's apt. Given enough of a free rein, someone could make an excellent film which would still be recognisable as Necromancer, only good. Or could have in the eighties, at any rate - I'm not sure the treatment of disability would be salvageable now. As a book, I don't think I'd recommend it. But I'm glad all the same that I've finally read it.