Book review: The Night Land
THE NIGHT LAND
By William Hope Hodgson
An eerie classic of dark science fantasy
Mr. Hodgson’s THE NIGHT LANDS concerns the last remnant of mankind, alive on a darkened and terror-haunted Earth after the extinction of the sun. At the bottom of the trench of a dead sea, still kept warm by dying embers of geothermal heat, powered by the mysterious ‘Earth Current’ rises the Last Redoubt, a massive pyramid a mile or more in height, the fortress in which the final descendants of mankind survive. Around the Last Redoubt lurk massive and sinister beings, perhaps brought to Earth long ago by the unwise curiosity of man: but whether they are demons, or aliens, or extradimensional manifestations is unknown. The Northwest Watching Thing rises like a mountain near the redoubt, but history reports it has not moved in centuries. About its feet glide the Silent Ones, dimly seen by the light of the Giant’s kilns, and in certain pits beyond the Silent House the shadows of the Great Gray Man are sometimes seen. In the Last Redoubt is born a hero who has the gift of the Night-hearing, a type of telepathy. Dimly, he hears in his mind the voice of a human woman, and finds that there is another Redoubt somewhere lost in the darkness of the Night Lands, and he recognises her as his one true love from a previous cycle of incarnations. This Lesser Redoubt is besieged and dying. Alone, dressed in his armor and bearing his disk-shaped war-ax made of living metal, the champion goes for to find his love, despite all the unnamed terrors and mysteries of the Night Land.
The language in Mr. Hodgson’s work if formal and archaic, hence will be found difficult or boring for some readers. There characters are mere viewpoints, without any personality whatever. The plot is so simple as to be nonexistent: the hero voyages across the eerie landscape, avoiding monstrous beings and hulking troglodytes, finds the girl, and returns.
For me the main interest in the book was the depiction, all in hints and adumbration, of the supernatural entities looming, vast and inhuman, throughout the dead and wasted landscape: but since, during the second half of his odyssey, the hero returns by the same route he passed in the first half, no new spectacles are seen. Therefore the second half of this long book I found boring.
Night Lands is memorable, strange, quaint and horrid, and conveys a lingering sense of cosmic inhumanity, but so flawed in its lack of plot and character, its affected prose, that this book may only appeal to devoted aficionados of strange fantasy
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
