Witching Hill by E. W. Hornung
Aug. 14th, 2021 05:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeWell, talk about saving the best till last :D
The structure of Witching Hill (1913) is similar to that of the Raffles books: a series of connected short stories, with an over-arching plot running through them. They're narrated in first person by our hero Mr Gillon (I don't think he ever gets a first name), a young Scotsman who's recently left his public school and found a position in the world as a sort of general agent on a new suburban housing estate, Witching Hill. This is a rather unexciting job and, so thinks Gillon, a rather unexciting place to do it in. But then he meets Uvo Delavoye, a slightly enigmatic young man who lives on the estate with his mother and sister after civil service work in Egypt ruined his health. Uvo knows something about the history of Witching Hill; his family are distantly related to the aristocratic line who used to own the land when it was a grand country estate, and from him Gillon learns about the depraved tyrant Lord Mulcaster who owned the estate in the eighteenth century. Uvo finds a mysterious hole in the back garden of his family's house and enlists Gillon's help to investigate it; and from this, and other strange happenings around Witching Hill, it soon begins to look as though the eighteenth century is not quite done with this impeccably modern place...
I think this is the first time E. W. Hornung has written anything actually supernatural, and as a supernatural mystery it's very good. The situation, as is made apparent within the first few stories, is this: Lord Mulcaster's spirit haunts Witching Hill, compelling its modern inhabitants to repeat events from his own life and times, influencing their thoughts, feelings and actions and twisting them towards evil. Uvo and Gillon (whom Uvo by now calls Gilly) disagree, with Uvo accepting a literal supernatural explanation for the haunting while Gilly dismisses the strange events as either coincidence or the result of more mundane forms of influence on people who know Lord Mulcaster's history. Meanwhile, new and different sorts of strange and disturbing things keep happening. It's all really good fun to read, and Hornung makes the most of the contrast between the supernatural and the mundane, and between the larger-than-life eighteenth-century past and the very humdrum 1890s present. Witching Hill is the sort of suburb that was growing at pace in the late nineteenth century, inhabited by conventional middle-class City office workers and their families; Hornung describes this setting with his usual attention to pinpoint detail and perfect colour—commuter trains and top hats, pretentious house names (Uvo's house is unusual among its neighbours for being simply Number 7) and a respectable disdain for anything 'peculiar'—and contrasts it brilliantly with the vaguely-described, outlandish depravities of the past which keep intruding themselves. (They get a bit over-the-top at times, but perhaps that was deliberate—the comic yet disturbing contrast is the point).
The structure of related short stories, as is familiar from the Raffles books, is a good one for developing characters, which Hornung does here very well too. At the beginning of the book Gillon and Uvo are both, in their different ways, feeling stifled by the atmosphere of Witching Hill and both, in their different ways, become absorbed in its mysteries—and they find a much better thing in their friendship with each other, too. Uvo in particular is an interesting character; from the difficult backstory hinted at in his first appearance, he has hidden depths, and—under the influence of the haunting past—it eventually becomes clear just how deep they go. This subtlety of character underneath a relatively straightforward story reminded me of the Raffles books—Uvo and Raffles are not really alike as characters, but there are definitely common elements in how they come across to the reader, and some common traits as well.
As well as this there are quite a few incidental details familiar from the Raffles stories! The wider setting, in the western suburbs of London along the Thames, is an area Hornung knew well, having lived in Teddington for some years; it turns up in the Raffles stories set at Ham Common, and several of the same places are described again here—Richmond, Bushey Park, Hampton Court, the dark mists and clear winter days in the parks and on the river. (It's a lovely setting, and not a million miles from where I live—once travel is feasible again I think I'm going to go over there for a little Hornung-fandom fact-finding mission). One of the stories features a burglary which—at least at first glance—might almost have been a stealth cameo by Raffles and Bunny from 'The Wrong House'. And, like the Raffles stories, these are recent-historical, set in a past that's both definitely modern and long enough ago to have been a different time; the Boer War, which closed the period, appears again at the end, though in much less dramatic detail than in 'The Knees of the Gods'.
Hornung's literary and poetic references are as good as ever—he jokes at one point about how Uvo keeps making literary quotations that Gilly doesn't get. Kipling, Shakespeare and others make appearances, and there's one bit of quotation which I, with half a mind still on the Raffles stories, found very interesting indeed. The third story, 'A Vicious Circle', is about a very conventional young man who, under the influence of Lord Mulcaster, falls out of love with his fiancée and becomes convinced that if he goes ahead with the marriage something about it will be terribly wrong and he will somehow hurt her. He's come across some lines from a poem which he thinks sum it up perfectly—they're about a man who murdered his wife! And he quotes:
Unusually for Hornung, there's no central m/f romance in this book; but in the final story, after Uvo and Gilly have been parted for some time by the war, Gilly returns to find Uvo caught up in a mildly scandalous romance with a married woman. Uvo believes that the evil spirit of the place has haunted him into this ill-starred love; and—so it's implied, though the actual reality of the supernatural remains uncertain right up to the end—he finally puts an end to the malicious influence of the ghost by choosing to break things off with the married woman and... run off to Scotland to live happily ever after with Gilly instead.
That's literally the happy ending! I love it :D
So, all in all, I enjoyed this one very much indeed. I recommend it to all Hornung fans and to everyone else as well! And I'm very sad that there are only three more books to go in the Hornung read-through—but after the last few I'm sure they'll be good ones.
One last thing—unusually for a non-Raffles Hornung book, Witching Hill is actually popular enough to have some fic on AO3. And, once you've read the book, I highly recommend this fic, which is just the perfect epilogue for Uvo and Gilly.
The structure of Witching Hill (1913) is similar to that of the Raffles books: a series of connected short stories, with an over-arching plot running through them. They're narrated in first person by our hero Mr Gillon (I don't think he ever gets a first name), a young Scotsman who's recently left his public school and found a position in the world as a sort of general agent on a new suburban housing estate, Witching Hill. This is a rather unexciting job and, so thinks Gillon, a rather unexciting place to do it in. But then he meets Uvo Delavoye, a slightly enigmatic young man who lives on the estate with his mother and sister after civil service work in Egypt ruined his health. Uvo knows something about the history of Witching Hill; his family are distantly related to the aristocratic line who used to own the land when it was a grand country estate, and from him Gillon learns about the depraved tyrant Lord Mulcaster who owned the estate in the eighteenth century. Uvo finds a mysterious hole in the back garden of his family's house and enlists Gillon's help to investigate it; and from this, and other strange happenings around Witching Hill, it soon begins to look as though the eighteenth century is not quite done with this impeccably modern place...
I think this is the first time E. W. Hornung has written anything actually supernatural, and as a supernatural mystery it's very good. The situation, as is made apparent within the first few stories, is this: Lord Mulcaster's spirit haunts Witching Hill, compelling its modern inhabitants to repeat events from his own life and times, influencing their thoughts, feelings and actions and twisting them towards evil. Uvo and Gillon (whom Uvo by now calls Gilly) disagree, with Uvo accepting a literal supernatural explanation for the haunting while Gilly dismisses the strange events as either coincidence or the result of more mundane forms of influence on people who know Lord Mulcaster's history. Meanwhile, new and different sorts of strange and disturbing things keep happening. It's all really good fun to read, and Hornung makes the most of the contrast between the supernatural and the mundane, and between the larger-than-life eighteenth-century past and the very humdrum 1890s present. Witching Hill is the sort of suburb that was growing at pace in the late nineteenth century, inhabited by conventional middle-class City office workers and their families; Hornung describes this setting with his usual attention to pinpoint detail and perfect colour—commuter trains and top hats, pretentious house names (Uvo's house is unusual among its neighbours for being simply Number 7) and a respectable disdain for anything 'peculiar'—and contrasts it brilliantly with the vaguely-described, outlandish depravities of the past which keep intruding themselves. (They get a bit over-the-top at times, but perhaps that was deliberate—the comic yet disturbing contrast is the point).
The structure of related short stories, as is familiar from the Raffles books, is a good one for developing characters, which Hornung does here very well too. At the beginning of the book Gillon and Uvo are both, in their different ways, feeling stifled by the atmosphere of Witching Hill and both, in their different ways, become absorbed in its mysteries—and they find a much better thing in their friendship with each other, too. Uvo in particular is an interesting character; from the difficult backstory hinted at in his first appearance, he has hidden depths, and—under the influence of the haunting past—it eventually becomes clear just how deep they go. This subtlety of character underneath a relatively straightforward story reminded me of the Raffles books—Uvo and Raffles are not really alike as characters, but there are definitely common elements in how they come across to the reader, and some common traits as well.
As well as this there are quite a few incidental details familiar from the Raffles stories! The wider setting, in the western suburbs of London along the Thames, is an area Hornung knew well, having lived in Teddington for some years; it turns up in the Raffles stories set at Ham Common, and several of the same places are described again here—Richmond, Bushey Park, Hampton Court, the dark mists and clear winter days in the parks and on the river. (It's a lovely setting, and not a million miles from where I live—once travel is feasible again I think I'm going to go over there for a little Hornung-fandom fact-finding mission). One of the stories features a burglary which—at least at first glance—might almost have been a stealth cameo by Raffles and Bunny from 'The Wrong House'. And, like the Raffles stories, these are recent-historical, set in a past that's both definitely modern and long enough ago to have been a different time; the Boer War, which closed the period, appears again at the end, though in much less dramatic detail than in 'The Knees of the Gods'.
Hornung's literary and poetic references are as good as ever—he jokes at one point about how Uvo keeps making literary quotations that Gilly doesn't get. Kipling, Shakespeare and others make appearances, and there's one bit of quotation which I, with half a mind still on the Raffles stories, found very interesting indeed. The third story, 'A Vicious Circle', is about a very conventional young man who, under the influence of Lord Mulcaster, falls out of love with his fiancée and becomes convinced that if he goes ahead with the marriage something about it will be terribly wrong and he will somehow hurt her. He's come across some lines from a poem which he thinks sum it up perfectly—they're about a man who murdered his wife! And he quotes:
"Yet each man kills the thing he loves,Now, I may be reading too much into this—clearly the obvious point is the comedic contrast created by a very boringly conventional and un-literary character quoting Wilde, and perhaps there wasn't any other—but I did at least feel a little vindicated after all those much more subtle, easy to miss references to him in the Raffles stories.
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!"
Unusually for Hornung, there's no central m/f romance in this book; but in the final story, after Uvo and Gilly have been parted for some time by the war, Gilly returns to find Uvo caught up in a mildly scandalous romance with a married woman. Uvo believes that the evil spirit of the place has haunted him into this ill-starred love; and—so it's implied, though the actual reality of the supernatural remains uncertain right up to the end—he finally puts an end to the malicious influence of the ghost by choosing to break things off with the married woman and... run off to Scotland to live happily ever after with Gilly instead.
That's literally the happy ending! I love it :D
So, all in all, I enjoyed this one very much indeed. I recommend it to all Hornung fans and to everyone else as well! And I'm very sad that there are only three more books to go in the Hornung read-through—but after the last few I'm sure they'll be good ones.
One last thing—unusually for a non-Raffles Hornung book, Witching Hill is actually popular enough to have some fic on AO3. And, once you've read the book, I highly recommend this fic, which is just the perfect epilogue for Uvo and Gilly.
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