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 The Suicide Club and Other Dark Adventures could hardly be improved upon. It is a substantial collection of Robert Louis Stevenson’s short fiction and shows the haunting hold that the strange, weird and macabre had on his imagination. You will find herein many wonderful and exemplary instances of the storyteller’s art, by a writer whose admirers have included Henry James, Borges, Graham Greene, Nabokov, Harry Mathews and many another writer besides.
Reviewed by Paul Kane
The Suicide Club and Other Dark Adventures
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Tartarus Press
Limited edition sewn hardback of 507+xiv pages. £35/$65 inc. p&p. ISBN 1872621902, December 2004
The Suicide Club and Other Dark Adventures collects together in one volume the whole of Robert Louis Stevenson’s short fiction that can be said to be concerned with themes of a fantastic, weird or macabre nature. It includes a wide range of material and, whilst pride of place must go (of course) to the novella “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, many of the lesser-known pieces are of interest too.
The book begins with “The Plague-Cellar”, a piece of juvenilia written when the author was fourteen years old, and then moves on to stories with a Scottish setting and atmosphere. Of these, “The Body Snatcher” and “Markheim” were especially impressive. “The Body Snatcher” for the way in which its protagonist is drawn into evil: from ignorance to a kind of half-knowing, half-suspecting; then on to denial, complicity and, finally, full knowledge. And at each stage he is, he feels, trapped and unable to escape. There’s vivid description here, not only of Edinburgh and the atmosphere of the grave, but also of the main character’s psychological state: his fear, horror and weakness. There’s an art to description - knowing when to pair a noun with an adjective, or verb with an adverb, and knowing when to desist, to allow the readers’ imagination to colour in the blanks – and “The Body Snatcher” is an extremely instructive story in this regard. “Markheim” is an exploration of a murderer’s psychology: a man murders a pawnbroker and encounters a visitor who may be the devil, or another kind of angel. The ambience of this story is reminiscent of Dostoyevsky (Raskolnikov’s crime, Ivan Karamazov’s encounter with the devil) and one wonder’s whether the Russian writer might have read a version of it.
“The Suicide Club” and “The Rajah’s Diamond” stories (taken from New Arabian Nights, 1882) featuring Prince Florizel and his ally Colonel Geraldine appear next. These are fantastic adventures of the kind that we’ve now come to associate with G.K. Chesterton (and even some of the titles of these stories, e.g. “The Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts” are evocative of Chesterton) and have an appealing quality. A small warning, though: they can seem a little verbose to modern ears, if read one after another. Prince Florizel is a wholly good, noble and admirable character and is prone to make elaborately ornate speeches, sprinkled with a liberal amount of rhetorical questions and sometimes ending with “Alas!” Also, unlike (say) Sherlock Holmes, Prince Florizel is a series character without significant flaws and this is not quite to the (post-) modern taste. Read in the right mood, though, these stories possess an undeniable romantic charm.
There follows a couple of stories set in Hawaii and (the great discovery in this volume for me) a selection of the fables that Stevenson wrote throughout his life. The best of these fables (and I’m thinking in particular here of “Song of the Morrow”, “The Touchstone” and “The House of Eld”; the latter, incidentally, is very reminiscent of Thomas Ligotti’s fiction) have a timeless, mysterious quality that is difficult to define. Although the characters are only sparsely sketched (one is called only a “king’s daughter”, yet this is somehow sufficient to visualize her), they pay a cost for their predicament, whether it be a need to experience the world or a fatal curiosity, and this brings them to life. In our lives we too can become caught in the same traps as these people, and become prey to delusions that cost us time and opportunity; perhaps this is why they have a resonance despite being ostensible symbols, types or stand-ins. The fables are fraught with peril and dread and often end in disaster. As for their language, phrases and epithets are repeated (hair like “spun gold”, eyes like “pools in a river”) and act like a refrain. Also, a Scottish diction (e.g. gyve, scrannel, murrain, reck, widdershins, tatterdemalion) is much to the fore here. Another attraction of the fables is Stevenson’s eye for the eerie, telling detail. When, in “The Poor Thing”, a man enters and sits in a boat we are told that “the boat dipped not with the weight of him”. A spectral being, part of the man’s son-to-be, is present too.
So we come at last to the novella, “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. It can be said to be the template for all fantastic tales where the protagonist seeks to reconcile the duality of his nature, or to transform it in some way. Both the high modernism of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf and the pulp populism of Kurt Neumann’s film The Fly are equally indebted to it. Being certainly the most famous of Stevenson’s “dark adventures”, it is also altogether one of his most complex fictions.
This complexity is evident, firstly, in the way the story is told. A fractured, fragmentary narrative is related to the reader, rather than a continuous stream of events. Also, whilst the story is mostly written in the third person (with Utterson as the main point of view) there are two texts within this main text: Lanyon’s narrative and Jekyll’s final confession. Secondly, the story itself is complex and open to many interpretations. This is easy to overlook, as “Jekyll and Hyde”, a familiar phrase in everyday life, is a story that we think we know from e.g. from film and TV adaptations. On the familiar reading, we get a simple opposition or dichotomy: Jekyll is good and Hyde is “pure evil”, a man beyond the pale. Yet Stevenson’s actual treatment of the theme of the duality of human nature, his tale of a man who decides to separate the good and evil within him (and the fatal consequences that follow from this) is by contrast amazingly subtle and interesting.
Of Jekyll one can say that he is by no means as “good” or respectable as he appears to the world. On the contrary, he is absolutely complicit in Hyde's (mis)deeds. In one sense, Hyde is that part of Jekyll’s nature that he represses and denies, and keeps hidden from view, because it would otherwise attract scandal and outrage Victorian proprieties. Jekyll seeks out Hyde, delights in him (in the "current of disordered sensual images running like a mill-race in my fancy", as he puts it at one point), but then is overpowered; and one might say that this “case” is about addiction and the disaster that follows when it takes hold.
Hyde is not wholly separate from Jekyll and nor his he wholly evil. Jekyll says at one point of Hyde that “his love of life is wonderful.” Hyde is described as being “deformed” and small (like a monkey), but also as a young man, much younger than Jekyll; in fact, he is young enough to pass for Jekyll’s son.
There are vivid descriptions of Edinburgh at night: of the moon, the fog that deforms the skyline, and “the great field of lamps in a nocturnal city”. And this is not incidental, for it is the city that makes this story (which is about duplicity, leading a double life) possible. It is true of all great cities that they are one kind of commercial entity by day and another by night. On one reading, the city has become a metaphor for personality. “Jekyll and Hyde” is a personification of how these two cities, the respectable and the clandestine, interact and are related and inter-dependent. Jekyll (as himself and as Hyde) is a member of both.
There is also in this story, I’d argue, a kind of post-Darwinian trauma, an apprehension to do with reconciling Darwin's view of our animal origins with the prevalent Christian view of human nature (The Descent of Man was published in 1871, just sixteen years before Jekyll and Hyde). This is evident from the following passage, in which Jekyll’s predicament is set out. It gives a good sense of the quality of Stevenson’s prose:
He had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him and deposed him out of life.
Hyde is “not only hellish but inorganic”, he represents “the slime of the pit” and in appearance he is “deformed” and apelike. His sin is to be an anachronism.
Mark Valentine has selected the material for this book and also provided an enthusiastic and erudite introduction in which he sets out the background to each story. There’s no doubt completeness here with regard to Stevenson’s macabre fiction, but I’d make the point that there’s no clear demarcation point between it and his other work. Stevenson’s feel for the macabre can manifest itself too in the novels of adventure, or indeed the more overtly literary or realistic works. A modest example follows.
The Master of Ballantrae is a novel of adventure: the action takes place in Scotland, the Caribbean, in India and America; on treks through wasteland and wilderness, and at sea. So it is by no means a macabre work of fiction. It is concerned with the antipathetic relationship between two brothers, James and Henry Durie, and on reading it a few years ago I came across this passage (from chapter 9). Henry’s servant Mackellar is presenting a somewhat hostile description of James:
…and sometimes my gorge rose against him as though he were deformed – and sometimes I would draw away as though from something partly spectral. I had moments when I thought of him as a man of pasteboard – as though, if one should strike smartly through the buckram of his countenance, there would be found a mere vacuity within. This horror (not merely fanciful, I think) vastly increased my detestation of his neighbourhood…
Note first the same sense of antipathy as in the passage quoted from “Jekyll and Hyde”, and indeed the use of the word “deformed”, which suggests a clear kinship between Hyde and James Durie. Also, note Mackellar’s horrific impression of James as someone “spectral”. My point is simply that there are macabre elements present (albeit through simile and metaphor, as here) throughout all of Stevenson’s work.
The Suicide Club and Other Dark Adventures could hardly be improved upon. It is a substantial collection of Robert Louis Stevenson’s short fiction and shows the haunting hold that the strange, weird and macabre had on his imagination. You will find herein many wonderful and exemplary instances of the storyteller’s art, by a writer whose admirers have included Henry James, Borges, Graham Greene, Nabokov, Harry Mathews and many another writer besides.
About the reviewer: Paul Kane lives and works in Manchester, England. He welcomes responses to his reviews and can be contacted at pkane853@yahoo.co.uk
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