The village of Brampton Bryan, Herefordshire, consists of a small cluster of houses on the road between Ludlow and Knighton, in the Marcher Country between England and Wales. Four miles to the west is the early medieval border earthwork of Offa’s Dyke. Above the village a wooded, domed hill rises, very much like those in Arthur Machen’s fiction. It has always looked to me somewhat otherworldly. I expect to see smoke rising from a temple hidden in its evergreen grove.
The church here is notable for a particularly serpentine yew hedge which undulates around the curtilage. It looks like a dragon merely resting here for the time being who might at any moment decide to rise and up and ravage the countryside. Opposite the church is the turn to Aardvark Books, where you find yourself in a farmyard. One barn houses cattle, the other books. Inside the latter is a large space on two floors, warmed in winter by a wood-stove.
The bookshop has a café offering coffee and tea, soup, croques monsieur and cakes. I have spent many contented moments here browsing or imbibing, and have had some unexpected finds: a half-row of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels, for example, some self-published poems by a café bohemian in Paris, two classic volumes of ghost stories in a box on a trestle table.
On a recent visit, in the company of John Howard, I found under Theology the alluring title Candlelight in Avalon (1954). This suggested an Arthurian and Glastonbury theme. Indeed, I have myself written a story, ‘Candle Land’, (The Fig Garden, 2022) which evokes the significance of the candles in the Grail procession in the medieval Arthurian romances. Had this earlier writer, I wondered, noticed this too: was the book about some similar mystical experience?
But Candlelight in Avalon proved to be quite
different to my expectations. It is the journal of a worn-out soul who has left
London to find solace and tranquillity. ‘Avalon’ is not the mystic Arthurian
realm, but the name of a house about an hour north from London lent to the protagonist
by a friend. Houses are called ‘Avalon’, of course, just as some are called
‘Shangri La’ (and one I saw was rather marvellously called ‘Coromandel’). No
doubt we are meant to see a symbolic link with the sanctuary where Arthur was
taken to be cured of his wounds. But the title rather promises a larger
legendary resonance than the book in fact pursues.
Though it is presented ambiguously, which was presumably why it had been shelved as non-fiction, it is in fact a novel. I should have been alert to that, for the author is the prolific Scottish writer Augustus Muir, most known for the entertaining The Intimate Thoughts of John Baxter, Bookseller (1942), which was at first taken to be a genuine memoir, but is in fact a drily humorous fiction.
Candlelight is an odd book. The narrator is a valetudinarian solicitor, and, on the face of it, a diary whose narrator is mostly interested in the state of his nerves and then extends this to the state of his soul, is not particularly beguiling. It is true that at times, in his spiritual seeking, the lead character gets close to evoking elusive mystical experiences, but these are never quite evocative enough, as they would be, say, in a Machen or de la Mare story. Muir relieves his protagonist’s self-examination by introducing several unusual supporting characters with whom his narrator comes into contact. Yet these also are afflicted in various ways: you wouldn’t mistake any of them for characters from Rose Fyelman’s and Millicent Sowerby’s The Sunny Book (1918).
One, the local schoolmistress, has a tragic past: another, a bohemian pianist who lives in a remote cottage in the woods, has consumption. It is as if the author is trying to depict as much melancholy as he possibly can. These characters do engage our interest, but I found the narrator an unsympathetic figure and the theme a bit too earnest. I would rather have heard much more about these other characters, particularly the bitter pianist. The ending, intended to be both poignant and uplifting, is rather too conventional. It is a book that might just have worked if it had ventured further into stranger terrain or had a bolder conclusion. Nevertheless, it does have a certain morbid, haunting quality.
Later in the week, at the Welsh Bridge Bookshop in Shrewsbury, with its array of rooms and staircases at all angles, I found a copy of another book by Muir, from thirty years previously, which is in complete contrast. It is a Buchanesque thriller, The Third Warning (1925), which celebrates its centenary this month. The yarn starts in the good old style with a chap in London visiting his solicitor to ask for an advance on his funds, only to discover he has unexpectedly inherited a sinister country house in the Lammermuir Hills, in the Scottish Border Country, together with the title of Laird. It's the sort of thing that could happen to anybody.
In no time at all, he and a staunch chum are motoring North to inspect the demesne. I must admit to a fondness for this sort of beginning, and when a chapter soon follows entitled ‘The Light in the Library’, I am further beguiled. Our hero’s inheritance of the estate has not gladdened the hearts of certain rivals, and so when uncanny happenings begin there are several suspects to hand among his neighbours.
The book turns out to be a fairly standard espionage story, but colourful enough and with suitable twists and turns, light gusty reading. But what a complete contrast to the later book. Evidently Muir was a versatile writer, or perhaps he simply enjoyed exploring different terrain. Even though I found Candlelight in Avalon did not really live up to its evocative title, it did have an atmosphere of melancholy that tends to linger with the reader. In any case, Muir may be worth looking out for: The Third Warning is a perfectly sound Buchan pastiche, and The Intimate Thoughts of John Baxter, Bookseller will delight those who enjoy wry tales about bookshops.
(Mark Valentine)
