The Spell of a Summer's Night: 'The Enchanted Village' by Edward Shanks

In searching for forgotten examples of supernatural or fantastic fiction, it is inevitable that some books with promising titles or descriptions will turn out not to belong to the field. However, there are also others where the question remains open. There may be no clear incursion of another reality, yet there is an uncanny atmosphere, or a series of subtle, finely-shaded implications.

Edward Shanks’ The Enchanted Village (1933) is set in a small settlement under the Downs, consisting of one street only, off the main road to London. It is a hot, dry summer with a drought. The village team are playing a team of ‘gentlemen from London’ at cricket. The latter might be a passing nod to the Invalids, the touring team run by J.C. Squire, editor of the London Mercury, where Shanks was a contributor and reviewer.

We are introduced to the city newcomers who have made their homes in the village, modern young men and women with light, fashionable clothes and casual, open-handed ways. Rather too many are paraded at once, three couples, two singles and a few others on the edge of things, but the principal ones are Joe Marriott and his wife Nina, who have converted a former inn into a large house, and Arthur and Ursula (known as Billie) Dodd. Both have friends to dinner, some staying as guests. There is to be an all-night party in a big barn (a post-cricket match tradition), with dancing and fireworks.

One of the guests asks another if he is thinking of moving here too: ‘“You will have to, if you don’t take care, you know. The village throws its spell over everyone who comes into it. I believe that it is an enchanted village’” (pg. 37). This is the first reference to the book’s title and up to now there has been no particular reason to describe it as ‘enchanted’. It is drowsy, usually quiet, it has an inn, a nearby railway station, and, in the big Georgian house, a retired Oxford don who writes popular essays about its local life. The remark might be merely a pleasantry, but we assume it is to have further significance. 

In the next chapter we begin to get some hint of this. Between the grounds of the Marriott and Dodd houses is a piece of ‘no man’s land’ occupied by a gigantic mulberry tree. If the village is enchanted, says Arthur Dodd, ‘that’s where the enchantment comes from. I’ve always felt that there was something queer about that tree. No Man’s Land! Perhaps we’ve given it the right name’ (pg. 49). These reflections are the more notable as until now he has seemed not in the least a reflective individual: practical, commonsensical, easy-going. But the conversation soon veers away, and the scene shifts to the party, now getting under way. Later, the ex- Oxford professor sees an indistinct couple disappearing into the deep shade of the tree and reflects that it has probably been a trysting place for local lovers for generations: it is, he thinks, the village’s ‘tutelary spirit’. He does not realise one of the pair is his own youngest daughter.

The remainder of the novel depicts the nocturnal tensions and excitements of clandestine affairs involving the villagers, the newcomers and their visitors, with several couples finding new partners. Shanks writes vividly of these fervent, furtive passions. By the end of the book there will be dramatic changes in some of their lives. Others will find that the village is not the rural idyll they hoped for, and decide to move back to London. For them, there is disenchantment. 

It is not clear to what extent Shanks intends us to infer that the mulberry tree really does exercise an ancient influence on the amatory activities in the village: this is not spelt out, and may be purely metaphorical, but it is invoked enough for this to be one possible reading. By contrast, throughout almost all of the novel, there has been no mention of the village church, and indeed it does not appear, and then only in passing, until the very end, for the next morning’s Sunday service after the party. It is as if it has no place in the pagan revels of the night, but marks a return to ‘respectability’ when these are over.

Shanks was at first known as a poet in the restrained, rural, Georgian mode, but was also the author of a science fiction novel, The People of the Ruins (1920), and an occult thriller, Old King Cole (1936). I wrote about these in my essay ‘Change Here for the Dark Age’—Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins’ (Sphinxes and Obelisks, 2021).  Here, in discussing The Enchanted Village, I noted: ‘The characters are deftly drawn, and we see them chat [to] and chaff each other in shrewdly-observed, brisk set-pieces. The prose is assured and well-honed.’

But I had been hoping for some more overt use of the supernatural: ‘The title leads us to expect some stranger enchantment, and we do not really get it. The best that can be said is that he succeeds in conjuring a slightly peculiar nocturnal atmosphere, but he refrains from developing this . . .’ Nevertheless, the book is one that draws you back: and in my further reading, as I have indicated above, I do think there is room for an interpretation that sees an ancient, uncanny influence at work.

The author was perhaps most noted at the time for his magnum opus, the 650+ page novel Queer Street (1932), which apparently sold well, and went into Penguin paperback in two volumes. The title refers to a slang term: being in Queer Street means being in trouble of some sort, usually financial. His bohemian characters often lead a hand-to-mouth existence. This work has received little attention for some years: given its scale and ambition, it might be compared to the novels of John Cowper Powys. The Enchanted Village is sometimes described as a sort of sequel, since some of the characters reappear, but to my view it is really quite separate, with its own different, strangely-charged atmosphere.

(Mark Valentine)

The People of the Ruins by Edward Shanks

The Stokes 1920 dust-wrapper

The People of the Ruins is a sort-of scientific romance by Edward Shanks (1892-1953). It was first serialized in Land and Water from 19 October 1919 through 12 February 1920; then published in book form by Collins of London on 23 September 1920.  An American edition followed on 30 September 1920 from Frederick A. Stokes of New York.  

The set-up of the novel is fairly simple. A few years into the future, in 1924, a callow lecturer named Jeremy Tufts witnesses an odd scientific experiment which causes an explosion. When Jeremy reawakens, it is one hundred and fifty years later. Everything about the world has devolved since the Troubles, which were beginning just as Jeremy had been knocked out. Jeremy finds a simpler world, less technology, less science, and with a medieval-like setting. And classes still exist, and Jeremy's knowledge brings him to the aged leader of the London area, called the Speaker, who wants Jeremy to repair ancient war technology like cannons. Jeremy becomes enamored with the Speaker's daughter, so a romance is added into the mix. For most of the book, it feels almost like a "cosy" post-apocalypse. But by the end--presumably the only way the author could think to end the story--Jeremy has come to realize that civilization is completely dead.

The book is clearly a reflection on the Great War, which had ended not long before Shanks started writing his tale. And it warns of the evils of socialism and communism. But it seems a curiously narrow viewpoint. As a novel it is plodding, and only intermittently engaging. It seems to have inspired a variety of reactions, perhaps the most representative being the viewpoint of The Dial, in calling it "pleasant if not nutritious reading" (February 1921). But to me even that might be a bit generous. I'm glad to have read and finished the book, but I don't feel much inspired to pursue the author further. 

The Ghost That I Like Best: Famous Authors on Their Favourite Spooks Pt. 1

In the December 8, 1923 issue of T.P.’s & Cassell’s Weekly, there appeared a symposium of responses to a question along the lines of “What is your favourite ghost?”. Here are some of the responses.  More will appear in a future posting.   

Thomas Burke

Yes, but what sort of ghost? The author’s “ghost”? Ghosts in literature? Ghosts I have met?  I have never yet met a ghost, and don’t want to. With Charles Lamb, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am afraid of them. Of ghosts in literature I prefer those with plenty of clanking chains and grisly robes, ghosts that do squeak and gibber round the ivied walls at midnight. Marley’s ghost and the ghost of Hamlet’s father are most unsatisfactory; they are ghosts with moral purposes. Ghosts in fiction should have no purpose beyond that of hair-raising; and in this matter the best ghost I know is the ghost in G.W.M. Reynolds’s “Bronze Statue,” because I was twelve years old when I read it, and it was the first and only ghost that raised my hair.
 
Vere Hutchinson

You are quite right to think I have a favourite ghost.  I frankly confess the more ghostly the story or legend the happier I am! I think there has never been anything so terrible or realistic as Kipling’s “The End of the Passage.”  I do not remember anything with such horror in it.  To me it is the one great classic of the uncanny. Then there is that mad, jolly yarn of Richard Middleton’s, “The Ghost Ship,” the most crazy, most enchanting fantasy; to be read on a dark night with a wild wind and driving rain. It is absurd, if you like, with its village of nice, properly conducted ghosts, but it seems to me to have a magic of its own, and after you’ve read it, if the real ghostly spirit is upon you, then open your window and you can see “The Ghost Ship” sailing through the air, with her flare of lights and her noise of singing, her great masts raking the stars—I swear you can!
 

Edward Shanks

My favourite ghost is chosen by pure favouritism,  It is not much of a ghost, but it is my own, or, at least, I have a good long lease of it, which is nearly as good.

The house in which I live consists of two old cottages thrown into one. The little room which I use as a study was once, so far as I can judge, the kitchen and sole living-room of the smaller cottage. One day, some fifty years ago, the labourer who lived here, oppressed, I dare say, by the too close presence of his wife and children, hanged himself from a beam in this room. So says village tradition: and there is to this day a large, firm nail in the beam, from which a man might very well hang himself. He might, that is to say, if he were a dwarf or without legs; any other sort of man would find it difficult. And, for reasons which will appear, he cannot have been legless.

This tradition, once heard, vanished from my mind. But after some time it happened that I was working alone past midnight, all the others in the house being long asleep. Not quite alone, for my cat was there—a detestable cat, kept only for mousing, not at all an author’s favourite cat who shares his study and his labours with him. Something, I do not know what, made me look round.

There, directly beneath the suddenly sinister-looking nail, was the cat, walking up and down with all the motions and the pleased expression of a cat which is rubbing itself against someone’s legs. Up and down she went for several minutes, purring softly, while I sat looking over my shoulder, unable to move. Then I went to bed and left her there, and left all the lamps burning and all the doors open behind me.

And yet, strangely, in the morning the pride of possession threw out the horror of the night. It was my ghost, my very own; not a freehold ghost, to be sure, but even a leasehold ghost is more than most people have. He is my favourite ghost, now almost an “affable familiar ghost,” and I look at all others as a man who loves his own mongrel fox terrier looks at the champions assembled at Cruft’s.

 
W. B. Maxwell

My favourite ghost is that of Lord Strafford in the novel “John Inglesant.” “All to nothing,” he seems to me the most appropriate and majestic apparition that has ever been imagined.

As many of your readers will remember, it is two nights after Strafford’s execution (the consummation of King Charles’s betrayal of a loyal servant), and Inglesant, on duty at the palace of Whitehall, sees the dead man pass through the outer rooms and enter the King’s bedchamber,  “He was falling asleep when he was startled by the ringing sound of arms and the challenge of the yeoman of the guard on the landing outside the door. The next instant a voice, calm and haughty, which sent a tremor through every nerve, gave back the word ‘Christ.’ Inglesant started up and grasped the back of his chair in terror. Gracious heaven! Who was this that knew the word? In another moment the hangings across the door were drawn sharply back, and with a quick step, as one who went straight to where he was expected and had a right to be, the intruder entered the antechamber. . . .”

If anything could make me believe in ghosts, it would be Shorthouse’s conception and handling of this dread visit.

 
Algernon Blackwood

My favourite ghost story is what I believe to be also the shortest:

“Do you believe in ghosts?” said Jones.
“No,” said Smith.
“I do,” said Jones—and vanished.

Its authorship I do not know. It may be a chestnut too. Next to this, I place “Turn of the Screw,” by Henry James, for its majestic horror; and “The Monkey’s Paw,” by W.W. Jacobs, for it cumulative horror and its inevitableness.


W. L. George

I am very fond of supernatural stories, and am sure that the best I have ever come across exhibits the intangible couple of ghosts, those of the governess and the valet who float about the lake and establish a connexion of nameless horror and vileness with the two children who occupy the centre of the story called “The Turn of the Screw,” by Henry James.


May Sinclair

If by my “Favourite Ghost” you mean the apparition that has most appealed to me in literature I should vote unhesitatingly for the ghost or ghosts in Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw.”