John Berger writes about receiving his new book from the publisher, and finding it badly produced, burns it. High-minded perhaps — he lived in the Alps — but I understand. An ugly book is sad. I got one in the post the other day: Mehalah Gothic Novel (A Story of the Salt Marshes) by Sabine Baring-Gould. Print on demand. Confect a cover out of online prompts; cram the text into 170 pages, which would be better spread over twice that. There was a time when I read gothic novels for their otherness, their badness, their removal from the here and now. Whatever I read I like it to be for pleasure. I like a book to be a book. This is a tomb.
However, as a child of salt marshes, read it I must. It's a way of visiting my home turf, albeit in 1880. The flatness of the Essex coast has given it in recent times a flatness of character in the popular imagination. Back then there was a rich life with dialect and contraband, as well as some of the detail I remember from my childhood, like shrimps and winkles measured by the half pint in a pewter mug, and smoked eels, but most of all the marshes and their arcane channels and the bottomless mud I feared.
The plot is rich, fecund and ridiculous. The book was a sensation when it came out. Halfway through my reading I realised the author was a man, and a vicar. Which changed everything. Mehalah, most often called Glory, was a strong, capable, beautiful gipsy type, with a failing mother, a beloved George who vanishes, and an evil landlord Elijah who keeps a mad brother locked in the cellar. The twists of plot keep you, reluctantly, reading. Everything ends badly, which is what makes it gothic rather than romantic. Mehalah marries Elijah, not George, burns out his eyes with vitriol, feels guilty and, although George reappears, vows to atone for her sin by staying with Elijah, who padlocks them together in a boat and pulls out the plug.
There is is much about the fires of God, which I guess I noticed after I knew the author was vicar of Mersea Island for ten years. To me this confuses everything, but it adds fire without going so far as the fires of hell imbued into the folk of Ireland.
