Murky Ecstasy
Treatises on Dust by Timothy Jarvis (Swan River Press, 2024)
Reviewed by Geoffrey Reiter
Timothy J. Jarvis is no household name, though he may be most familiar to aficionados of the weird horror genre for his work related to the Welsh author and mystic Arthur Machen (1863-1947). Jarvis was the longtime editor of Faunus, the journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen, and he co-edited The Secret Ceremonies, a collection of Machen-related essays. Beyond these roles, he currently serves as Senior Lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, where he teaches Creative Writing. And notwithstanding his scholarly achievements, Jarvis is an established fiction writer, having already published one novel, The Wanderer (2014).
In his latest book, Treatises on Dust, Jarvis collects stories he has published over the past several years, along with some previously unpublished contributions. His Machen bona fides are immediately evident, proclaimed in the book description, which announces that his fictions “cleave closer to what the literary hermit of Arthur Machen’s Hieroglyphics called ‘ecstasy,’” albeit an ecstasy “grubbed up from the murk of . . . consciousness.”
But readers shouldn’t expect Machen’s typical horrors—murderous fairies or nameless, inchoate abominations—nor Holy Grails and mystical beauties. Jarvis’s style hews closer to Machen’s oft-neglected late work, of which he is an evident admirer. Jarvis’s characters encounter strange, ethereal worlds in the most mundane of environments—beneath “a certain old street lamp” (7) or “under the sickly light of a strange moon” (230)—dingy back alleys or shallow woods littered with beer cans. The departures from the mundane that occur in the pages of Treatises aren’t easily categorized: strange, half-baked memories of indeterminate yet enchanted (or haunted) places that people can’t recall, yet can’t quite forget. This indeterminacy resembles works like Machen’s The Green Round, “The Dover Road,” or “N” more than The Great God Pan or The Secret Glory.
One shouldn’t go in expecting traditionally satisfying closure at the ends of Jarvis’s stories: they are all ambiguous to one degree or another. Some do build to climaxes that follow clearly and organically from the mounting unease of the atmosphere, such as the eerie slow burn of “We Recognise Our Own.” In other cases, it is not readily apparent how, if at all, the various strands may tie together. But again, it is important to note that this is a feature, not a bug, of Jarvis’s writing. In The Green Round, Machen’s narrator notes “the rough, unfinished ends in the tale. . . . That is a loose end, and I must leave it loose” (311). And it seems evident that this is the effect Jarvis is seeking to emulate. Whether this is a flaw in Machen’s last novel may debated, and one may debate the same question regarding Jarvis’s stories. But at least in Jarvis’s case, it is clearly a conscious artistic choice.
Though each tale stands alone, Treatises on Dust is presented as a compilation of mysterious anecdotes. Its frame narrator declares from the outset, “For a while now I’ve been collecting texts that hint at strange tales” (7). In this regard it perhaps resembles the paranormal detective sub-genre, though without the direct commercial appeal of William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin, or even Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence. It may be closer to J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly, in which Martin Hesselius appears only in “Green Tea,” the initial story. But the terrors in Jarvis are even more oblique than any in Le Fanu.
Perhaps this all sounds off-putting, but this should not dissuade anyone from entering Jarvis’s peculiar world. Quite the contrary—his tales and vignettes are entrancing. His opulent evocation of scenes is lavished with a mellifluous diction that is both rich and strange, almost incantatory. Take the opening paragraphs of his story-montage “Three Relics”:
In summer, one of the city’s most pleasant spots is a park on the shores of the Bosphorus. Cedars grow thickly there, and it is cool beneath their shade and in the breeze blowing off the sea. In this park, atop a squat knoll, is an artificial tree of gleaming silver. Flurries soughing through its filigree leaves make a soft music. Wedged in a fork of this tree is a lumpish skull. Hammered gold wraps it and it has been given horns of whetted obsidian. With the garnets set in its sockets, it looks out over the water, where dolphins sport and sunlight on the chop makes a tracery of fire.
A clockwork contraption hidden inside the skull’s brainpan wags its jawbone and makes it speak in a fluting brogue, low and solemn. During the hot season, the mechanism is wound each morning before dawn by the city watch, and folk gather every day to hear the skull declaim verse and tell tales of times long past. They hunker rapt in the glade about the tree, from sunrise out over the hills on the other side of the strait, till red dusk throws the cupolas, onion domes, and minarets of the city into stark silhouette. Only then, when a booming gong sounds out from that great bell, Cracked Mary, high up in the crooked tower of the Cathedral, calling the faithful to prayers, does the skull fall silent and the crowd disperse.
But in winter, when snow bows the boughs of the cedars and keen-honed gusts off the water yowl in the branches of the silver tree, the sentries, knowing no one will come to hear it speak, do not wind the skull. During those mute, cold months, it broods, broods on the tale it would relate to the summer throngs were it not constrained by the mechanism to rote recital. (56-57)
Such passages suggest the lapidary prose of Clark Ashton Smith as much as Machen, but whereas Smith was at his best in his lost worlds of Zothique, Hyperborea, Averoigne, or Poseidonis, Jarvis’s settings are more down-to-earth. The Bosphorus of the above tale is about as far afield as he will go, and most of the entries are set in England or western Europe. Many of his characters are well-educated, often academics like himself; yet they also tend to be broken or dissolute or conflicted, and they communicate in the terse, colloquial, and often vulgar speech of everyday life. In this regard, Jarvis more closely resembles writers like Joel Lane (of whose work he is an admirer).
It is in the interstices between these juxtapositions—between filth and ecstasy, between crudity and beauty—that Jarvis situates his work. Perhaps it is an uncomfortable dialectic for some. But for those seeking a speculative writer who can draw on a fine literary heritage while preserving his own distinctive voice, suggesting other worlds in the dirt of this one, Treatises on Dust will amply reward their time.
Geoffrey Reiter is Professor and Coordinator of Literature at Lancaster Bible College and associate editor at Christ and Pop Culture. He is the author of several academic articles on genre fiction and philosophy and has also written for Christianity Today online. An author of fantasy and weird horror, his poetry and fiction have appeared in The Mythic Circle, Star*Line, Spectral Realms, and Penumbra. His collection of weird horror, The Lime Kiln and Other Enchanted Spaces, has been published by Hippocampus Press.
