First published on 8th March, 2002 in StarTwo
Review by DAPHNE LEE
ONCE
By James Herbert
Publisher: Macmillan, 400
(ISBN: 978-0333761403)
JAMES Herbert has a huge following as the author of horror novels. The majority of his books (he has published 20 including this latest) are explicitly nasty (The Rats, The Fog), although Herbert does occasionally employ a more subtle style (The Magic Cottage, Haunted). However, even at his least graphic, there's nothing to rival the slow, creeping terror and implied evil of Henry James' The Turn Of The Screw or the ghost stories of M.R. James and Sheridan Le Fanu. Herbert's technique is more obvious, more calculated. The suspense is measured, with practically every chapter ending in a cliff hanger and a promise of greater horrors to come (at times, Herbert's blatant intention to titillate is reminiscent of the worst kind of juvenile horror fiction, as in, ''And before this night was through, Thom Kindred would know such horror.'').
As for the climaxes, they are timed to perfection - often, several paragraphs or even pages of increasingly gory description are wrapped up by a stark sentence or two. The effect is of a door being abruptly, loudly, viciously slammed in one's face. The reader is left stunned and breathless, but primed for the next onslaught.
And it works, especially on this de-sensitised generation, raised on Freddy Krueger and (perhaps even scarier) Jennifer Love Hewitt (endlessly fleeing a mass murderer in a wet T-shirt). Never mind complex characters, a unique plot and inspiring prose, Herbert's bulging coffers are the result of practically the exact opposite of that.
Take his latest horror-fantasy hybrid, Once. The novel was perhaps written in anticipation of the public's current all-time-high thirst for magical worlds, thanks to the release of the Harry Potter and The Lord Of The Rings films, but both those books are infinitely better written.
Herbert's characters are, without exception, two-dimensional figures who do not undergo any development in the course of the story and who behave in a manner that is laughably predictable. It doesn't take a genius to tell the good guys from the bad. Herbert doesn't, for a moment, bother to keep you guessing, and the same goes for the plot.
In a nutshell, a young man called Thom Kindred suffers a near-fatal stroke. He goes back to his childhood home (a cottage in the grounds of a country manor) to recuperate. Once there, Thom discovers that the woodland surrounding the house is an enchanted realm, peopled with elves, goblins, brownies and such, and he is soon caught in the middle of a battle between good and evil (what else?).
By the way, Herbert's ''faerefolkis'' bear a closer resemblance to the merry, winged beings in Enid Blyton's books than to Tolkien's tall, proud creatures. However, Thom does meet an undine, or water sprite, called Jennet who is large enough to become his lover.
Having said that, Jennet's physical attributes - golden hair, tiny breasts and absence of body hair (yes, there too) - give her a prepubescent quality that makes all that rolling around in the hay she does with Thom quite unsettling to read about.
Interestingly (perhaps the one intriguing thing about Once), the Thom-Jennet relationship recalls that of Tam and Janet in the Scottish ballad, Tam Lin. Tam Lin also deals with faeryland's dark side and, just as Janet is Tam's salvation in the song, Jennet is Thom's in Once (unfortunately, the similarities end there). The evil element, in Herbert's book, is Nell Quick who, like the archetypal soap opera villainess, uses her body to get what she wants.
This brings us back to the book's sex scenes, which are plentiful and, for most part, gratuitous. Herbert has cleverly capitalised on the fact that readers who enjoy every drop of blood and slash of the knife described in minute detail are likely to also appreciate blow-by-blow accounts of every hump, bump and grind going. Therefore, there are couplings galore, in a style that is somewhere between that of a sentimental bodice-ripper and an unspeakably debauched Harold Robbins novel.
As mentioned before, there is something unsavoury about Jennet's sexual appetite in light of her decidedly childlike appearance. Perhaps one is simply unused to reading about faeries as sexual beings, but in any case, the sex does nothing to enhance the story.
But you don't buy a book like this expecting high art or a serious, thought-provoking read. It isn't even particularly re-readable, unless you're a diehard James Herbert fan. However, Once is something you might pick up if you want something entertaining and easy to digest, even a little risque - in fact, it's just the sort of book to bring on a long flight or to read on the beach. If you're squeamish it might give you nightmares, but anyone familiar with bestselling chiller fiction should know what to expect and be able to handle a few spiders and shrivelling corpses.
What makes Once really worth your money and earns it a permanent place on your bookshelf are the beautifully drawn, elaborately detailed colour illustrations. These are not something you would usually find in a novel and are in keeping with the faerytale aspect of the book. It is unconfirmed as to whether the paperback edition will also contain these drawings.
Recent Comments