Strange Relics: Stories of Archaeology and the Supernatural, 1895–1954 edited by Amara Thornton & Kay Soar
(Handheld Press, 2022)
Reviewed by Andy Sawyer
Much supernatural or ‘weird’ fiction goes something like this: antiquarian digs up relic from the past: something horrible happens. Thornton and Soar, themselves archaeologists, have curated a collection that specifically focuses upon how weird fiction engages with archaeology, and the book has already caused something of a stir in the archaeological community. While the dozen stories here are (mostly) within that reductive summary, this is a well put-together volume combining familiar favourites with lesser-known works.
As seems to be the norm with Handheld Press, there is a useful introduction in which the authors explain the contexts of their anthology, trumping the critic who is tempted to approach the stories with a view to their focus upon exotic ‘othering’ and equating earlier cultures with ‘savagery’ and ‘primitivism. Yes, the first story (and one of the strongest), Arthur Machen’s ‘The Shining Pyramid’, certainly does this, with its survival of an earlier race leaving cryptic messages about a horrific ritual. Yes, the rise of archaeology as a discipline, the editors note, certainly is connected with colonialism and stories reflecting it are ‘often suffused with racism. We have not been able to avoid it entirely…’ E.F. Benson’s ‘The Ape’ and Margery Lawrence’s ‘The Curse of the Stillborn’, though, are apt selections, with an Egyptian setting. In ‘The Ape’ Hugh, a wealthy tourist, purchases a fragment—half an image of a monkey—from a vendor of ‘antiquities’. It matches another fragment he had found in the sand earlier than day. When shown to the Egyptologist Rankin, the figure is identified as that of a monkey-demon and the inscription on it, a secret name which will summon the demon, who will obey the summoner. Jealousy—he is the idle amusement of Rankin’s niece—spurs Hugh to test this, with (almost) predictable results. In Lawrence’s story, a missionary’s wife pressures her husband to refuse to allow a young woman to bury her stillborn child according to imagined ‘awful’ heathen rites. Traditional Egypt gets its revenge.
In each story, Egypt’s past is identified as suffused with ‘black magic’, but also in each, colonial anxiety is clear. Benson’s Rankin says of Egypt: ‘we have killed it with our board-schools and our steamers and our religion’; and Mrs Bond is made aware that she has raised ‘Something that belonged to Egypt, that had demanded Its right of Its land, and had through her been denied it.’ Alan J.B. Wace, a lecturer in Ancient History and Archaeology who became Director of the British School at Athens in 1914, and was involved in wartime Intelligence work, invokes a similar anxiety about the archaeology of Greece in ‘The Golden Ring’.
Rose Macauley’s ‘Whitewash’, set in Capri, evokes the atrocities of the Roman Emperor Tiberius to comment ironically about how controversial figures from the past are evaluated and re-evaluated. Britain’s own archaeology, especially that of its Romano-British past, offers its own share of psychic angst. Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Through the Veil’ gives us the conflicts around the Roman fort at Trimontium (Newstead) ‘remembered’ in the mind of a solid Border citizen. As he narrates his story to his wife, her growing understanding of her own part in the drama will affect their marriage forever onwards. Places haunted by their own pasts are featured in H.D. Everett’s ‘The Next Heir’, the wonderfully-titled ‘Ho! The Merry Masons’ by John Buchan and Algernon Blackwood’s ‘Roman Remains’. The cracks perceived in a floor-tile by the unhappy narrator of Dorothy Quick’s ‘Cracks of Time’ form a vivid and unsettlingly active face of Pan. Icelandic lore, and barrow-mounds on an English estate, feature in ‘The Cure’ by Eleanor Scott.
Perhaps the most interesting ‘archaeological’ perspective comes from M.R. James, whose. ‘View From A Hill’ is here given a significant context. Fanshawe’s experiences, with a pair of binoculars manufactured from particularly unholy components, remind us that what we see when we take our first cursory glances at archaeological sites can often be not at all what was there.
Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.