Help offset server costs by donating. This is totally optional. Any overages will go to library fines or new books.
The House on the Borderland Q4 - Characters
There are only a few characters in the book, and none of them are particularly well described - they are all vehicles, I suppose. It's not a character driven book. We have the two fishermen (did we need two, or would one have done just as well?), the owner of the house who we get to know the best. His sister (a necessary character? What does she contribute?). The dog, Pepper, and later Pepper's replacement. Pepper is the only one in the House with a name, that I can recall. Why is the dog so important? Lastly, there are some nebulous characters in the form of She and the mob of hog men, both of which are more like forces than characters.
Do you have any thoughts on these and their relationships? Did the book need more character, overall? Or Less?
Comments
I suppose again this was a facet of the book that made me feel that Hodgson was writing from some kind of inner experience or vision, rather than to make a point or address some kind of external situation. To repeat what I said before, I ended up with the feeling that the story wasn't going anywhere.
Now, I've mentioned some books which in one way or another seem to either derive from it or to explore something of the same space - The Time Machine, The Mind Parasites - and I also thought of Perelandra as somewhere around the same territory. But all of those books had a sense, each in their own way, of going somewhere specific, and they certainly had named characters! So maybe other writers looked at what Hodgson was doing and thought about maybe ways they would adapt the pattern for their own purposes?
There wasn't really a character in the book, more a sequence of narration mouthpieces. None of the characters changed during the book and the only real character-influenced choice was to stay in the house and defend it against the swine-people.
But this was a book about the experience and the description rather than a story or characters. But like Richard says, it's all rather aimless.
There were definitely characters, just not particularly deep ones. Only the man really had any depth because we were somewhat privy to his thoughts. Pepper was more an archetype, and so was the sister. Some say she represented a grounding force and I wonder if she was even necessary to the story. On the other hand, someone could probably write a fine novel retelling this story from her perspective!
I'm really not clear who She was. While reading the book, I assumed She was a vision of some platonic ideal of a woman that the man saw on his journeys and fell in love with - kind of like a banshee (she - shee - sidhe). But maybe, as I read elsewhere, she was a deceased lover of his he was trying to reconnect with. I can't help but think there's a connection between this She and H. Rider Haggard's She.
Was there anything more to the village people at the start of the book. I kept waiting for the shoe to drop and for them to have some sort of connection to something else in the book. Or maybe break out some sort of Deliverance style menacing of the two fisherman for daring to go poking their nose in business that they don't belong in. I was a little let down that it never went anywhere.