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Title:
The Night Land
Series: (Standalone)
Author:
William Hope Hodgson
Rating: 1.5 of 5 Stars
Genre:
Adventure
Pages: 681
Words:
197K
Publish: 1912
Back
in 2020, I tried to read The
Well at the World’s End, but had to give up at 9% because
of the faux old time’y language the author used. There has been
lingering regret about that decision ever since and I have felt like
I was defeated by mere words. As someone who thinks that words are
the most important, that defeat just stuck in my craw. Which is
necessary info to understand why I persevered through this current
piece of garbage.
This story could have been 150 pages but Hodgson puffed it up to over 600, mainly because he insisted on detailing everything on an hourly basis, through the narrator. The narrator tells us every time he eats, sleeps and gets outraged at himself (Dictator Xi Jinping now humps a goat) when he doesn’t do those things on the schedule he set up for himself. And then tells how long it has been since he last ate or slept so as to show that he’s aware of breaking his own schedule and somehow trying to secure our sympathy.
And it is all written in Faux 1700’s language.
I have mentioned in previous reviews of Hodgson’s stuff that I’m not surprised he’s been swept aside and forgotten by history. This book really cemented that idea for me though. It also made me realize that I am wasting my time with Hodgson and thus this will be the last book of his I read. There are other authors who HAVE stood the test of time that I should read instead of this guy. Dickens, Dumas, MacDonald, Hugo, etc spring to mind.
I
considered giving this a 1star because I was so bored with it and
wanted it to end, but 1stars are saved for the truly egregious books
that cross moral lines and are poisonous to the reader. This was like
a HUGE bag of store brand buttered popcorn that was stale. It’s
disgusting but it isn’t poison.
★✬☆☆☆
From Grokipedia
Framing device
The framing device of The Night Land presents the entire narrative as the visionary manuscript of a 17th-century gentleman mourning the death of his beloved wife, Lady Mirdath the Beautiful, who died young. [15] [16] Overwhelmed by grief and loneliness, the narrator experiences a series of dreams and waking visions in which he "waked into the future of this world," perceiving the life and thoughts of his own reincarnation millions of years ahead. [17] These psychic or telepathic impressions reveal events in a distant era after the sun's death, which he recognizes as connected to his soul's eternal continuity. [17]The story is thus conveyed as a "found" record or transcribed vision from this historical narrator, who describes his experiences in an archaic, ceremonious prose reflective of his time. [15] [17] He frames the account as a personal testimony born of sorrow, noting that such knowledge came to him through spiritual sympathy and reincarnation memory, allowing him to witness his future self's existence. [17]This framing structure creates significant temporal distance between the narrator's 17th-century perspective and the remote future events, lending the tale a mythic, prophetic tone that heightens its sense of solemn wonder and cosmic scale. [15] [18] The device also transforms personal bereavement into a broader meditation on enduring love across aeons, offering consolation through the promise of reunion beyond death. [17]
The Last Redoubt and the Night Land
The far-future Earth depicted in The Night Land lies in perpetual darkness, enveloped in an everlasting night after the sun's extinction millions of years earlier, with the planet grown cold and hostile to life. [19]Humanity's last remnants—millions of people—survive within the Last Redoubt, a gigantic pyramid constructed of grey metal, measuring more than five miles along each side of its base and rising to a height exceeding seven miles, surmounted by a tower nearly a mile tall. [19] This colossal structure contains 1,320 stacked cities across its floors and is protected at its base by the Electric Circle, a great ring of light generated by the Earth Current, which extends outward for a mile on every side and forms an invisible barrier that repels monstrous entities and evil forces. [19] The Earth Current serves as humanity's sole remaining power source, sustaining life within the pyramid—including vast underground fields that form a stepped pyramid of country lands reaching a hundred miles deep and wide at the lowest level—and providing illumination, agriculture, and defense, though its finite nature poses an ultimate threat to survival. [20]The surrounding Night Land extends as a vast, lightless wilderness of profound horror, lit only by scattered unnatural sources such as the Red Pit's fiery glare, the Vale of Red Fire, the cold glow of the Plain of Blue Fire, the fitful red light of Giants' Kilns, and low volcanoes along distant borders. [19] This landscape teems with monstrous entities, including the four principal Watchers—immense, immovable beings of hill-like bulk radiating steadfast, hideous intelligence and positioned to menace the pyramid from the north-west, south-east, south-west, and south—as well as giants, Night Hounds, Ab-humans, the Silent Ones, and other grotesque creatures that lurk amid features like the House of Silence, the Pit of the Red Smoke, and the Country Whence Comes the Great Laughter. [19] [21]A smaller, failing outpost known as the Lesser Redoubt exists elsewhere in the Night Land, built as a three-sided pyramid no more than a mile high with a base scarcely three-quarters of a mile along each side. [20] Housing no more than ten thousand inhabitants by the time of renewed contact, it draws upon a comparatively weak stream of the Earth Current through a deep shaft, resulting in long ages of dwindling vitality, listlessness, and premature aging among its people until a recent resurgence restored some vigor. [20]
The journey and resolution
The protagonist establishes a telepathic bond with Naani, a woman from the distant Lesser Redoubt, and recognizes her as the reincarnation of his past love Mirdath.[17] [22] When the Lesser Redoubt loses its protective Earth-Current and is overrun, leaving Naani and a handful of survivors to flee its ruins, he resolves to abandon the safety of the Last Redoubt and undertake a solo quest to find and rescue her despite the immense dangers.[17] He equips himself with the Diskos, a powerful two-handed weapon that draws on Earth-Current to produce a flaming, vibrating blade capable of cleaving through monstrous foes.[17]The outward journey across the Night Land lasts weeks or months and subjects him to extreme isolation and peril. He traverses nightmarish landscapes including the Plain of Blue Fire, the dark Mighty Slope, the Great Gorge with its blue gas flames, and the Country of Seas and Fire dotted with volcanoes and dried seabeds.[17] He must skirt or pass near fixed terrors such as the immense Watchers, the House of Silence, and the Road Where the Silent Ones Walk, while fighting off active threats including packs of giant Night Hounds, great slugs, Humped Men, the four-armed Yellow Beast-Man, and other ab-human and bestial creatures in desperate, prolonged combats.[17] [23] Starvation, exhaustion, and repeated brushes with madness test him, yet the Diskos and his determination sustain him until he reaches the ruined Lesser Redoubt and reunites with the starving, barefoot, and injured Naani along with a small number of other survivors.[17]The return journey, often more grueling than the outward trek, sees most of the accompanying survivors perish from monster attacks, wounds, or fatigue, including a major battle against Humped Men on a raft island in a fiery sea region.[17] Naani repeatedly nears death from cold, hunger, exhaustion, and injuries, forcing the protagonist to carry her for long stretches while fending off continued assaults from Night Hounds, slugs, and other horrors.[17] In the final approach to the Last Redoubt, Naani succumbs to a spiritual assault from the House of Silence and appears to die in his arms just outside the protective Electric Circle.[17] Yet she miraculously revives during the burial procession inside the Pyramid, restored by the Earth-Current.[17]Both recover from their wounds and hardships, marry first in private and later in a grand public ceremony, and share a period of peaceful "Love Days" within the Last Redoubt.[17] The protagonist is commemorated with a statue in the Hall of Honour depicting him forever carrying Naani in his broken armour, symbolizing the triumph of love and endurance.[17]
Characters
Protagonist and narrator
The protagonist and narrator of The Night Land is an unnamed man whose existence spans two distinct lifetimes connected through reincarnation. In his first incarnation, in a past age, he falls deeply in love with Mirdath the Beautiful, marries her, and suffers profound grief when she dies in childbirth. [23] [22] This loss haunts him until a mystical connection allows his consciousness to merge with his reincarnated self millions of years in the future. [24] [23]In the far future, he is a Monstruwacan in the Great Redoubt, humanity's last refuge, stationed in the Tower of Observation where he develops his natural telepathic abilities under the guidance of the Master Monstruwacan. [25] He wields the Diskos, a formidable personal weapon consisting of a sharp, spinning disk of grey metal mounted on a rod, charged by the Earth-Current and forming a unique affinity with its owner, often described as a companion in battle. [26]The narrative is delivered in the first person from this future incarnation, employing deliberately archaic and formal prose that reflects the influence of his past life, marked by phrases of solemn devotion and ceremonial gravity. [23] [25] His personality reveals exceptional courage in facing the terrors of the Night Land alone, profound and unwavering devotion to his reincarnated beloved, and an emotional arc shaped by the lingering anguish of past loss and the intense fulfillment of reunion. [22] He briefly establishes telepathic contact with Naani, which propels his journey. [23]
Naani and Mirdath
Naani is a young woman living in the Lesser Redoubt, a smaller pyramid-shaped stronghold housing a dwindling human population far from the Great Redoubt. [17] As the daughter of the Master Monstruwacan of the Lesser Redoubt and a gifted Sensitive capable of strong telepathic perception, Naani possesses unusual abilities to reach across the vast darkness of the Night Land. [17] She initiates faint, exhausting contact with the narrator using the Master-Word and an ancient love-name once reserved for Mirdath the Beautiful, his beloved from a previous life. [17] This recognition reveals Naani to be the reincarnation of Mirdath, whose soul has returned after ages apart, as confirmed by shared spiritual essence, old gestures such as kissing food tablets before eating, and Naani’s emerging memories of their past union. [17]Mirdath the Beautiful, described in the narrator’s earlier existence as his cousin and betrothed, shared a profound romantic bond with him until her death in childbirth, an event that plunged him into lasting grief and inspired tender, sorrowful poetry. [17] The narrator perceives Naani’s voice and presence as Mirdath’s returned, declaring that “she was Naani and she was Mirdath,” with their reunion evoking the sense that “Eternity had been rolled backward.” [17] Their connection underscores a theme of eternal love persisting across vast temporal distances through reincarnation. [27]Naani’s peril escalates when the Earth-Current sustaining the Lesser Redoubt fails suddenly and catastrophically, draining vitality from the inhabitants and leading to widespread madness, despair, and a fatal exodus into the monster-haunted Night Land. [17] Left alone amid the destruction, Naani wanders starving and exposed for a prolonged period, her calls growing fainter and more desperate as she faces imminent death from exposure, hunger, and lurking threats. [17] Her dire situation and continued telepathic pleas, invoking the past love-name and signaling her mortal danger, serve as the central impetus for the narrator’s resolve to leave the safety of the Great Redoubt and cross the Night Land to save her. [17]
Antagonistic forces
The Great Redoubt stands besieged by an array of malevolent forces that surround it in the eternal darkness of the Night Land. The most formidable of these are the Watchers, immense, mountain-like entities positioned at various points around the pyramid, embodying a hideous, steadfast intelligence as they observe without cease. Described as "mountains of living watchfulness and hideous and steadfast intelligence," they remain immobile, never sleeping or moving perceptibly, having watched "from the Beginning" through eternity. One, the Watcher of the South, is portrayed as "a living hill of watchfulness... squat and tremendous, hunched over," having approached slowly over twenty thousand years until halted by a rising protective dome. Other Watchers exhibit distinctive features, such as the North-West Watcher with its vast chin lit by red pit glow, the South-East Watcher as a "squat monster" with a lumbered-forward head, and the North-East Crowned Watcher marked by a blue luminous ring and a constantly quivering bell-ear.[26][26][28][26]Abhumans represent another category of threat, consisting of mutated and degenerated descendants of humanity who have become evil, bestial beings adapted to the harsh outer world. These include various tribes such as the Humped Men—squat, powerfully built figures with humped shoulders, large teeth, and brown hair who hunt in predatory packs—and other brutish or giant-like forms, often described as half-man and half-beast, incredibly hardened to suffering and hostile to the Redoubt's inhabitants.[26]Additional antagonistic entities encompass a range of monstrous creatures, including giant slug-things—black, beslimed, and wrinkled with eye-stalks and long white tongues that move slowly and emit a dreadful stink—as well as large serpents thick as a man's body, night hounds great as horses that bay and tear in packs, and hybrid horrors such as four-armed yellow beings with talons or low, bristled yellow things resembling living hillocks that attack with poisonous hairs and sharp legs. Evil spirits and psychic forces also lurk, particularly in locations like the House of Silence, which exerts an irresistible drawing power.[26]These threats are held at bay by the Earth Current, a fundamental energy drawn from beneath the pyramid that sustains the Redoubt's light, heat, agriculture, weapons, and communications while generating protective barriers. Chief among these defenses is the great Electric Circle of light, burning eternally within a transparent tube around the pyramid's base and creating an invisible wall of safety, such that "none of the monsters have power to pass across it" and it affects the weaker minds of lesser creatures.[26]
