The Master of Silence by Irving Bacheller, 1892

Irving Bacheller appears to be one of that type of novelist that is somewhat popular in his day and then fades from public memory. While not a complete enigma like some of the authors presented on here prior, Bacheller's life seems oddly lacking in interesting episodes. A WWI war corespondent and founder of the first modern Newspaper Syndicate who brought Kipling, Doyle and Conrad to the US reading public, his one major goof seems to have been sending writer Stephen Crane as a war correspondent to Cuba where the poor bloke got himself stranded on a dinghy for two days when his ship went under.

The Master of Silence appears to be Bacheller's first novel. It deals with a young man named Kendric who is visited one night by a strange mute person handing him a card from his mysterious, long unseen uncle Revis Lane (this family has a bit of an aversion to common names it would seem), urging the recipient (the boy's father, unknowingly to the writer long since departed) to come, citing "Consequences of vast importance to me and to mandkind" as incentive. Before the boy can get an answer to his questions, the mute servant suddenly up and dies, leaving the thing a mystery.

A few years later Mr. Earl, a man whose connection to the Lane family is never properly dwelled upon, ships off Kendric to look for his uncle in America. Then we skip two years and Kendric's already at his witts end. He finally discovers his uncle in a weird lake-side house shut up from all sides, only discovered via the medium of convenient newspaper article and here he comes to meet his cousin Rayel, who was intentionally raised by Revis Lane in complete isolation without ever having been taught how to speak because of Revis' idea that speech clouds the minds and distances us from the truth of things. Of course you have to have only a cursory understanding of feral children to know this is anything but the truth.

Of course the novel doesn't dwell on the sadism of the man deciding that since his wife died in childbirth he might literally make his own son into a living science experiment, dammaging him beyond repair in god knows how many ways but it's okay because he brings up God a few times.

Once Revis Lane dies Rayel is taken to the outside world and you'd think this would now be a novel about him trying to fit in with humanity after having spent his entire life with his father and two mutes inside of one house. But not really. Well it sort of is like that for a few pages, but it's mostly about Rayel's ability to somehow see through people's lies and the subsequent societal embarassment caused thereby. And then he and Kendric run into Kendric's old sweetheart, by complete accident again, who is now a famous actress. Now you'd think this would lead to some romantic entanglement involving both the cousins and the lady in question and it does for about two pages but then Rayel basically says he'll walk it off and you're left wondering what the point even was.

Around this same time Kendric gets beaten up by the accomplices of a sinister count whom Rayel accused of bank robbery while at a dinner table, and then after they move back to England there's some refference to a plot by Kendric's foster mother and her new husband to try and kill him except it's not really dwelt on at all, and then there's a confused scene of Kendric starting a fire and Rayel being horribly burned carying him out.....and if you're wondering if that's the end then pretty much yeah.

Despite the fact that barely anything happened.

This is a strange book. The first chapter draws you in with the sudden appearance of a mute bearing a cryptic note and even the search for Revis Lane leaves you with some hope but then it switches between taking potshots at high society, romance and adventure all within the span of a few pages and it barely dwells on any of it long enough to leave an impression.

The Sign of the Spider by Bertram Mitford (1896)

Courtesy of southafricabooks.com

Bertram Mitford (1855-1914) is a tought nut to crack. There isn't much information on him to be had online accept for the fact that he was born in the UK and visited South Africa several times, which is also where he got the inspiration for the setting of most of his novels. The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction claims he was a member of the Royal Geographical Society. His father Edward Ledwich Osbaldeston Mitford (1811-1912) lived to be 100 years old, for which he received a congratulation by the King, and according to The Times from London served for 25 years in the Ceylon Civil Service and in fact his first three children were born on Ceylon/Sri Lanka but Bertram was born back in England.

The Sign of the Spider is a book which I've looked forward to for many years on the title alone, before I found out Mitford was compared to H.Rider Haggard.

The problem is the tone of the book is all over the place. On the one hand you have a main character, Laurence Stanninghame, who is very pessimistic in all he does, to a lovable decree. But on the other, you have him participate in human slave trade in Africa and he goes through all sorts of mental gymnastics to justify how it's actually good that's he's enslaving these people. Mitford has all the people he enslaves be "savages", bloodthirsty cannibals, and so he tries very very hard to not have the issue seem at all moraly dubious. That is still very hard to accomplish, especially when the main character actually compares his own perpetual and hereditary enslavement of whole generations of people to his own future of, gasp, having to do odd jobs for not that much money ! Because willing paid employment and forced unpaid lifelong servitude and objectification are basically the same.

The main character doesn't set out to South Africa to deal in slaves, but circumstances force him into it. Only later on in the book when he gets captured by the People of the Spider, descended from the Zulus, the reader is hard pressed to feel genuine sympathy for him because he always has to remember this man was making money out of enslaving people. One of his companions actually continually protests the bloody business at first, and I could not shake the feeling it would not have been better for the book if that was the main character who had these objections. And not because I favour clearly defined black and white morality in characters, but more because the entire rest of the novel is set up like a traditional adventure novel where the story is designed to have you sympathise with the main characters and his plight and that always comes up as a sore spot.

The title of the book is derived from a box given the main character by a potential love interest before he sets off for his expedition and just so happens to resemble the national symbol of the spider worshipping Ba-gcatya and thus saves his skin. He gets carted off to their land, but his stay there doesn't take up much of the book and isn't as in depth as one would like.

Then finally, the moment we've all been waiting for. He gets himself thrown down into a pit with a huge man eating spider and it's.....not that great. It only lasts a few pages and then he runs off thanks to his Ba-gcatya sweetheart Lindela. On the way back to Cape Town Mitford, in order to avoid having to deal with race issues, does a copout by having Lindela die of a snake bite along the way. Laurence finds his other sweetheart in Cape Town, the owner of the titular Sign of the Spider, her monogram on the box which saved Laurence's life before, is now married to her rude, obsessive cousin, because he'd probably off himself otherwise.

Laurence then goes back to England with a few diamonds he found in the spider cave and apparently his slaving companions are still in the business and getting rich off of it by the end of the novel.

While the Ba-gcatya are portrayed with dignity, one does have to wonder about Mitford's morality when dealing with some of these issues.

Overall, the horror element in this book is far too minimal to really warrant it being a classic of the Weird and the adventure element isn't as extensive as one would hope. I hope Mitford's Induna's Wife and The Weird of Deadly Hollow will fare better.