For weeks Belgium has lain under a thick grey cloud, our lives occasionally enlivened by a few hours of rain, no sunshine, no snow, just greyness. At such a time, what could be better than The Pendragon Legend, the first novel of the Hungarian writer Antal Szerb, published in 1934. It is gothic, comic, romantic, mysterious and utterly charming. It would be satirical, if satire was too strong a word for its affectionate, gentle mockery: it loves what it laughs at. It includes a ghost, ancient books, the Rosicrucians, north Wales, a ruined castle, a disputed inheritance and sinister goings-on. I love it and re-reading it has cheered me up no end.
Perhaps you too recognise the feeling that is described here? It is the moment when our narrator, János Bátky, first claps eyes on the precious Pendragon library:
I was filled with the tenderness I always feel – and which nothing can match – when I encounter so many books together. At moments like these I long to wallow, to bathe in them, to savour their wonderful, dusty, old-book odours, to inhale them through my very pores.
János Bátky is a Hungarian scholar with an interest in the esoteric. At a party he falls into conversation with the Earl of Gwynedd, a recluse who shares his enthusiasm for Robert Fludd, and is invited to stay with him at Llanvygan Castle and examine his library of priceless manuscripts. Reading up about the Pendragon family (who are the earls of Gwynedd), Bátky befriends an Irish adventurer and fantasist named Maloney who, coincidentally, is also bound for Llanvygan in the company of Osborne Pendragon, the Earl’s nephew. But before they leave, a mysterious telephone caller warns Bátky to stay away.
At Llanvygan Bátky accidentally offends the Earl and so does not see much of him. Most of the Earl’s time is devoted to experiments with some gigantic axolotls he has bred and through whom he hopes to find the secret of the resurrection of the body and eternal life. Bátky enjoys his days in the library, especially when accompanied by the beautiful Cynthia, Osborne’s sister, but his nights are considerably less enjoyable, interrupted by a midnight rider with a flaming torch charging around the castle. Someone is trying to murder the Earl, there is a crazed prophet in the village, and the ruins of Pendragon Castle on the hill above hold a secret that may shed light on the mysteries, if only Bátky, Osborne and Maloney can find it.
So, melodrama, mystery and eccentrics a-plenty, all spiced with lashings of humour. It’s a book that doesn’t take itself seriously, like its narrator. As the quote about his feelings for libraries suggests, Bátky is sensual as well as scholarly, easily distracted by a beautiful woman. He is clever and curious but weedy, given to experiencing life through books and ill-equipped to face the more physical dangers the situation in Llanvygan foments. The telephone call almost puts him off even starting for Wales, and it is only academic vanity that spurs him on. He struggles to climb a cliff during a nocturnal escapade with Maloney and Osborne, and at a crucial point gets lost on a Welsh mountain because he cannot tell the difference between beech, birch and oak trees. He is a frightful snob and romantic and it is these qualities that support him and drive him on rather than any nobler attributes. He is somewhat in love with the idea of the British aristocracy, to put it mildly.
Here he is, experiencing that mainstay of gothic fiction, an eerie noise at night in a castle:
Anyway, I switched the light on. The room was now at least two hundred years more historic than when I had gone to bed. I had seen rooms like it in London museums and French chateaux, but then there had been guides and written inscriptions to direct one as to what to imagine [..] But none of the elaborately carved wardrobes in this room carried any such source of enlightenment. Nothing tied the imagination to what was merely informative and comforting. For all I knew, some ancestor might have died in here, repenting his unspeakable crimes amid horrific visions ... And all the while, there came this unceasing sound: tap, tree-ee, and the terrible sigh. [...]
Of course, I realised it must be a window, or something of that kind, producing the noise. On many a windy night the same battle had been waged between an unsecured window and my fevered imagination.
I knew that, whether I wanted to or not, I would have to go and investigate. I knew my habits of mind: until I did that, I would have no rest.
I got out of bed, donned my dressing gown and quietly drew back the door.
There is a clever balance here between self-deprecating humour and true creepiness, no mean feat to achieve. For underneath the jolly japes, the endearing eccentrics and the madcap pace, we glimpse a darkness: besides the horror of banal, lucre-worshipping criminality there arises the horror of an evil less easy to comprehend, and one which speaks to ancient terrors. Where does legitimate pursuit of truth end, and obsession and madness begin? At what point does the past grip the present too tightly? Dreams, prophesies, stories, lies, all have their own truths. The novel plays delicately too on bodily and literary immortality; it concludes with a sense that there are indeed mysteries that can never fully be understood.
The Pushkin Press edition which I read was translated by Len Rix so beautifully that not only does it flow as easily as if it had been written in 1930s English, it also captures Bátky’s personality and dry wit perfectly. The whole book is an absolute joy.
(Portrait of Antal Szerb, from the Pushkin Press website; Szerb was a Hungarian Jew and so his literary career was destroyed and he was murdered in a forced labour camp in 1945)