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The House on the Borderland Q2 - Structure
The novels follows a distinctive structure in that it opens with a framing narrative, then switches to a first person narrative by the house owner which describes an attack on the house. Then there's a break in the middle - part of the book is damaged (why, how, and what is the significance of this?). Then follows a cosmic journey of sorts to the green star at the centre of the universe. Finally, we return to the fishermen for a denouement.
What did you think of the structure? Was the framing narrative needed? Successful?
Why the break in the middle? Did Hodgson just not know how to describe things here, or is there some other significance?
Compare the writing in the 'attack' section to that of the 'journey' section. How is the prose different? Is this intentional? Significant?
Comments
Use of a frame is moderately common in 19th century books (strictly speaking Borderland isn't C19th but it feels like it shares a lot of those conventions. Other similar writing conventions are the epistolary novel in which the action is described by means of letters, or the traveller's tale where it is presented as though it was a diary. In all of these there seems to be a feeling that a simple entrance into the narrative isn't enough to transit the reader from their own world to the inner world of the book, and therefore some sort of artifice is needed to bridge the gap. I'm not sure (to a modern reader) that the fishermen add anything to the tale, and a m,ore modern writer would probably have just gone straight into the story.
Come to think of it there are two layers of the "wrapping" the fishermen, and then the diary - we're well insulated from direct contact with the events in question!
I don't know about the break in the middle. It felt to me as though Hodgson just didn't want to write too long a book, and this was his way of omitting some of the middle stuff.
The structure: it struck me as being two quite separate novellas that were bundled together for publication economics. The two halves of the book have very little do do with each other.
I didn't pick up much different about the prose style, but the tone of the two sections was different. In the first, the narrator was active for a lot of the time, exploring the Pit then fending off the attacks of the Swine-things. The second was much more passive, with the narrator literally along for the ride, with no control over where he went, or how fast, or when he started or stopped. I found the second half much less satisfying.
But at the same time something remains off what was, but it to is bound to be forgotten, just as dreams are forgotten by the everyday - horror.
I read somewhere that the broken section in the middle (the part that describes 'She' - some kind of love interest, or an object of desire) is broken because this is the part of the book that was open when the house collapsed on it. Meaning it was the last part of the book that the man was reading when he died or became too ill to continue. The speculation is that She was a lover or wife, now gone but still very much longed for, and the man's dreams we spurred by his desire to reconnect with her. I'd need to re-read this part of the book to see if I could parse this - it feels speculative, based on my first reading.
Another consideration - the man may be dying. In the end he's consumed by fungus, but maybe that's the very end. He may already be dying. In his dream state he sees his actual figurative death. What are the stages of grief? Denial (moves to remote home), Anger (fights off invaders), bargaining (the part with She?), depression (the cosmic journey?), and acceptance (fungal state?). Perhaps there's something in this.
This is about where I landed as well. Most of the book felt like some weird hallucinatory dream where I wondered if the guy who wrote the book was just having a breakdown of some sort, but the second half cranked that up to 11. I also didn't really notice the prose change.