Land Under England Read online

  Praise for Land Under England

  ‘We are dazzled by the nightmare-like luxuriance of Mr O’Neill’s imagination’

  New York Times

  ‘It belongs to the ancient school of fiction which includes The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Water Babies . . . A piece of compelling imagination’

  Harper’s Bazaar

  ‘Superlatively exciting’

  Sir Compton Mackenzie

  ‘Land Under England is historically significant, eminently readable and belongs in any reasonably complete collection’

  Science Fiction and Fantasy Review

  ‘Attains the heights of literary excellence’

  Publishers Weekly

  Land Under England

  JOSEPH O’NEILL

  INTRODUCTION BY ADAM ROBERTS

  There are literal underground spaces and there are metaphorical underground spaces. World literature is full of stories about the latter masquerading as stories about the former. The attentive reader needs to be clear about the difference.

  Returning to the earliest stories of fantastical underground worlds takes us back to ancient Rome – something particularly relevant to Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England (1935), as we’ll see. At the heart of Vergil’s Aeneid – the central epic of Latin literature, the greatest expression of imperial Roman self-identity – is a lengthy episode in which Aeneas descends into the underworld through the cave-mouth at the lake of Avernus, near Cumae. He passes through a nightmarish landscape of torture and punishment of evil-doers before coming into the bright-lit pastures of Elysium where the virtuous dwell in bliss. Here he meets his own father and hears a prophesy of the coming greatness of Rome, the city he himself is destined to found.

  This sixth book of the Aeneid is one of the most influential works in all classical literature. Dante and Milton drew on it to portray their own epic subterranean underworlds, and it fed through into popular imagination. This is where we derive our notion that Hell is somehow underground (it’s not in the Bible, for instance). Serious theological enquiry about the interior of our world fed into more fanciful hollow-earth theories, and from the eighteenth-century onwards there developed a lively sub-genre of subterranean fantasy, often comic or satiric in aim. These sorts of stories enjoyed remarkable success, from Holberg’s Journey of Niels Klim (1741), through Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), Wells’s Morlocks in The Time Machine (1895) and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s At the Earth’s Core (1914) into a whole spread of twentieth-century science fiction and fantasy. Land Under England must be understood as part of this longstanding tradition, although one of the distinctive things about O’Neill’s novel is the way it returns, as it were, to the source – the prototype of the subterranean fantasy as such. The Aeneid.

  The father of O’Neill’s protagonist, Anthony Julian, is obsessed with Ancient Rome, convinced he himself is descended from Julius Caesar and given to exploring by the ruins of Hadrian’s Wall. When he disappears Anthony believes he has passed through a portal into an under-realm, and when he eventually follows his old man under the earth he discovers a cavernous realm under England – a terra sub Anglia – where Rome still thrives. It is, though, an oppressive, twisted version of the imperium, a place where telepathy has bound most of the population into a single hive-mind enslaved to certain ‘Masters of Knowledge’. There is no such thing as individuality. Every citizen dedicates his or her whole life to the good of the state, and even after death their bodies are used as fuel in the empire’s blast furnaces.

  Anthony finds his portal to this strange world below in Cumbria not Cumae, at the Julian, rather than the Avernan, pond; but O’Neill is playing a fairly obvious intertextual game in this novel, and for a purpose. Aeneas descends into the underworld to locate his father, just as O’Neill’s Anthony does. Like the Roman hero, Anthony passes through a nightmarish place of precipitous cliffs and waterfalls, of strange vegetation and predatory monsters, before finally arriving at Roma Nova, new Rome. This, though, is where O’Neill’s novel swerves. Aeneas is happily reunited with his pater and sees the glory that his ancestors are fated to inherit. Anthony looks in vain for his father for most of the novel, exploring a totalitarian state where citizens are so intimately controlled, telepathically, that they have been reduced to the level of automata.

  The country is a deep valley that lies between mountains which support the roof of the land on all sides. In the middle of the valley the Central Sea runs along its whole length, until at this end of the valley it narrows into a great river that flows under the mountains behind the city. This Central Sea is salt water, and the main source of their food, since in it live most of the creatures from which they get meat and fish, and almost most of the edible plants.

  This, clearly, an underground version of the Mediterranean, a body of water which the Romans called, significantly for this novel, ‘the internal sea’ (mare internum) – but rotated through ninety-degrees, so that (like Britain above it) it runs south-north rather than west-east.

  O’Neill’s New Romans are similarly twisted around a satirical axis. As O’Neill was writing Mussolini’s fascists were bolstering their totalitarian control of Italy with reference to the glories of Rome’s past, and Hitler’s Nazis had recently seized power in Germany. Fascism drew heavily on the history and iconography of the Roman empire. The movement’s very name derives from the fasces, bundles of sticks tied together around an axe blade that were symbols of Roman judicial authority. The idea is simple: one stick is easy to snap, but the bundle is too strong to break. If the 1930s teach us nothing else it is how easily this common sense apprehension – we are stronger together than alone – can be perverted into totalitarian dictatorship and oppression.

  This, at any rate, is the satirical force of O’Neill’s fantasy. What began for the first settlers of these underground spaces as a means of defence against ‘the deep fear of the darkness and the forces of destruction and death that they dreaded in the darkness’ has calcified over time into a nightmarish elimination of individuality as such. The novel’s portrait of its twisted neo-Roman underworld is also O’Neill’s diagnosis of how civilisations like Italy and Germany can fall under the sway of figures like Mussolini and Hitler. ‘The driving force behind it,’ Anthony tells us, ‘was the throb of dread, the mass-hysteria of the race, that kept welling up through the everpresent darkness.’ Nor is he entirely immune to its appeal: the society he discovers, even in its tyranny and annihilation of self, calls ‘to the dread and the hysteria that lay deep in the abysses of my subconscious mind,’ he confesses, ‘urging, compelling me to come into this shelter they had built, away from the storms and agonies of individuality’.

  There are actual subterranean spaces in the world; and Land Under England does a vividly memorable job of evoking its gloomy, dimly phosphorescent milieu whilst staying, just, on the side of believability. But the underground in this novel is metaphorical rather than literal. What do they mean, then, these subterranean spaces illuminated by flickering sheets of uncertain ionization? These dream-haunting swamps thronged by predatory giant toads and spiders the size of bears, lit by the glow of giant phosphorescent mushrooms? They are the Id of conscious political life: the dark and monstrous subconscious of ideological authoritarianism. O’Neill’s is a novel that understands that European civilisation itself is built over the abyss, an abyss that threatens once again to rise up and reclaim it. It would be nice to say, three-quarters of a century after Land Under England was first published, that his warning has lost relevance. But it seems to me, re-reading this darkly compelling, claustrophobic novel, that it is more relevant now than ever.

  CHAPTER ONE

  My Father

  THE STORY that I have to tell is
a strange one—so strange indeed that many people may not believe it, and the fact that the events related in it happened in Great Britain itself will, probably, make it less credible than if it had happened in Central Africa or the wilds of Tibet or the lands round the sources of the Amazon, now so much favoured by travellers. Perhaps it is better that it should be so, since if people realised the truth of my story some men would certainly be tempted to try to discover the roads by which my father and I went, and, if they did find the road, would either meet the fate that my father met and that I escaped by mere chance, or bring upon us a conflict of which the results would be incalculable.

  The beginning of the story and its ending have little connection except the most superficial one. It begins as a family legend that is mostly a fairy-tale, but the results of this romantic beginning had little of romance in them for me at least. What they held for my father I shall never fully discover.

  We are the Julians of Julian’s Pond. We might indeed be described as the Julians of the Roman Wall, for Julian’s Pond is only a section of the fosse of that great rampart, and, though we are now an unknown and almost extinct family, we belong to an ancient order of things, of which the Wall and its Ponds are the most evident remnants left on the surface of Britain to-day. Our name and our family traditions point back to a Roman origin. These were the sources from which the dreams of my father came, and the disaster that came to him from his dreams.

  If our family had been able to hold their lands, it is probable that my father would not have fed so much on his fancies, but before the end of the nineteenth century we had lost all our landed property, and the family was so scattered that, when the twentieth century began, my father was the only Julian left in the northern country.

  As my mother often pointed out to him, there was no real reason for his remaining there either, for he had been forced to sell everything except the house, and the house also might have been sold, with advantage to our purses, since it was much too big and too expensive for us.

  The fact that my mother kept pointing out this obvious fact to my father, and that her suggestions were, from his point of view, so irrelevant as not to be worth discussing, will give some idea of the atmosphere of my home life. Not that it was an atmosphere of discord. There was not even sufficient contact between my father and mother to produce discord. He looked upon her as a kind, gentle woman who had no understanding, and could not have any understanding, of the big matters with which he was concerned, and he would have no more thought of talking to her about them than he would have thought of discussing them with his dog.

  Their marriage had been one of those love marriages that bring two people together in a sudden glamorous fusion, and then, if their natures and interests are incompatible, finish up in a swift or slow falling asunder.

  When she was a girl of nineteen or twenty, my mother must have been very beautiful, for, as a woman, she was most attractive to look at. She was certainly lovely, when I first remember her, with her broad face with the cat-like curves and the deep-blue eyes, set very widely apart, and the delicate, fair skin and auburn hair.

  It was a face full of gentleness, and, though a superficial glance might discover little subtlety in it, it was full of a charming delicacy and sweetness that most people found very attractive—all, indeed, except those who looked chiefly for explicit intelligence in a face. Later on, I discovered that her expression concealed a depth of feeling that gave her far more wisdom than mere intelligence can ever give.

  Even in the beginning I found her very attractive, but her influence on my life from the earliest days was overshadowed by that of my father, who was of a type that could hardly fail to dominate the imagination of most boys. To begin with, his appearance was most striking in a romantic sort of way. He was over six feet in height, and had a very handsome, rather aquiline face, with eyes of a brown that was almost black, and curly black hair that fell crisply over a fine forehead with very delicate modelling. When his eyes were dreamy, they were full of soft depths, and when he was in one of his merry humours, which was often, they sparkled and glanced with a most delightful malice that made him extraordinarily good company.

  It was no wonder that my mother fell in love with him. Women found him at all times most attractive, and, for the matter of that, so did men. If he had been a social man, he would certainly never have lacked company, and it would probably have been better for him and for all of us, in the end, if he had been so, even though social life would have depleted still more our slender resources. If he had been constantly surrounded by people, he could not have fed so much on his dreams.

  If, again, my mother had been as obviously powerful and deep in her emotion during their life together as she showed herself after his disappearance, she would probably have been able to exercise some restraining influence over him, but as long as he was with her she never did herself justice and she had no influence over him, though he always treated her with the utmost courtesy and even tenderness, in so far as his nature allowed him to occupy himself with the details of outer attitudes towards people. That was not a very great deal, for, like many attractive men, he was incapable of thinking of others.

  The fundamental interest in the man’s life was in fact his dream, and it was this obsession and not an ordinary selfishness that made him act afterwards in such a way as to wreck our family life, without considering what the effect of his acts would be on my mother and myself.

  Indeed, if he had been an ordinarily vain and selfish man, we might have been saved much suffering, since he would have occupied himself with slighter matters. He belonged rather to the category of artists and scientists and other dreamers whose life is shaped by the urge of their dreams, and who cannot allow the lives of others to interfere with their course.

  If he had had to work for his living, his dreams could not have occupied so great a part of his waking life, but the money that he had got from the sale of the last portion of the Julian lands was just enough, when invested, to allow us to live in decency, and so he was able to spend his time reading and re-reading the classical writers, and doing what he called archaeological work along the Roman Wall, to the great worry of my mother and the disgust of our neighbours, who found society scanty enough in that lonely region and could ill afford to do without a man who could be such delightful company.

  I shared none of these feelings of the community about his actions. I was an only child, and I was the sharer of his dreams. He was my hero, and, during my early days, I must have been one of the happiest as well as one of the most learned of children—in so far as knowledge of the classics can be considered learning. Latin was a second native language for me; archery, javelin-throwing, and other ancient exercises were my pastime, and, as for archæology, there is hardly a foot of the Roman Wall, of all its seventy odd miles, from Wallsend to Bowness, that I have not worked over with my father, examining the Vallum and the Murus, the dyke and the ditches, and the military stations.

  The George Inn at Chollerford is a delightful centre for such wanderings, and so are Burgh, with its clay houses, “the largest village in Cumberland,” where Edward I died, and Bruff, where the 6th Legion put up its altar in memory “of things prosperously performed along the Wall.” This was the part of the Wall that I loved most, but, indeed, all things connected with the Wall were almost equally delightful to me: the duck-ponds that are the remnants of the Wall-ditch; the altar “dedicated by the hunters of Barra to the holy god Silvanus”; the names of the Roman quarrymen cut in a rock to amuse an idle moment — “Securus” and “Justus” and “Mathrianus”; the goose-flocks that made friends with us, after they had thought over us for a while; the sound of the “beetles” of the farmers’ wives on washing-days; the “out-by” farms with their lovely names—“Back-o’-Beyond” and “Hope Alone” and “Seldom-Seen”; the lonely goats that came along to us for company, when we sat down near them, and with little cries tried to prevent us leaving them; the rabbits that scudded away first, showing t
heir white scuts and then stopping suddenly to look back at us; the Nine Nicks of Thirlwall; the Roman water-mill on the Haltwhistle Burn.

  In some places the Wall is ten feet high and ten feet thick, and in these spots we would camp for days, as at Cilurnum, which is called Chesters to-day, for my father always held that, somewhere in the still existing chambers of the forts he would find secret passages to the world below.

  To the ordinary traveller, I daresay, there would seem to be little evidence of that past world in those remote landscapes of beauty or desolation, but for me they were populous with legionaries and centurions, and consuls and emperors.

  Carvoran and Caw Gap and Birdoswald were lovely for themselves, but, when my father began to talk in the evenings, they passed from sight, and in their place I saw Magna and Aesica and Amboglanna populous with their legions. Their names were a fair litany: at Amboglanna the 1st Cohort of the Dacians, “Hadrian’s Own”; at Vindolanda the 4th Cohort of the Gauls; at Procolitra the 1st Cohort of the Batavians; at Cilurnum the 2nd Ala of the Asturians; and so on through all the famous names of great legions.

  In this way I also passed through the doors by which my father escaped from an upper world of dreary twentieth-century realities into kingdoms that were lit by the suns of other days, but not darkened by their clouds.

  It was all a very idyllic and romantic setting for the beginning of an adventure as ghastly as any man has gone through—an adventure so profound and so deadly that it has left a mark on my life that can never be effaced.

  However, the Great War, which was not at all a romantic matter, intervened between those early days of which I am speaking and the convulsion that swept aside my father’s individual life and nearly shattered mine, and I may as well take events in their order.