Chumble & Widgeon

My review today of ENGLISH HERITAGE by M. John Harrison….

“Without their indistinctness things do not exist; you cannot desire them. Blurs and important wrong shapes, ridgy lights, crater darkness making a face unhuman as a map of the moon,…”
— Elizabeth Bowen 

…quoted in my today’s daily review of Bowen, about an hour before reading the Harrison Nightjar with the below circumflex-elbow sitting above the end of its signature, and the deliberate or accidental, not elbow-, but bowel-movement in a seaside holiday house’s mis-opened garage… 

“She liked to be lost. She liked the adventure of it.”

And despite being unique in itself, this fine Harrisonic story is the essence of ElBowen (in a similar way Aickman was used by her in the form of this story’s succubus), a story depicting one of Bowen’s shadowy triangulations in contact with psychotic objects (mainly in the kitchen at the end) and an Obelisk, this triangulation being one of two men and a woman, on holiday from Covid in a seaside place where Rick Stein gets mentioned. It also mentions Clun, the first time I have seen this place mentioned in literature, a place where I went on honeymoon in 1970 after putting a pin in a map.
This triangulation’s visit to the English Heritage is not only seen in being essential Bowen, but also in the stately house Sweenay — after which house (with its own public car park) their own holiday place was ironically named wherein they were set on telling ghost stories to each other and a place with the strangely opened garage and (or as) outside toilet. Sweenay itself turned out to be badly affected by Pandemic regulations…
And places where one part of the triangulation saw another part unclearly in the distance. A story with kites, a sudden thunderstorm, a “disproportionate thud”, an act of partially losing where one has parked a car, strange shouts across the bay in the night, strangely staged conversations between two parts of the triangulation overheard by a shadowy third (or did I imagine that when learning that one of the men “felt as if he were stuck in some view of himself…”?), the story of Chumble and Widgeon, and a reference to a woman “who had spent her retirement in fabulous but waning old places…”

“Time isn’t specially a thing,…”

My previous reviews of M. John Harrison: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/m-john-harrison/

This story’s NIGHTJAR PRESS context: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/12/23/nightjar-nuitjour-nightday-nightlight-nightjourney/