THE DEEP ONES: "The Fall of Ashes" by Mark Valentine

"The Fall of Ashes" by Mark Valentine

Discussion begins June 28, 2023.

First published in Secret Europe (2012).



BIBLIOGRAPHY

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?2187427

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Secret Europe

ONLINE VERSIONS

https://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/04/the-fall-of-ashes/

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

No online audio versions found to date.

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Valentine
http://www.tartaruspress.com/mark-valentine.html
https://endlessbookshelf.net/2021/10/15/a-singular-interview-with-mark-valentine...
https://swanriverpress.ie/srp-author/mark-valentine/
https://tinyurl.com/52t8yp7n

I have a suspicion I'd liked this better in its native context in Secret Europe, but standalone it struck me as unoriginal observations on people under totalitarianism unremarkably told, and not at all Weird.

I liked it, particularly the last image of the ashes obliterating the text of the new and improved official history, a nice reversal of the medieval citadel bursting through the modern streets.

I am interested in reading the whole book.

Does anyone have any idea what country this is supposed to be set in?

Well, Secret Europe is supposed to be set in real and fictional locations in Interwar Europe. If this one is supposed to be set in a particular real country, my guess would be somewhere in the southern parts of the Soviet Union, since the flavour of totalitarianism struck me as more Communist than Fascist.

Soucek is a Czech name, but democratic Czechoslovakia can’t very well be intended. The German names are unhelpful as there were significant German-speaking minorities all over Eastern Europe before Mr Hitler’s little adventure.

>5 AndreasJ: I agree that it seems more like a communist state. The narrator doesn't work at an ochre exporting firm. He works at the "ochre export office" which hints at a state-owned enterprise. However, I'm a bit puzzled as to why naming a cat "Archduke" would seem to be controversial if this was a communist state.

Well, the aristocracy was generally assumed to be anti-Soviet as class enemies of the proletariat, so without actually knowing I can easily believe that naming a cat for a noble title would have been considered suspect.

The particular title "archduke" was a Habsburg specialty, though, which might hint we're in ex-Habsburg territory, none of which became Soviet before WW2.

I think the story does work better in the context of Secret Europe where it contributes to a composite picture of a "secret" Europe which is also a lost one, obliterated by history, but also an imagined one. Some of the locations are fictional as already noted, but these are also stories written by a couple of middle-aged Englishmen just a few years older than me. The parts of the world they are writing about were largely inaccessible in their childhood and early adulthood, being part of the Soviet bloc, behind the "Iron Curtain".

I imagine they both had moments when they found out about the countries of pre-WWII Europe, through old atlases or stamps or books, and maybe it was like finding an unexpected room in a well-known house (I remember hearing or reading about Byzantium/ the Byzantium Empire without having any clear idea of what it was, but there was a definite moment when I realised "wait, you mean there was a Roman Empire right up to the Renaissance?" Mind blown, as no-one says anymore).

As the original publisher was based in Romania, presumably there was no feeling that these stories were insensitive or written from an uncomprehending outsider's viewpoint.

As to the story itself, I thought it was effective, albeit in a minor key and as elegently written as usual with this author (actually, the line "newly erected blocks rose in stark blocks" was uncharacteristicaly clumsy).

Although there is nothing Weird about the events in the story, and the story is (reductively) "about" how people behave in a Totalitarian state - although it hints at the attractions of otherthrowing the old regime, with the rumour that the ashes might be everyones' official papers, I did reflect that Mark Valentine has been connected to Arthur Machen (he wrote a short literary biography of the man in the '90s, he's been connected to Tartarus Press almost from the beginning, and so on), and how close a mystical experience is, in much of Machen's work, to a vaguely symbolic or allegorical, but essentially naturalistic image in straight-down-the-line Modernist or literary fiction.