The Terror of Blue John Gap | review by Rafe McGregor
Theaker’s Paperback Library, 148pp, £7.54, July 2010, ISBN 9780956153326
The Victorians were obsessed with doubles, whetherthe literal evil twin brother of the doppelgänger popularised by E.TA. Hoffman,Edgar Allan Poe, and Oscar Wilde or the figural pairing of the civilised andthe savage in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Edward Prendick and Dr Moreau, and CharlesMarlow and Mr Kurtz. Conan Doyle was no exception to the rule. Doubles appearin two of his Sherlock Holmes stories, ‘The Final Problem’ (1893) and ‘TheAdventure of the Creeping Man’ (1923), in the pairing of Holmes and Professor Moriartyand Professor Presbury and Presbury-on-serum respectively, and the fact that DrWatson never sees Moriarty raises the intriguing possibility that he isactually a doppelgänger. Doyle also deployed doubling in his horror fiction,most notably in ‘A Pastoral Horror’ (1890) – Father Verhagen anddiseased-Verhagen – and ‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’ (1910), both of which Iselected for Theaker’s Paperback Library’s TheConan Doyle Weirdbook.
‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’ is an epistolary noveletteof just over seven thousand words, which is divided into seven diary entries byDr James Hardcastle, from 17 April 1907 to 10 June 1907, bookended by a forewordand a single-sentence conclusion by an implied author. Although Hardcastle isintroduced as a man of science, he was terminally ill with tuberculosis at thetime of the events chronicled and the story is replete with suggestions that heis an unreliable narrator. The repeated reflections, allusions, and intimationsof mental illness are matched by a carefully constructed undermining of thepossibility of corroboration. Hardcastle thinks he hears, sees, and shoots ablind, ‘bear-like’ beast taller and broader than an elephant and ten times thesize of the biggest bear, but all the reader knows for certain is that heentered Blue John Gap mine, fell, and lost consciousness. Hardcastle first hearsabout the beast from a young man named Armitage on 17 April, when he favoursprosaic explanations of missing sheep and a damaged wall. By 3 May, Armitagehas himself disappeared and Hardcastle leaps to the completely baselessconclusion that the beast is responsible. Hardcastle’s shot either misses orfails to draw blood and his vague description of his own wounds – concussion, abroken arm, and two broken ribs – is ambiguous as to whether they were causedby a swat from a gargantuan mole or a fall down a mine shaft. Finally, thelocals are quick to dissuade ‘adventurous gentlemen’ from descending on theirpeaceful haven in the Derbyshire Dales and repair the gap to prevent anyfurther exploration.
I’m increasingly convinced that Doyle’sachievement is similar if not identical to that of Henry James in The Turnof the Screw (1898), where the interpretations of psychological and supernaturalhorror are equally valid to the extent that the ambiguity is constitutive ofthe work’s literary value. If the beast is an overgrown figment of Hardcastle’simagination, then it is likely the product of his unconscious and ‘The Terrorof Blue John Gap’ a psychological horror story. Hardcastle is exemplary of theVictorian gentleman, a well-educated and well-mannered man of reason with asteadfast moral compass, a propensity for bold action when provoked, and thegender, class, and ecological prejudices of his time. As he narrates themajority of the narrative, the reader becomes acquainted with both his actionsand his thoughts. The beast, in contrast, remains entirely enigmatic, with muchof its appearance left to the reader’s imagination and scant explanation of itsevolution, habitat, or behaviour. It is, in short, wholly Other to humanity ingeneral and Hardcastle in particular. If the beast is real, then the narrativerecalls the novels of one of Doyle’s contemporaries, H. Rider Haggard, whoseserial protagonist Allan Quartermain is the archetypal Great White Hunter. For Haggard and the majority of Victorians, naturewas simply a resource to be mastered, adapted, and exploited for humanity’s benefit,notwithstanding the widespread acceptance of Charles Darwin’s theory of naturalselection. Yet Doyle’s perspective on the relation between Hardcastle and thebeast, whether mental or material, is much more sophisticated and explored witha calculated literary artifice that employs two converging configurations.
First, he distances his readers from Hardcastle asthe narrative progresses, a cumulative effect achieved by the combination of repeatedreferences to his unreliability with an escalation of his obsession to uncoverthe mystery of the mine, an investigation he is patently unfit to undertake. Hardcastleis most unsympathetic in his determination that Armitage has fallen victim to thebeast, convincing himself that the beast has taken Armitage in order to justifythe satisfaction of his own desire to hunt and kill it. Second, Doyle invites readersto empathise with the beast by means of the late revelation of itsvulnerability (blindness) and the even later speculation as to its origin(earthly not infernal). The epistemic ambiguity is thus extended to the ethicaland the story closes with the question of whether our sympathies should liewith the beast or with Hardcastle. The beast is the most complex of Doyle’sdoubles because in spite of representing the brutish, savage, and untamedaspects of humanity, it is not presented as meriting approbation – likediseased-Verhagen, Moriarty, and Presbury-on-serum. As such, the doubling ofHardcastle and the beast is an instantiation of what Mark Bould refers to asthe environmental uncanny in The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture (2021): the recognition by human beings that they arein the presence of nonhuman agency, which draws attention to the play ofidentity and difference between human and nonhuman. Whether produced byHardcastle’s unconscious or by natural selection, the beast sheds light on therelation between the human and the natural worlds.
It would be stretching credulity to categorise ‘TheTerror of Blue John Gap’ as eco-fiction – fiction that takes the integrationand interdependence of humanity and the environment as its subject – butDoyle’s deployment of doubling in the novelette is distinct from the otherthree examples I cited. Diseased-Verhagen is a serial killer, Moriarty an evilgenius, and Presbury-on-serum a rapist-in-waiting. The beast is neitherhomicidal nor evil nor rapacious. While the zoocidal Hardcastle’s agency isimpaired by his obsession, the beast has sufficient control of its instincts torefrain from making a meal of his unconscious body. That ‘awful moment when wewere face to face’ is likely to have been awful for each of the doubles, thepair of which provide a reminder of the invisible ties among all livingspecies.
