The Great God Pan

Ask people about famous Welsh fantasy writers and they will probably look blankly at you. Ask them, “what about Arthur Machen” and they may well reply, “oh, was he Welsh?” The Great God Pan is a classic of 19th Century Gothic fiction. Parts of it are even set in Wales. But it is, after all, rooted in Classical mythology rather than Welsh. Machen (Arthur Llewellyn Jones) was born in Caerleon, the home of Legio II Augusta, and he spent a lot of time thinking about the Roman Empire.

The end of the 19th Century is an interesting time for speculative fiction. Machen published the final version of The Great God Pan in 1894. HG Wells published The Time Machine in 1895. The two books are very different. One helped kick-start the burgeoning genre of science fiction. The other is acknowledged as a classic of the horror genre but, like the work of HP Lovecraft, it can seem very stilted to a modern reader.

The basic plot of the story is very straightforward. A young gentleman is invited to witness a scientific experiment which, he is assured, will allow the test subject to see into the mystical realm and gaze upon The Great God Pan. The experiment appears to be a failure as the subject ends up a drooling idiot. Years later the same gentleman becomes aware of a number of high profile suicides of wealthy men, which he links to a particular woman, and thence back to the consequences of the experiment that he witnessed.

The problem, for both Machen and Lovecraft, is that they must somehow convey in words that which is too horrible for the mortal mind to witness without descending into madness. It is a task in which they both fail, because if they didn’t no one would survive reading their books.

What is then left for the horror writer is to convey a sense of creeping, escalating unease. That’s something that Alan Garner does very well in The Owl Service. Neither Machen nor Lovecraft seems to have that skill. Whether that is actually a lack of skill, or something cultural that differentiates the late 19th century from our own time, I can’t tell. I’m not well versed enough in horror as a genre.

What we can say, however, is that Machen’s influence on later writers has been immense. Bram Stoker, Lovecraft, and Stephen King have all been fans. He also has the unusual honour of having written a story that gave life to an urban legend (‘The Bowmen’ is the source for the Angel of Mons legend). And he had a fascinating life, including being friends with Oscar Wilde and a member of the Golden Dawn. Not bad for a kid from near Casnewydd.

Title: The Great God Pan
By: Arthur Machen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura