Over the past years Wakefield Press has been doing a tremendous job releasing seminal works of Weird Fiction, chief among them the fiction of the “Belgian Poe” Jean Ray. One of several pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes de Kremer, Jean Ray is a personality of enigmatic history, whose biography could double for that of a protagonist in one of his stories. Among the releases from Wakefield Press include multiple short story collections, starting with his alcohol and briny sailor-filled Whiskey Tales, and his best-known novel, the strange and exquisitely crafted 1943 gothic horror Malpertuis. Director Harry Kümel adapted the latter into a film featuring Orson Welles in 1972, which had a recent, gorgeous release from Radiance Films.
Translator and writer Scott Nicolay has brilliantly translated and annotated each volume of Jean Ray’s work released by Wakefield Press, and I’ve had the fortune of discovering Ray and reviewing several of those books through this. (I believe all the previous reviews I’ve done have been for Rachel Cordasco’s Speculative Fiction in Translation.)
This year marks a new release of a Nicolay-translated Ray work, 1944’s Les derniers contes de Canterbury (The Last Canterbury Tales), the literary equivalent of a single-artist anthology film, a short story collection that contains both tremendous variety and precise construction to thematically and narratively tie individual stories together with wraparounds that themselves wrap (or warp) time and space. In introductions and postscripts Nicolay and others comment on the structural and thematic ties between Malpurtis and The Last Canterbury Tales, two forms of work that embody the core of Ray’s fiction and Weird creativity.
For one, the origins of the main stories making up The Last Canterbury Tales stretch across two decades of Ray’s writing, meaning that some stories very closely resemble the early stories of Whiskey Tales, including some elements of racism and anti-Semitism that appear far less frequently in his later stories. Other stories come from later periods after Ray had achieved more experience through the various experimentations and explorations of his earlier tales. These shifting eras of composition nicely parallel the changes in space/time that Ray explores within the wraparound structure of The Last Canterbury Tales, with characters pulled from across eras and history of literary reference.
The Last Canterbury Tales also offers readers a sort of sub-genre mix of what Ray worked within. The stories vary from Gothic to Cosmic Horror to Ghost Story to Weird to Comical to Body Horror, and more. All of these variations can make The Last Canterbury Tales into a possibly uneven success for some readers, however it also gives an optional short fiction introduction to Jean Ray’s range that would only otherwise be possible to glean by reading across his other chronological story collections as his style and sub-genre emphases evolved.
Despite variation, all of the stories within The Last Canterbury Tales are distinctly Raysian, united by introspection on fear and death, taking elements from classical literature, religions and mythology, and mixing them up into a modernist milieu (for his time) with a tremendous attention to detail and setting. Nicolay’s annotations that accompany the stories in endnotes mainly serve to explain to the reader the plentiful historical, biographical, geographical, and linguistic details that Ray directly employs or alludes to. Ray’s stories almost seep in a dense atmosphere of place and time, which only enhances elements of Weirdness when Ray then crosses these into one another in the wraparound narrative that cohesively holds The Last Canterbury Tales together.
As its title implies, Ray’s collection uses Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales as a significant influence, using its form and many of its characters here. Yet it is not any completion of Chaucer’s classic, or any attempt to copy the style of its author. The collection equally holds Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron as inspiration, as well as Marguerite de Narre’s Heptaméron. Here the narrative structure involves the social Upper Thames Book Club and a meeting at the Tabard pub with its members and other patrons of the pub who seem to come from across time, space, or beyond to relate their strange tales. Within this framework Ray includes E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Tomcat Murr, a feline from a satirical work who here enigmatically holds court within the Tabard (and viciously dispatches with some of the tale-tellers.) He also includes Shakespeare’s Falstaff in one dark, comical tale (or perhaps more properly speaking this historical personnage that may have inspired the Shakespearean character.) And if this set-up of the Upper Thames Book Club doesn’t already conjure thoughts of The Pickwick Papers, Ray’s choice in character names (e.g. Tobias Weep, Peter Kupfergruns, Herbert Pain, and Reid Unthank) swiftly reveals the Dickensian homage to this collection.
The title of Ray’s collection conveys finality when many of its direct inspirations have the defining characteristic of being famously unfinished. Here Ray is playing ironically with the reader, in a collection that isn’t really finishing any of those classic works, and whose stories within might contain a sense of sudden, surprising finality (such as when Tomcat Murr pounces) but most often conclude with a deep sense of foreboding that the horrors and fears are not done with. The conclusion to the wraparound story itself acts similarly, revealing forces or personages in control of things who are alluded to within some of the tales that precede. It’s a conclusion that does parallel aspects of Ray’s Malpertuis, and gives this collection almost a novelistic cohesiveness.
If you haven’t read Ray before, this would be a fine place to start. Settle into a cozy library chair, pour yourself a glass of whiskey (or spiritual substitute) and join the eclectic cast of characters in the Tabard for a pleasant journey of darkness and weirdness.
