Library of Wales: Hill of Dreams

Arthur Machen’s classic of 1907 is ‘a book of great beauty’ that defies definition. Thinly veiled autobiography? A treatise on the art of writing? Psychogeography avant la lettre? A study of madness? It is all of these and more, conveyed through a mesmeric tale of obsession, not with a woman or power or money, but with the beauty and mystic energy of language and the written word, with ‘the construction of the sentence, as if it were a piece of jewellery or mosaic’. Even as a child, Lucian Taylor is an outsider. His mother is dead and his impoverished clergyman father has to withdraw him from school because he can no longer afford the fees. Lucian’s hopes of an Oxford education are dashed, though not his ambition to make his mark as a writer. Roaming the ‘long lovely valley’, the lanes and hills and woodlands around his home, Lucian has two mystical experiences that bring his virgin mind to the edge of sanity. He drifts into a fantasy world, his court of Avallaunius, while secretly scourging himself with thorns. He becomes the aesthete, the ascetic, ‘the true artist’ who perceives all around him a rigidly conformist society in which he has no place. Exiling himself to a bed-sitting-room in a squalid London suburb, where he lives on bread and water, Lucian dedicates himself to producing his great work: ‘the sensuous art of literature; […] the art of causing delicious sensation by the use of words’. It is an ambition that Lucian sadly fails to achieve, but that Machen realises to hypnotic effect. The Hill of Dreams has been described as the most decadent book in all of English literature. It is art for art’s sake – ‘as mystic and wonderful as a dimly lit cathedral’. -- Suzy Ceulan Hughes @ www.gwales.com