Monk'd!

One of my odder fetishes as a longtime lover of books and reading is tiny books: few things make me happier than finding affordable purse-size hardcovers, even though I never carry a purse and thus tote tiny books just like their compatriots of normal size. Discovering a row of little blue Konemann Classics editions of English novels fills me with quiet joy, which is more than I can say for some of their selections (Charles Dickens, I'd be looking at you, but a) you are deceased and b) if you weren't, you'd write an entire chapter about me looking at you).

On my last big binge at a bookstore, along with two obscure horror mangas and a humor book called Haiku U, I bought both a Konemann Classics edition of Dracula and a small, sensationally covered and blurbed Oxford edition of Matthew Lewis's The Monk, the 1796 Gothic novel I didn't get to read in college because we were assigned Mrs. Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. Udolpho, while longer and plagued by a heroine who went unconscious more often than Nancy Drew, assisted me in putting into words a literary position I'd actually held my entire life:

I hate Explained Gothic.

Sure, it's a more realistic subgenre of creepy fiction. But the writer of Explained Gothic, now or then, is no better than a magician who pulls a rabbit from a hat and then shows people the hidden bunny-cage. Saying "Oh, but it was really the nephew all along, merely PRETENDING to be Aunt Sally's ghost in order to drive down property values and snag the manor for himself" is all very well for the novelist, who gets both the benefit of hooking his/her audience on spooks and the smug superiority that comes with shining the light of knowledge into dark places at the end of the story. Readers, on the other hand, feel only faint disappointment. In short, if you put Explained Gothic in front of me, there'd better be someone saying "Jinkies, Scoob!" in due time.

I am pleased to report that, true to its advertising, The Monk is gloriously unexplained, not infrequently wallowy Gothic. In a welter of incest, murder, intrigue, convent goings-on, mistaken identities, hauntings, pacts with the Devil and potions that simulate death, the only thing Lewis seems to have left out is the nun-raping. The plot in its simplest possible terms is this: Lorenzo and Raymond are friends. Raymond loves Lorenzo's sister, Agnes, but she has disappeared into a nunnery after a series of mixups, and soon disappears altogether. Lorenzo loves newcomer Antonia; unfortunately, so does the titular monk, Ambrosio, who after being seduced by a sorceress is in the kind of slippery-slope moral decline much beloved by writers of After-School Specials, but with more cassocks and corpses. From all this springs a situation so bizarre that our heroes, who otherwise spout a kind of proto-Jonathan-Harkerish rationalism, end up relying on the Spanish Inquisition to sort things out-- possibly the last time in history the Inquisition was portrayed as a righter of actual wrongs.

This last is actually where my objection to the book lies: the tension between characters who feel themselves to be rational creatures and a world where a few blocks away the devil is handing someone a pen and a contract has been so well explored in later works (like, well, Dracula) that it comes as something of a shock to see Lewis abandon it for more grottoes and human suffering. The book does seem to focus on mood over substance, but the mood is effective, even two hundred-odd years later.