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This month features The Fog and The Rats by James Herbert
The Fog, James Herbert, Pan, 0330376144, £6.99
Page 60.
Have you read it?
Yes, page 60.
Page 60. Go on. Have a look.
You’re not scared, are you?
What do you think?
Yeah, isn’t it?
This is what you would have heard, circa 1982, in the playground at my school.
The book being handed round was James Herbert’s The Fog. Either that or James Herbert’s The Rats, which also had a page – a page upon which something particularly significant took place.
On page 60 of The Fog:
‘The boys had stopped halfway through the PE exercises leaving Osborne, their burly physical training master, jumping on the spot alone, arms and legs snapping in-out, in-out. One boy had ceased jumping first, then all the others, as one, had followed suit. They stood rigid, staring at the energetic teacher, their arms at their sides, no words passing between them, but somehow mentally in tune with one another…
‘“Come on, Clark, what’s all this about, eh?”
‘Clark, one of his personal favourites, because of his promising ability as a sportsman, said nothing, but stared at the teacher as if he’d never seen him before…
‘“All right, all right, you’ve had your little prank, but I’m going to give you five seconds to get weaving again!” He strode into the middle of them. “One…”
‘He failed to notice Clark, now behind him, walk towards a cricket bat lying on one of the benches at the side of the gym.’
There is, of course, little doubt what Clark does with the cricket bat.
Nor what, three pages later, another character does with a large pair of garden shears.
That was why page 60, and pages 61 and 62, conveyed such a galvanic frisson in the playground.
Half an hour later, if it was a Thursday, we boys would be in the gym being shouted at.
I’m not sure if, back then, I read much more than those few pages of The Fog. I did read The Rats, which is a better and a far scarier book. But The Fog was the one which connected, which became a playground cult.
The effect of page 60 was similar to hearing ‘We don’t need no education/ We don’t need no thought control’ sung in defiantly estuary accents on Pink Floyd’s The Wall. It was public schoolboy dissidence.
The other record The Fog reminds me of is ‘London Calling’ by The Clash. What they have in common is a very Cold War vision of apocalyptic London.
The set-up of The Fog is very simple – it is latter-day Wyndham Lewis; The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos meets biological, chemical and nuclear anxiety uptown. There is a violent earthquake (or is it?) in rural Wiltshire, nearby to where the Ministry of Defence conducts its secret military experiments. Our hero, John Holman, a civil servant at the Department of the Environment, is on his way back from a spying mission – checking up on the untrustworthy MoD. A deep fissure suddenly opens up down the middle of the road. Holman’s car skids in. He manages to escape, and to go to the aid of a terrified little girl, but:
‘Just then Holman noticed movement at his feet. At first he thought it was dust caused by the disturbance, but then saw it was billowing up from below. It was like a mist, slowly rising in a sluggish swirling motion, slightly yellowish although he couldn’t be sure in the gloom.’
It is the eponymous fog.
By the time he is rescued from the huge hole, Holman has breathed in some of the fog and has gone completely, suicidally insane.
This is the effect that the fog has. It makes some people want to kill themselves and some people want to kill others. It also makes animals, cows, cats and birds, want to kill people – allowing Herbert to reprise some of the pack-attack scenes of The Rats.
James Herbert isn’t a good prose writer; his sentences often clunk, start up again, then clunk once more. The book is chockful of 1970s sexual stereotypes – the frustrated housewife, the self-pitying lesbian, the seedy homosexual, the uncommitted Home Counties playboy hero, the doting doormat heroine.
Herbert’s best trick, one he repeats often, is to introduce us to a character for a page or two, just enough for them to start annoying us, and then kill them off in an entertainingly gruesome manner. For example, there’s Herbert Brown the pigeon fancier whose beloved birds, a few paragraphs in, peck his eyes out. It’s as if fiction had become bored with itself – as if it were saying, I’m not going to be responsible about the work I’ve put in to establishing this character; I’m just going to fucking waste them. This, as one of the many clichéd lower class characters says, is just ‘Like one of those ’orror films.’
The fog itself isn’t a particularly menacing presence. If all it can do is simply be blown around by the wind, it isn’t capable of truly surprising and horrifying us. Herbert seems to realise this, and does his best to give it a malevolent monsterish consciousness:
‘Could it be self-motivated? It was an incredible idea and [Holman] tried to dismiss it from his mind. It was too fantastic, too much like science fiction…’
But, and I don’t want to be patronizing, there is definitely something in Herbert’s vision of London gone mad that stands comparison with John Wyndham’s decimated England in The Day of the Triffids.
In the thick of the fog:
‘They passed many burning buildings, more blazing cars; scores of people roaming the streets, insanity evident on their faces; individuals curled up in corners, occasionally staring around with wide, fearful eyes. They passed bodies that had obviously fallen or jumped from the surrounding tall buildings; they heard, screams, laughter, chanting; they saw people on their knees praying. And, strangest of all, they saw people behaving normally: queuing at bus stops, walking along briskly as though on their way to work, swinging umbrellas or carrying briefcases, entering the buildings that were open, waiting patiently alongside others whose doors had not yet been unlocked, chatting to one another as though it were an ordinary working day, ignoring the chaos that was taking place around them. But that was their abnormality.’
James Herbert, The Rats, Pan, 0330376144, £6.99
I wanted to find out which the page 60 equivalent was in The Rats, so I reread it.
It was page 68, on which the hero (this time an art teacher) and his doting doormat heronie make love al fresco, slipping down a hillside.
Herbert’s trademark, and one of the reason he appealed to the schoolboy me, was to alternate horror with sex. And much of the horror comes as a form of punishment for some sexual abnormality, either an excess or a paucity of desire.
One of the victims in The Rats is Mary Kelly, a devout Catholic nymphomaniac. Another is a shame-filled middle-aged homosexual. Another is simply trying to cop a feel in a darkened cinema.
The 1970s sexism, homophobia and racism which pervade The Fog are there more sharply in The Rats.
By the end, it seems pretty clear that the novel is an allegory of immigration paranoia: dangers to the hermetic health of the UK come from the infectious south, the vicious orient. Mutant irradiated rats have been secretly imported from New Guinea by Schiller, a zoologist with the surname of a German Romantic. If we’re not careful, we’ll be overrun.
‘A black rat was feeding on [Foskins], drinking the red liquid with greedy gulping motions. It stopped as the light was shone fully one it, two slanted eyes, yellow and malevolent, glaring directly at the bright torch.’
Herbert was born in 1944. He and others of his generation would have glimpsed those slanted eyes before – glaring down from tattered wartime posters warning of the Yellow Peril.
A genuinely nasty book.
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