80 pages
Published 1915
Read November 18
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
I went into this flimsy novella knowing nothing about it beyond its author (who could write an interesting story if he really wanted to) and its length (which would pad out my reading numbers and perhaps help get me to a hundred books read this year). Despite the story’s brevity, Machen feels no urgency to get to his point. He rambles about marvelous events getting lost in the quotidian apathy of newspaper type for about 15% of the book before we even get a hint of what our plot might be.
The Great Return turns out to be a tale of metaphysical manifestations in a quiet Welsh village, signs and wonders turning the folk of Llantrisant serene and joyful, full of appreciation for the world around them, which seems to have become Paradise. It almost feels like a step on the road to folk horror: a village of ecstatics, albeit played for religious fantasy rather than horror.
The novella is shoddily constructed. The first half is an account of some guy hearing about the mystery of Llantrisant and coming to investigate it. His efforts consist of happening to overhear conversations in and around the town. Around the halfway mark, Machen appears to grow bored of connecting this framing device to the rest of the story, and has his narrator abruptly shift gears:
This is enough of the personal process, as I may call it; and here follows the story of what happened at Llantrisant last summer, the story as I pieced it together at last.
We are never given an indication of how the narrator pieced any of it together, which (to my tastes) makes the existence of the narrator entirely superfluous.
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