The Willows

After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes. On the big maps this deserted area is painted in a fluffy blue, growing fainter in color as it leaves the banks, and across it may be seen in large straggling letters the word Sümpfe, meaning marshes.

The Willows is immediately thick with atmosphere thanks to winding, lush descriptions of a pristine area that is as rich with natural beauty as it is desolation and loneliness, strongly reminiscent in both style and setting of

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, one of my favorite novels of any genre. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t really…go anywhere. Yes, Algernon Blackwood (what a name) does a fantastic job building a growing sense of dread, and yes, the otherworldly horror they encounter is sufficiently creepy and intriguing. But nothing much

happened, what did happen was fairly repetitive, and there was absolutely nothing in the way of character development. This latter point is particularly disappointing to me, because the setting, tone, and themes of the story naturally lend themselves to an introspective exploration of character (as in

Annihilation).

To an extent, this is unavoidable in a novella-length work, and some of my complaints are inherent to the format itself (which admittedly isn't entirely fair to Blackwood). However: given the number of pages Blackwood devoted to atmosphere and description, characterization and plot feel proportionately underdeveloped.

In short,

The Willows had wonderful atmosphere and was an engaging read, but ultimately feels like a wasted opportunity.

Some favorite passages:

For the wind sends waves rising and falling over the whole surface, waves of leaves instead of waves of water, green swells like the sea, too, until the branches turn and lift, and then silvery white as their underside turns to the sun.

We entered the land of desolation on wings, and in less than half an hour there was neither boat nor fishing-hut nor red roof, nor any single sign of human habitation and civilization within sight. The sense of remoteness from the world of humankind, the utter isolation, the fascination of this singular world of willows, winds, and waters, instantly laid its spell upon us both, so that we allowed laughingly to one another that we ought by rights to have held some special kind of passport to admit us, and that we had, somewhat audaciously, come without asking leave into a separate little kingdom of wonder and magic—a kingdom that was reserved for the use of others who had a right to it, with everywhere unwritten warnings to trespassers for those who had the imagination to discover them.

Altogether it was an impressive scene, with its utter loneliness, its bizarre suggestion; and as I gazed, long and curiously, a singular emotion began to stir somewhere in the depths of me. Midway in my delight of the wild beauty, there crept, unbidden and unexplained, a curious feeling of disquietude, almost of alarm.

The huge-grown river had something to do with it too—a vague, unpleasant idea that we had somehow trifled with these great elemental forces in whose power we lay helpless every hour of the day and night.

But my emotion, so far as I could understand it, seemed to attach itself more particularly to the willow bushes, to these acres and acres of willows, crowding, so thickly growing there, swarming everywhere the eye could reach, pressing upon the river as though to suffocate it, standing in dense array mile after mile beneath the sky, watching, waiting, listening. And, apart quite from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us.

Mountains overawe and oceans terrify, while the mystery of great forests exercises a spell peculiarly its own.

It made me think of the sounds a planet must make, could we only hear it, driving along through space.

The loneliness of the place had entered our very bones, and silence seemed natural, for after a bit the sound of our voices became a trifle unreal and forced; whispering would have been the fitting mode of communication, I felt, and the human voice, always rather absurd amid the roar of the elements, now carried with it something almost illegitimate. It was like talking out loud in church, or in some place where it was not lawful, perhaps not quite safe, to be overheard.

I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I understood quite well that the standard of reality had changed.

“Death, according to one’s belief, means either annihilation or release from the limitations of the senses, but it involves no change of character. You don’t suddenly alter just because the body’s gone. But this means a radical alteration, a complete change, a horrible loss of oneself by substitution—far worse than death, and not even annihilation. We happen to have camped in a spot where their region touches ours, where the veil between has worn thin”—horrors! he was using my very own phrase, my actual words—“so that they are aware of our being in their neighborhood.”