As is often the case with the Faber Editions reissues, Sven Holm’s Termush was a book I hadn’t heard of before it was presented to me as part of a series with a pretty knockout hit rate so far (we’ll just quietly draw your attention to Mrs Caliban, They, Maud Martha, The Glass Pearls and The Shutter of Snow and leave you to decide whether you agree or not).
What you have here is a sort of proto-Ballardian dystopia (although don’t get hung up on the Ballardian moniker – it both is and isn’t Ballardian). A severe disaster has occurred (but we don’t really get “visions of the corpses or the shattered houses or the people who are still alive with burns on their bodies”) and a group of (we assume) wealthy people have been summoned, as part of disaster protocols, to the Hotel Termush, where, it is hoped, they will be looked after in keeping with what they have paid.
But, you know, there is “considerable pollution”, and before long the “concern” that “Termush should become infested with sick people”. And, let’s not forget what happens when people of any kind get together. “Rumours”. “Noisy comments”. Factions. Ah, you might think, so it’s a sort of end of the world Lord of the Flies we’re talking about? To which the answer has to be: kind of but also no, not at all.
Because the best thing about Termush is its irresistible obliqueness. In the midst of the awfulness and the threats of still greater awfulness hovers a sort of indeterminate buzzing delirium:
“Suddenly I was startled by the unnerving number of identical doors, the great pitchers which stand and gape, empty of flowers, and the blazing blue carpeting which seems to rise up slantingly along the length of the corridor.”
As you’d expect of such a calamity, arguably the greatest calamity, things get a mite existential:
“Is nothing changed, can everything be swept away as a dream is swept out of the conscious mind in the morning?”
This strange hotel at the end of the world grows increasingly strange as you progress page by page through the oddity that is Termush:
“I see Termush as a large organism, a single body, which acts according to different laws from those which apply to each individual guest. No one can foresee a reaction; the organism comes up with its reply later on, positive or negative. Or it reacts unexpectedly, as in paralysis – it rests and is tolerant and then kicks out like a damaged muscle.”
Jeff VanderMeer provides the introduction to the reissue and there is a pervasive sense of ‘if you like VanderMeer, particularly his Southern Reach trilogy, you’ll get a big kick out of this’.
Any Cop?: Another smasher from Faber Editions.
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