The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen

Disturbing trip inside a mind losing grip on reality

Welsh author Arthur Machen’s novel The Hill of Dreams was published in 1907. Its protagonist, Lucian Taylor, is the son of a clergyman. Lucian and his widower father live on the outskirts of a rural Welsh village named Caermaern. Lucian is very intelligent, but not in the conventional good-grades way. He loves books and enjoys filling his mind with esoteric, mostly useless knowledge. A social outsider, Lucian frequently wanders alone through the countryside. He develops a fascination for the local Roman ruins and all things antiquarian and reads works on the occult. From such subject matter, he creates an interior fantasy world that serves as a paradisiacal refuge from the world of everyday society. Lucian is smart enough to pursue university studies, but he doesn’t have the money to do so. I don’t know enough about the Welsh clergy to understand how a country parson goes poor, but Lucian and his father live in relative squalor. Lucian is caught in the catch-22 of can’t get an education without money and can’t earn money without an education. He decides to become a writer and devotes all of his energies to that goal. The practice of writing becomes almost a religious obsession with him, entwined with his pagan fantasy land. Lucian’s literary career is an uphill battle, however, and he experiences failure and frustration in his chosen vocation.

Through the eyes of this outsider, Machen satirizes the British literary scene and the British class system. The rich residents of Lucian’s town look down on him for his poverty, while they themselves are depicted as pompous, shallow hypocrites. As a writer, Lucian yearns to create a timeless masterpiece for the ages, but he is constantly reminded, by literary critics and well-meaning neighbors, that the insipid popular novel is where success lies. Underlying the story of Lucian’s coming-of-age, The Hill of Dreams is an expression of Machen’s ideas on literature and the arts. His is a bleak and cynical outlook reminiscent of Jack London’s Martin Eden.

Machen is best-known today as an author of horror fiction. (Stephen King is a fan.) Is The Hill of Dreams horror? Not by today’s standards. It’s more of a psychological tragedy with an overall tone reminiscent of the deliberate dreariness of Edgar Allan Poe’s work. The novel charts Lucian’s gradual descent into madness. The reader roots for this young man, hoping he’ll find some happiness, but it becomes harder to get behind him as he becomes more and more disturbingly unhinged. Lucian’s story illustrates how someone like a John Hinckley Jr., Mark David Chapman, or Ted Kaczynski might have been created. About 90 percent of this novel, however, happens inside of Lucian’s head, so he never goes so far as to commit actions similar to those aforementioned psychopaths.

Those with antisocial tendencies can’t help but identify to some extent with Lucian. Polite society is replete with superficial pretense. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get along without it? This is a book that speaks to misanthropes and misfits. Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian likewise speaks to that audience, but reassures such misanthropes that there are others out there like you, your narcissism is justified, you are superior to the human herd, and someday you will be discovered by your misfit brethren. Machen offers no such consolation in The Hill of Dreams. We sympathize with Lucian, but there is no doubt he has gone off the rails, beyond the point of reason or justification.

Machen writes brilliant, exquisite prose. There’s hardly a sentence in this book that wouldn’t qualify as a quotable line of poetry. The plot, or lack thereof, does get repetitive and drag on in its relentless chronicling of Lucian’s deranged thoughts. Nevertheless, this is a deep and compelling work. One reading might not be enough to fully appreciate everything Machen put into this.