The Three Impostors; or, The Transmutations (1895)

Arthur Machen’s early short novel displays his fascination with the occult and also, perhaps, his difficulties in organizing longer pieces. His long story or novella, “The Great God Pan,” published the year before, is another example. The images are striking, the situations unsettling, the language resonantly weird, but the narrative lumbers along like trawling a boggy swamp at night. The Three Impostors is so episodic, in fact, that two of its chapters (“The Novel of the Black Seal” and “The Novel of the White Powder”) (no, not that white powder) have been broken out verbatim and anthologized as short stories, which in turn exercised influence on H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and others. But the overall arc of the novel is much darker than either story. The “three impostors” are two men and one woman who belong to an occult society. They are hunting for “a young man with spectacles.” Two more main characters, Mr. Dyson and Mr. Charles Phillips, are middle-aged friends who see one another frequently for cigars and brandy and such. Dyson is something of a spiritual adventurer, or occult detective, while Phillips is a hardheaded proponent of the scientific way of thinking. They enjoy kicking it around. There’s a lot going on in the background of these scenes. The impostors have decided Dyson can help them find the young man with spectacles. They work to meet Dyson as if by accident, win his confidence, and accept his invitation to tell their stories, which include “Black Seal” and “White Powder.” The three plant clues in their stories to manipulate or lead Dyson to the conclusions they want him to reach. I think that’s what is going on here anyway. Machen can be so indirect and allusive about these themes it’s not always easy for me to make out. It’s possible I was missing things. There’s a lot compacted into this. We have no idea how horrifying the opening scene is, for example, until we have finished the novel. Then the opening becomes shocking. What I love most about Machen at his best is the powerful sense that more things are going on in heaven and earth beyond what we can detect or know with our senses. We only get glimpses of these realities, whatever they are, which are almost too awful to let ourselves contemplate. There are levels beyond levels beyond levels in the best of his stuff, which includes this novel. It may be awkwardly constructed, the dense language may hover near maddeningly opaque, but it is still a novel, not an accidental collection of breakaway stories. In a way, The Three Impostors is more like the opposite of a fix-up novel.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.