In very brief summary: Gerald and his lover, Winifred Coombe-Tennant conceived a child. Mrs Coombe-Tennant had had difficult experiences giving birth and did not relish the prospect but both of them believed they were being directed to do this from beyond the grave by the founding fathers of the SPR, Frederick Myers, Henry Sidgwick and Edmund Gurney. Their child, guided by the deceased eminences of the SPR, was meant to grow into a sort of messiah who would lead mankind into a new golden age. While Henry Coombe-Tennant had an unusual and remarkable life, it was lived largely away from the limelight. He spent his last 29 years as a Benedictine monk, perhaps a big disappointment to the dead founders of the SPR.
I was particularly struck that people at the heart of government could believe such things and act on them. I found myself wondering what people at the heart of government now might believe - well, apart from the obvious.
Andrew Conway told me about The Lovecraft Investigations, an updating of the stories and themes of H P Lovecraft in the form of a fake podcast from the BBC. I love it! Many films have started from Lovecraft's stories and few of them do him any sort of justice. By far the best adaptation I've seen is The Call of Cthulhu, an ultra-low-budget production of the H P Lovecraft Historical Society, a black-and-white, silent movie, the sort of film that would have been made at the time the stories were originally written. Short on gloss, long on atmosphere, it really catches the feel of the original story. We can't call it an updating, though, it's more like an attempt to fake an artifact from Lovecraft's own time.
A cinematic or televisual updating would demand images, CGI stuff, that would leave nothing to the imagination; even worse, would compete destructively with your own imaginings. The podcast form is utterly contemporary but doesn't suffer from this problem at all. Conversations and sounds can build atmosphere in a truly Lovecraftian way while leaving any amount of room for the listener's own mental images. Since they are gathering material the podcasters leave their microphones on all the time and provide narration for the listener. Recording machinery may of course prove more sensitive than the human ear.
All sorts of updatings become possible that don't break the Lovecraftian essentials. I just loved the detailed histories that blend almost imperceptibly into the real world so you start googling names to work out who's real and who's imagined for the story. It seems absolutely correct that followers of Nyarlathotep would be found at the heart of the British establishment, that the Esoteric Order of Dagon would melt into the British Union of Fascists.
I was amused also to discover that Kennedy Fisher, one of the two (fictional) podcast hosts, has her own blog. It leads in many disturbing directions, one of them the Wikipedia biography of Oswald Mosely. There in turn it was surprising to learn about Mosley's involvement with organic farming in Britain, the origins of the Soil Association and ... someone called Lady Eve Balfour. Yes, from the same Balfour family, one of the six children Gerald had with his wife, Lady Elizabeth Bulwer-Lytton. Henry Coombe-Tennant was her illegitimate half-brother.
There's no suggestion Eve Balfour had any fascist sympathies whatsoever. She lived for 50 years with another woman and may have been a sort of person the fascists would have preferred to stamp out. She and Mosley come together only in their shared interest in organic farming. But I was slightly spooked to follow a trail from these early 20th century psychical researchers and bump up against a famed British fascist, a real-world mirror of the sort of trail Dr Eleanor Peck would have drawn out so convincingly.
