The Other Side     by Alfred Kubin, Translated by Mike Mitchell Original title: Die andere Seite Original language: German Published by Dedalus Pub. Date: January 1, 2000 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 320 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.78 x 7.79 x 5.68 ISBN: 1873982690 List Price: $15.99, £10.17 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £9.99 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.19 Published by Penguin Pub. Date: 1973 Format: Paperback, 282 pages Not available for ordering Published by Gollancz Pub. Date: 1969 Format: Hardcover Not available for ordering

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Kubin was an artist whose primary medium was pen and ink. He was one of the best-known and most influential book illustrators of the first half of this century. His works record a fascination with the grotesque, with decay and horror, and dark sexual fantasies; the writer for whom he illustrated the greatest number of books was Edgar Allan Poe. Among his contemporaries he is probably closest in feeling to Mervyn Peake, illustrator and author of the wonderful Gormenghast trilogy.

He was originally commissioned to illustrate Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem (see review here), the author supplying him with the text chapter by chapter, as it was written. When Meyrink’s inspiration dried up, Kubin used the illustrations he had done as the starting point for a fantastic novel of his own, The Other Side, the only novel he wrote.

The story is told by a graphic artist living in Munich who is visited one afternoon by an emissary of an old school-friend, Claus Patera, who has inherited fabulous riches. He has used his wealth to found an empire of his own, the Dream Kingdom, cut off from the rest of the world by an immense wall somewhere in central Asia. Patera rejects the modern world of science and technology and has built and furnished his realm by buying up old objects — everything from small utensils to whole buildings — in Europe and transporting them to Asia. Nothing later than the 1860s is allowed in the Dream Kingdom.

The narrator accepts Patera’s invitation, and he and his wife travel — via Samarkand — to Perle, the capital of the kingdom, being forced at the frontier to jettison any possessions the officials consider too modern.

Perle turns out to be a murky, twilit world, full of dilapidation and decay, where the logic of everyday existence appears not to apply. The Dream Kingdom gradually takes on the atmosphere of a nightmare. A visit to the dairy behind their flat, for example, turns into a descent through a labyrinth of dripping passages; a runaway horse, so emaciated it is no more than a living skeleton, suddenly charges past; when the narrator emerges the door leads into the coffee house where the customers and waiters are just recovering from the ’Brainstorm’ which visits all the inhabitants whenever the inhabitants’ resistance to their fate grows too strong.

Patera remains inaccessible to his old school friend, ensconced in a huge palace and guarded by an impenetrable bureaucracy that anticipates Franz Kafka’s The Castle. Under the strain of the grotesque irrationality of this world, the narrator’s wife falls ill and dies. The narrator himself, after his initial resistance, succumbs to the all-pervading atmosphere, allowing himself to be drawn into the twilight world of Patera’s kingdom and experiencing a series of surrealistic dreams. He also produces his best work as an artist.

Into this lethargic community bursts a dynamic figure: Hercules Bell, an American multimillionaire who is the exact opposite of all that Patera represents. The two, Patera and Bell, gradually swell into gigantic figures and the conflict between them assumes apocalyptic proportions, the final battle that destroys Patera and his kingdom turning into a cosmic cataclysm.

The narrator survives to tell the tale, which reads like an allegory of a journey into the unconscious, to the dream world which is an essential part of creation. But only one part. The world, the final paragraphs seem to say, is a hybrid of the dark forces of death and the bright sunlight of life.

‘As I started across the river, I sensed that the miller was standing behind me. «I murdered him,» he growled, and tried to push me into the water. Then, to my astonishment, my left leg grew to enormous length so that I could step efforlessly across into the motley crowd on the opposite bank. And then I heard about me a multifarious ticking, and became aware of a great number of flat clocks of almost every size, from church clocks and kitchen clocks down to the smallest pocket-watches. They had short stubby legs and were creeping about in the meadow like turtles to the accompaniment of an excited ticking. A man dressed in soft green leather with a cap that looked like a white sausage was sitting in a leafless tree and catching fishes out of the air...’ p150