The Great White Space by Basil Copper

"Keep trying,” Scarsdale told me, almost savagely. His bearded face looked more like a Viking than ever as he gazed about him, his revolver cocked and ready for use. I remembered then the fate of the dwarf Zalor and realised what had never been absent from our leader’s mind; that this underground world harboured many ancient and evil things which would only reveal themselves when they were ready.

Before I left on my travels to North Carolina and New Jersey (greatest state in the Union) we read Basil Copper's Jack the Ripper prequel "Bright Blades Gleaming" in the 1995 anthology Dark Love and were impressed by the style, though we found the plot and resolution underwhelming.  In the comments to that blog post about four selected stories from Dark Love, a well-read gentleman, Pliny the Ill, recommended Copper's 1974 novel The Great White Space.  So let's check it out!  The jacket of the Robert Hale edition of The Great White Space, a scan of which I am reading, claims that Copper has been "hailed in America as the best writer of fantasy since H. P. Lovecraft," and the novel is dedicated to Lovecraft and August Derleth, while the first page introduces us to a character named after Clark Ashton Smith, so we have every reason to hope we are about to indulge in a feast of weird Yog-Sothery and cosmic horror.

Pliny the Ill called The Great White Space a Lovecraft pastiche, so we have no reason to be surprised when we immediately learn that the novel comes to us in the form of the memoir of a man who wants to impart to us knowledge only he possesses, a man whose mental health we have reason to question, a man who warns that a terrible future awaits mankind!  And a man who, among the five men of science who went on a secret expedition to a remote location, was the only one to return!   

Our narrator, Frederick Plowright, was a successful photographer of the exotic, and had made a fortune recording on film remote locales and unusual animals while on dangerous expeditions when he was contacted by famed explorer and academic Professor Clark Ashton Scarsdale.  Scarsdale is setting up a return expedition to a site he was forced by terrible danger to flee after only briefly exploring it, a site the exact location and nature of which he refuses to divulge, even as he invites Plowright to join the team he has assembled--himself, electrical engineer and geologist Van Damm, historian and radio expert Holden, and Egyptologist and cartographer Prescott.  Plowright agrees to accompany the expedition and chronicle its progress and findings photographically, as well as lend his physical strength to the undertaking--The Great White Space is full of foreshadowing of how dangerous this expedition is going to be, and the intimation from Scarsdale that physical strength that eggheads Van Damm, Holden and Prescott cannot supply will be necessary is one of many such hints.

The Great White Space, about 180 pages split into 20 chapters, is kind of long and the pace is deliberate, with Copper providing lots of descriptions and many images.  Copper spends four chapters introducing us to the characters, each of whom he tries to give a personality--particular attention is given to the relationship between expedition leader Scarsdale and second in command Van Damm--and the preparations for the expedition.  The four scientists have constructed, and along with Plowright test and train on, four fully enclosed metal vehicles with treads that are operated with a complex series of levers.  Scarsdale also insists the expedition bring along sidearms, rifles, elephant guns, hand grenades, and belt-fed machine guns mounted on tripods--Copper doesn't give a manufacturer or model name for these machine guns, and refers to them variously as "light" and "heavy," leading to a little confusion as to how to visualize them. 

Our band of heroes, whom we know are doomed, leaves England and in Chapter Five is at the walled town of Zak in a mountainous region of Asia.  With a local guide, Zalor the dwarf, they travel across a desert in the four tractors to the village of Nylstrom, 200 kilometers off.  In Chapter Six, in the village, Zalor is discovered to be some kind of traitor and thief but the dwarf escapes.  In Chapter Seven the tractors grind forward to the cyclopean entrance at the base of the Black Mountains that opens onto a vast series of caverns and tunnels.  The five explorers enter a subterranean world lit by a mysterious phosphorescence, marching mile after mile, discovering strange inscriptions, a vast staircase with risers two feet high, jars five feet tall in which are interred human-sized insects whose remains fully dissolve after fifteen minutes of exposure to air, a city of windowless towers in a cavern whose ceiling is so high above it cannot be seen.  Who could have built this ancient city, these tunnels thousands of years old, carved them out of stone that is harder than granite?  The expedition comes upon the dead body of Zalor the dwarf--how did he get ahead of them?  Leaving behind the tractors, our guys cross an underground sea in inflatable boats and then advance on foot, pushing or pulling a trolley which carries weapons and equipment.  Occasionally the narrator hears the sound of leathery wings.  As the men advance deeper into the labyrinth a regular thumping sound, like the beating of a monstrous heart, grows steadily louder.  The most skittish of the scientists, Holden, left alone on guard duty, spots an enormous hopping creature in the distance and fires a machine gun at it--the monster escapes but leaves a trail of slimy gore.      

Copper describes each step of this journey, all the quotidian events of setting up camp, testing equipment, taking notes, taking photos, consulting the weird old book The Ethics of Ygor, who is on watch when, etc., in a pretty straightforward fashion; these many chapters of desert and subterranean travel are a smooth read, even if nothing much is happening.  I found this material entertaining, but it is fair to wonder if it substantially contributes to anything besides the novel's length. 

By Chapter Sixteen, Holden is incapacitated; have the sights of Zalor's mangled body and the hopping creature disordered his mind?  Or has something sapped his very physical strength?  Van Damm stays behind with the stricken man and Scarsdale, Prescott and Plowright, armed to the teeth and equipped with special goggles, advance into a brightening light that pulses in time to the throbbing.  The light, they discover, comes from a big chamber which includes a portal to other planets--this portal is the Great White Space of the title.  Within the chamber of the Great White Space they see oversized and hideous blob aliens with tentacles and claws, and in Chapter Seventeen must fight them; Prescott is devoured.  As they retreat, Scarsdale explains to Plowright that his mission has been to study the aliens and try to make friends with them and, failing that, collect evidence with which to convince the world of the danger posed by the aliens.  In Chapter Eighteen, Scarsdale and the narrator return to find Holden dead and Van Damm, apparently, captured by the monsters!  The state of Holden's corpse drives Plowright temporarily insane, but Scarsdale slaps him sane, and the men try to rescue Van Damm.  They fight and kill a bat-monster fifty feet tall, but it has already sucked the juices out of Van Damm with its proboscis.  They fight some more hopping jelly-creatures.  Luckily the aliens don't have any firearms.

In Chapter Nineteen, Scarsdale disappears while the exhausted Plowright is asleep.  After waking, our narrator finds the Professor among the aliens, not just the blobs and bats but also insect men, the live counterparts of the mummies discovered earlier.  Plowright tries to rescue Scarsdale, but something he sees sends him fleeing--we learn in Chapter Twenty that the narrator saw that the living essences of Zalor the dwarf, Van Damm, Prescott and Holden had been integrated into the jelly-like slug aliens, and that Scarsdale's body seemed to be controlled or partially taken over by aliens.  After a brief description of Plowright's return trip through the tunnels to the surface and then from the Black Mountains back to England, during most of which he was half-insane and feverish, and a prediction that the aliens are about to conquer Earth, come the last lines of the novel, in which in all-caps our narrator presents the theory that even before the expedition began Scarsdale was working, willingly or otherwise, for the aliens--maybe the expedition was mounted so the aliens could integrate into their consciousnesses such experts on Earth history and science as Van Damm, Prescott and Holden.

I enjoyed reading The Great White Space but after finishing it I have to admit it doesn't add up to much and the structure and organization of the novel have some real problems.  Copper devotes a lot of time to stuff like the relationship between Scarsdale and Van Damm, and the way the tractors operate, that don't actually have much effect on the plot.  These descriptions are entertaining enough, but they take up so much time that you expect a pay off, that Van Damm is going to sacrifice his life to save Scarsdale or vice versa, or that the tractors are going to be critical to overcoming some obstacle or winning some fight or are going to protect Plowright from radiation or a barrage of arrows or something.  In the event, Copper could have dispensed with the tractors and had his characters cross the desert and explore the first series of tunnels in trucks or on horseback or astride camels.  The fight scenes don't make a lot of sense, and are not very exciting.  Mysteries about Zalor's ability to get ahead of the expedition when the Englishmen have tractors and the dwarf doesn't, and what the hell Zalor was up to anyway, and about Holden's health, are not resolved as far as I can tell.  I missed why Plowright's physical strength was mentioned repeatedly--Scarsdale doesn't need him to lift anything heavy or anything like that, as far as I can recall.  (Maybe the aliens wanted a youngish specimen for study?  But it is implied that they allowed Plowright to escape....)  It feels like Copper wrote this story as he went along, including cool elements thinking he would do something with them later, and then leaving them in later drafts anyway even though he never came up with a cool function for them within the context of the plot.

I can recommend The Great White Space mildly; I enjoyed it while I was reading it, but I don't think it is going to make a deep impression on me--there isn't much that is special about it, though Copper's style renders all the scenes except the battle scenes in the last fifth or so of the book a pleasant and smooth reading experience.  The Lovecraftian completist will find The Great White Space an easier pill to swallow than a lot of the incompetent junk we read by August Derleth and Frank Belknap Long--Copper is much better at putting together a sentence than those guys.