The Nyctalope on Mars 2: The Triumph of Love

by Jean de La Hire

  This problem did not, however, stop with the supposed villains of the piece; it was bound to reflect on their victims and the heroes forced to oppose them. The awkward inadequacy of the XV as villains is more than balanced by the woeful inadequacy of the Nyctalope as a hero—not only in terms of the actions he performs, although they are seriously deficient, but in terms of the narrative voice’s apparent blissful unawareness of the blatant fact that the lavish praise it keeps heaping on the character is ludicrously unmatched by anything he actually does.

  (It is possible that La Hire knew exactly what he was doing in creating this mismatch—even to the extent of knowing that “nyctalopia” actually means night-blindness, not night-sightedness—and that the hectic moral confusion of his plot was quite deliberate, but if he did, his pretence of ignorance and ambivalence is astonishingly convincing.)

  The narrative voice continually tells the reader that Saint-Clair is a great man, in every possible sense: physically, morally and intellectually. The reader is assured, in fact, that this greatness literally radiates out of him; to be in his presence is to be humbled, and even his enemies are dazzled by their own helpless admiration of his charisma. At every stage in the story when he is actually required to demonstrate his prowess, however, he makes a mess of things.

  The Nyctalope can see in the dark, but he does not notice Koynos sneaking up on him aboard La Gironde—and it was Ensign Damprich, not he, who spotted that something was amiss. He is a skillful fighter, but Koynos is nevertheless able to bundle him up and throw him overboard. In Palma, where he supposed to be doing the utmost to keep his survival a secret, he spills everything to a man he has never met, and who is surely too old to be of any use as a recruit to his expedition, thus welcoming a spy into his intimate company. When he arrives at the radiomotive station, he is quite incapable of figuring out a way into the underground base, or how Max has been abducted; in the end, all he can do is stand around, embittered by frustration, and wait for Max to fetch him (which Max, about whose heroic qualities the narrative has also waxed lyrical, is unable to do by his own efforts, eventually succeeding only because his enemies simply untie him).

  Saint-Clair does not manage to work out how to prevent the radiomotive station from blowing up, but has to rely on the resident technicians doing it for him. He only avoids annihilation en route to Mars because Alkeus obligingly picks the wrong target, and only avoids annihilation on arrival because Koynos tells him where to land. Having landed safely, he then delivers himself impulsively into the hands of the XV on Argyre Island, without even bothering to make a plan, and cannot persuade the XV to behave rationally thereafter, even though his patronizing speech has logic on its side, as well as his alleged eloquence. When Abbou tries to kidnap Xavière, Saint-Clair exposes her, quite unnecessarily, to mortal danger. When he finally does undertake a heroic expedition in Iapygia, he ignores several opportunities to capture a kephale unobtrusively and takes no advantage of what he has learned about them, again acting abruptly on impulse—thus starting a perilous chase that results in the unnecessary death of the only heroic character in the entire book who actually shows some evidence of competence, the luckless Paul Verneuil.

  In brief, not once does Saint-Clair succeed in achieving an objective by means of his own capabilities; everything he achieves is handed to him on a plate by his author, who continually invents new characters such as Normand and Banko, purely to serve that purpose. As for his moral decisions—the murders he commits, the murders he does not commit, the punishments he exacts and those he does not exact, both in respect of the XV’s minions and the two Martian species—they are, to say the least, amazingly inconsistent in their random alternation of bizarre callousness and scrupulous sentimentality.

  Saint-Clair’s own alleged charisma is, of course, also reflected in his fiancée, whose own successes are entirely due to her own supernatural ability to fascinate males of the species and reduce them to helpless, suicidal slavery merely by her appearance and the power of her gaze. She is, in fact, a stereotyped femme fatale in every particular but one: she is not an antagonist, as the vast majority of femmes fatales are, but a heroine. Her role is, in consequence, just as confused as Saint-Clair, and is further complicated by her passive complicity with the author’s astonishing decision to sacrifice her sister to a plot-twist that is surely as ludicrously unnecessary as it is patently atrocious.

  Within the fundamental formula of thriller fiction, it is antagonism that drives and heroism that follows; it is the quality of the villains that specify and determine the quality of the heroes who are to defeat and chastise them. Given the general awful incompetence of the XV as antagonists, therefore, it is not surprising that the heroes who oppose them have little to do but watch them fall apart and pick up the pieces. The most striking thing of all about Le mystère des XV, in fact, is that it is has absolutely no need to be a superhero novel. At no point in its plot’s development does it require any superhuman effort or accomplishment on the part of its heroes. Why, then, is the reader subjected to a constant barrage of insistence regarding Saint-Clair’s all-round superheroism?

  The simplest hypothesis that might account for this conundrum is that La Hire had made up his mind in advance that this was what he was going to do, and that it was mere literary incompetence on his part that prevented him from putting Saint-Clair’s alleged superheroism through its paces, by demonstrating it in action in response to carefully-crafted necessity.

  There is, however, another way to look at the matter, and that is to consider the Nyctalope from a Futurist perspective. Seen from that angle, Saint-Clair’s superheroism is no mere natural response to the magnitude of the threat posed by the XV, arising out of purely narrative imperatives; it is far better understood as a result of La Hire’s new-found determination to celebrate the coming era of glamorous high-speed technology.

  Saint-Clair is, in effect, a prototype of the übermensch of a freshly-glimpsed coming era, and the very core of his superhumanity is his glamour: his casual personification of the spirit of flight and speed. As his name and nickname both suggest, the essence of his fictional nature is clarity; he is, by definition, unobstructed by the darkness that normally clouds and confuses human vision. He is not only endowed with better eyesight than other men, but can himself be seen more brightly, to the extent that he dazzles the mind—and dazzling is exactly what the narrative voice is doing, or attempting to do, with all its unwarranted laudation.

  See from this viewpoint, the melodramatic inflation of Le mystère des XV is no mere matter of gradual evolutionary adaptation, but a manifestation of bold mutation: a freakish “hopeful monster” of a story, which was literally ahead of its time—and whose internal readjustment in such a manner was therefore not at all inappropriate, no matter how accidental or confused it might have been.

  Perhaps, admittedly, this is reading too much into a thoroughly badly-written book—but even bad books and bad writers sometimes have more in them than may appear immediately to the ordinarily-sighted eye.

  Notes

  1 It is not obvious how this astonishing diminution of momentum could be achieved, given Newton’s first law of motion, but its effect obviously embraces the passengers—who do not appear to be wearing seat-belts—as well as the vehicles.

  2 Like Argyrus, Niliacus still appears on modern maps of Mars, although the region is no longer imagined as a “lake” that could accommodate an island.

  3 The narrative voice repeats the peculiar allegation that it is the Martian atmosphere, rather than the planet’s lower surface gravity, that is responsible for the Terrans’ increased athleticism on several further occasions, so it is not a momentary slip of the tongue.

  4 This astronomical phenomenon is remarkable in more ways than one. Phobos and Deimos do not orbit their primary in opposite directions, and could not appear in different phases from the viewpoint of an observer on the surface.

  5 The arithmetic here is obviously faulty; each Martian “hour” w
ould, on the basis of the figures already cited—which are slightly larger than modern estimates—would be about one minute 39 seconds longer than a terrestrial hour. The narrative voice appears to be using the term “Martians” here to mean Oxus’ colonists; in subsequent chapters, it occasionally forgets the modification made here, by which the hours are numbered from noon rather than midnight.

  6 It is unclear how the 10th month of the terrestrial calendar could “correspond” to the 20th of the 24-month Martian calendar, even if—as La Hire seems to be assuming—the terrestrial and Martian calendars are somehow in phase. If, as the next sentence alleges, the lapse of time between sunset and sunrise is very close to 12 hours, Mars must be near to its vernal or autumnal equinox; the planet’s axial tilt is considerably less than Earth’s, but not negligible.

  7 The Terran newcomers could hardly have re-set their chronometers to “Martian time,” about whose conventions they are as yet ignorant, so the instruments surely ought to indicate 5:35.

  8 I have translated the French phrase “échelle de perroquet” directly, although English has no equivalent phrase; it refers, as the context makes evident, to a ladder whose footholds just out from a central pillar rather than being extended between two uprights. The term is used again at a later point in the text.

  9 La Hire’s notion of the “customary formalities” of secret societies seems to be based as much on Paul Féval’s extensive dramatizations of the operation of “secret tribunals” such as the German vehmgerichte as on the rituals the quasi-Masonic “Rosicrucian lodges” that had been highly fashionable in Paris in the late 19th century.

  10 I have left this word untranslated because it has no direct English equivalent. It refers to a particular kind of seat employed in inquisitorial or denunciatory legal systems for the accused to sit upon—often a deliberately primitive and low-slung camp-stool. Adversarial systems have long substituted a “dock” in which the accused (being considered innocent until proven guilty rather than the other way around) is placed, but the implications of that term reflect the context and it cannot serve in this instance.

  11 Henri François was probably not a real person, given that his forename is subsequently rendered as René (I have corrected the error). Louis Blériot’s son (Marcel) certainly was, although it is uncertain why his name is included here, since he plays no further part in the story. Perhaps La Hire had met him, although the two were by no means contemporaries.

  12 This description is very closely based on the one in second chapter of Book II of The War of the Worlds. The Martian “vampires” featured in the second volume of Gustave Le Rouge’s Martian fantasy are similarly based, although Le Rouge adds wings to give them the power of flight and makes them invisible to ordinary sight.

  13 This description of Martian feeding-habits—including the use of the pipette—is also copied from The War of the Worlds.

  14 It is not at all obvious why this would be the case, even if La Hire had not apparently forgotten that the sack was in the Nyctalope’s right hand and the compass on his left wrist.

  15 This speech does not actually appear in text of The War of the Worlds, but summarizes and paraphrases the argument put forward by the artilleryman in the seventh chapter of Book II. The next paragraph adopts the kind of argument Wells had earlier put forward in The Time Machine regarding the divergent evolution of humankind’s social classes, but extrapolates it quite differently. Gustave Le Rouge had used a similar argument in attempting to explain the evolution of the various intelligent species on his version of Mars.

  16 Given that the story seemed to be preparing to take a very different moral direction when the Nyctalope made contact with the bipeds, it seems slightly odd that the casual dismissal of that course expressed in this paragraph should begin with the word “naturellement” [naturally]. La Hire might be reflecting sarcastically on Gustave Le Rouge’s Martian fantasy, whose hero unhesitatingly takes the side of the humanoid Martians against their various vampiric predators, considering the decision natural and inevitable.

  17 I can find no evidence that Gustave Serrès was a real person, but Paul Yaki was; he published a well-known book on the painters of Montmartre. As with the other actual individuals drafted into the plot, La Hire was presumably acquainted with him; the two appeared together in at least one anthology.

  18 This retroactive change and others dealing with the overall chronology of the Nyctalope’s adverntures are analyzed in greater detail in the article “Not Alone in the Dark: The Tumultuous Life and Troubled times of the Nyctalope” by Jeam-Marc Lofficier, included in our first volume, The Nyctalope vs. Lucifer (Black Coat press, 2007).

  FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION

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  14 G.-J. Arnaud. The Ice Company

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  26 Albert Bleunard. Ever Smaller

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  88 Judith Gautier. Isoline and the Serpent-Flower

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  29 Michel Jeury. Chronolysis

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  87 Louis-Guillaume de La Follie. The Unpretentious Philosopher

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  52 Gabriel de Lautrec. The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait

  82 Alain Le Drimeur. The Future City

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  32 Jules Lermina. The Secret of Zippelius

  66 Jules Lermina. To-Ho and the Gold Destroyers

  15 Gustave Le Rouge. The Vampires of Mars

  73 Gustave Le Rouge. The Plutocratic Plot

  74 Gustave Le Rouge. The Transatlantic Threat

  75 Gustave Le Rouge. The Psychic Spies

  76 Gustave Le Rouge. The Victims Victorious

  72 Xavier Mauméjean. The League of Heroes

  78 Joseph Méry. The Tower of Destiny

  77 Hippolyte Mettais. The Year 5865

  83 Louise Michel. The Human Microbes

  84 Louise Michel. The New World

  11 José Moselli. Illa’s End

  38 John-Antoine Nau. Enemy Force

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  21 Gaston de Pawlowski. Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

  56 Georges Pellerin. The World in 2000 Years

  79 Pierre Pelot. The Child Who Walked On The Sky

  85 Ernest Perochon. The Frenetic People

  60 Henri de Régnier. A
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  35 Maurice Renard. The Doctored Man

  36 Maurice Renard. A Man Among the Microbes

  37 Maurice Renard. The Master of Light

  41 Jean Richepin. The Wing

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  62 Albert Robida. Chalet in the Sky

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