If the BBC's new dramatisation of MR James's story Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad does any justice to the original it won't be children but adults who struggle to get to sleep this Christmas Eve.
Oh, Whistle ... is arguably the scariest story ever written. James was a macabre master of atmosphere and intimation. His stories generally feature scholars, librarians or collectors of curious rare art and books. In the archetypal James story a donnish figure, a bit dry and rational, is cut off from the comforts of the university common room in some remote cathedral, hotel or foreign town and visited by enigmatic signs – a rattling in the corner of the room, a runic inscription in a book, a picture that slowly changes – that gradually build in terror and intensity until a final, awful revelation is glimpsed. That sight of supernatural power is always momentary, fleeting, yet absolutely devastating: an encounter with absolute dread.
James was himself a scholar whose masterpiece was a hugely influential translation of the New Testament Apochrypha. That vast knowledge haunts his tales. For if ghosts are the apparent theme, what makes his stories so scary is a sense of a larger, darker picture of the universe that holds such entities. In James's stories, ghosts are always evil. They are malevolent and murderous and may be summoned by black magic. The devil is his real subject; his supernatural visions have a nasty edge of satanism. Yet in a richly British way this is filtered through beautifully painted evocations of place.
Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad – which was previously, brilliantly filmed in 1968 by Jonathan Miller for a terrifying BBC film – is set on the Norfolk coast, in a landscape of sand dunes and old churchyards that would be scary even without any specific supernatural goings on. The hero, or anti-hero, is a tottering tower of reason whose visitation by dark forces seems a fitting punishment for his intellectual arrogance. But that is as much as I am going to say – I don't want to spoil it. This really is one to read, or watch, with the lights on and the door locked.
