In Arthur Machen’s
The Great God Pan, a short novella
published in 1894, Helen Vaughan is the mysterious femme fatale who dies
horribly at the end. In Rosanne Rabinowitz’s
Helen’s Story, a slightly longer sequel
to Machen’s story published in 2013, we learn that Helen Vaughan didn’t die--Machen
made that up. She is immortal, both Pan’s daughter and Pan’s lover. In modern
days Helen is an avant-garde artist in Shoreditch in London, whose paintings are immersive,
bringing together inside the art her fans and critics into amazing gender-bending
and boundary-defying orgies. Yawn. What a deflation from Machen’s threatening
and literally soulless character into to a mere modern bohemian artist. Detached
from the associations with Machen, it might have made a better tale, but with
its primary motivation being to undermine Machen's classic story it is itself
diminished by the comparison.
I enjoyed it, if only to explode the misogyny (either tragic helpless victim or eeeeeevil monster, in so many of his stories) and bad logic (someone that evil will just kill herself on command? Gimme a break) in Machen's work, the sort of thing that his talent managed to work in spite of. Also liked how the sexual stuff seemed just a gateway drug into other ecstasies/mysteries. As an asexual/aromantic I appreciated that. Yes, maybe she could have done a better job with those other mysteries, but that sort of thing is hard for *anyone* to even hint at, and I'd cut her a little slack.
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