Warning:
spoilers ahead for both The Watchers
and Neil Spring’s previous novel The
Ghost Hunters.
Neil Spring, author of the best-selling The Ghost Hunters, a novel about psychical
researcher Harry Price, has returned with another doorstop. The
Watchers draws on the 1977 UFO flap in Pembrokeshire which included a close
encounter at Broad Haven Primary School, where some of the children said they
had seen a spacecraft land and a sliver humanoid emerge. Mixed in is conspiracy theory; Cold War
apprehension and the fear of nuclear annihilation; secret government operations;
and covert American military activity on ‘Airstrip One’ with little or no
oversight by the British establishment.
It’s the sort of milieu that was mined superbly by Troy Kennedy Martin
in Edge of Darkness.
Against this uneasy background, Robert Wilding
(Wildling according to the back cover) is an assistant to the Member of
Parliament for Pembrokeshire, Paul Bestford.
More importantly Bestford is chairman of the Defence Select Committee
and Wilding is using his boss for his own agenda: damaged psychologically
because of a traumatic childhood, he wants to uncover what happened to his
mother during a peace protest at an American air base in 1963 which left her
blind in one eye and with severe memory loss.
In this effort he is being fed information by a retired admiral, Lord
Hill Bartlett (the name a nod to Lord Hill Norton, an admiral of the fleet who
developed an interest in UFOs).
Wilding’s search for the truth takes him back to
Broad Haven, where he grew up with his unsympathetic grandfather after his
parents’ untimely deaths there. Strange
goings on suggest it is a hot-spot for alien visitors, and in the process of
investigating their meaning Wilding discovers things about himself from his
childhood he had suppressed. Eventually
he reveals a sinister conspiracy run by the local Rotarians, one with a
supernatural dimension that could mean the end of civilisation as we know it. The bulk of the book comprises his first-hand
testimony as he gets to grips with recalcitrant locals in his search for
answers to mysteries past and present and finds out who his friends are.
The story is reminiscent of Nigel Kneale, mixing
science fiction and horror tropes, Spring’s silvery aliens actually expressions
of a demonic effort to break through from another dimension and take control of
our world. That reverses the premise of Quatermass and the Pit, aliens
misidentified as demons becoming demons misidentified as aliens. It’s an endearingly corny idea, though the
special effects will require a more substantial budget than that allocated to
the period drama of The Ghost Hunters
when Spring sells the film rights.
Surprisingly, despite dissimilar subject matter, The Watchers is actually a companion
piece to The Ghost Hunters, with a
returning character, Dr Robert Caxton.
His appearances in The Watchers
are marginal for most of the narrative, though they include extracts from his
book The Mind Possessed: A Personal
Investigation into the Broad Haven Triangle, which are interleaved with
Wilding’s first-person account. Both
novels too are structured with a frame: in The
Ghost Hunters the frame is 1977, looking back to the 1920s; while that in The Watchers is 1979, looking back to
1977. Another connection: we find out at
the end of The Ghost Hunters that
Caxton’s father is Harry Price, and although Price’s name is not mentioned
explicitly in The Watchers, there are
oblique references, until we learn in the denouement – from Prime Minister Mrs
Thatcher no less – that Price’s work was funded by the British government
before the war.
Unfortunately there is confusion in the chronology
for anyone who reads both books. The Ghost Hunters begins in October 1977
with Caxton visiting Senate House Library.
But the main events in The
Watchers occur in February the same year, and one would expect as traumatic
an experience as that undergone by Caxton in Wales to have had more of an
impact on the mildly sceptical academic who opens The Ghost Hunters. But there
is an even closer relationship between the two books, with The Watchers directly foreshadowed in The Ghost Hunters. At the end
of the first book, Caxton is shown a letter, dated 6 March 1977. It was written from Broad Haven where his
mother, who had given him up for adoption as a baby, was living. The writer, Vernon Wall, says that children at
a local school had recently ‘witnessed something most bizarre’, and suggests
that it needs an expert to dig into it.
This of course links to the action in The Watchers, except that by 6 March events
had moved on from children having a weird experience in a playground because
complete mayhem, including an extremely high body count, had descended on that
corner of West Wales. How can Caxton be
investigating something in February he didn’t hear about until March? Another, minor, problem in reintroducing
Caxton is that there are now two individuals with the same first name. Spring gets round this by not referring to
Caxton in The Watchers as Robert,
always calling him either Dr Caxton or just Caxton. We are only told that his first initial is
R. When he writes to his wife (on 7 and
11 February) he signs the letters ‘Caxton’, a rather odd thing to do when
writing to one’s spouse.
The ending of The
Watchers looks forward to another significant real-life UFO mystery, that
of Rendlesham Forest in December 1980. The
government, Mrs Thatcher explains to Wilding’s and Caxton’s horror, plans to
attempt to harness the power which manifested at Broad Haven. The date for the experiment is December 1980,
at RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge, near Rendlesham Forest. Wilding protests that these forces cannot be
controlled, but he and Caxton are effectively blackmailed into assisting in the
project (as we are still here it must have worked). A possible hook to a further novel, or a television
series, is Mrs Thatcher’s comment to Wilding and Caxton that while they are
waiting for December 1980 to roll round, ‘we have need of your experience
elsewhere. There have been reports of…sightings,
all over Britain. And abductions.’
The
Watchers’ epigraph, uncharacteristically ungrammatical, is
by the late Ralph Noyes, described simply as a ‘former MOD official’
(coincidentally he retired from the Ministry of Defence in 1977). As well as being involved with UFOs in an
official capacity, he was also for some years the Hon. Secretary of the Society
for Psychical Research and its self-appointed éminence grise. He would not
have been impressed to read a reference to the SPR, coming out of nowhere in an
extract from Caxton’s book, which begins: ‘After the scandals caused by the
Society for Psychical Research’s poor quality control in certain high-profile
investigations, anyone operating in this field [presumably meaning UFOs, not a
field with which the SPR has been much concerned] is compelled to act in
accordance with the highest professional standards…’ What these scandals and high-profile cases
are is not specified, but the implication is that the SPR through its
ineptitude has made life difficult for other investigators, though why anybody
should be ‘compelled’ to act in accordance with the highest professional
standards is hard to see. There is no
reason for this puzzlingly gratuitous attack on the SPR to be there.
Leaving aside problems of chronology The Watchers is well constructed but
suffers from flat writing and never manages to attain the tension a thriller
requires, even when it looks like an ‘ancient evil’ is about to be unleashed at
the climax. With The Ghost Hunters one senses that Spring is really enjoying seeing
Price come alive, and while there are infelicities that could have been
rectified by an editor, it is an entertaining read. The
Watchers has fewer basic errors (though the page number of one of Dr
Caxton’s book extracts jumps backwards) but the author’s emphasis on working
out the intricacies of the plot means that Wilding, Caxton and the rest do not
lift off the page. As a result The Watchers does not quite deliver on
its promise. It probably won’t do much
for the Pembrokeshire tourist industry either.
