The Tractate Middoth

Montague Rhodes James must be one of the most terrifying men who ever lived.  He looked mild enough and was a scholar at Cambridge, but depending on your inclination he would probably be the very first or very last choice to be stranded in a lonely old house with on a stormy night.  Or any night.  Or even any time at all.  Penned over a hundred years ago, his stories still send shudders down the spine, freeze the blood and generally get under the skin.  To anyone who has read or seen 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad', weighing down the sheets on an unused twin bed will seem a perfectly sound act, likewise shunning a pair of binoculars unless the exact provenance is known after 'A View from a Hill'.  To say Mark Gatiss is one of his keenest fans is an understatement, and lucky Mr G had the largesse of BBC2 on Christmas night to indulge his fascination.

This was lucky for us, too.  We can't help thinking that a venegeful demon or two would liven up 'Downton Abbey' no end, but meanwhile, we switched over gratefully and settled down with some pud to watch 'The Tractate Middoth'.  We found ourselves in familiar James territory: a dusty old library, arcane texts and men with dubious motives.  As befits a Christmas tale, it was greed that proved the undoing of at least one character, John Eldred (John Castle, another actor of whom we see too little) and possibly of his successor Mrs. Simpson (Louise Jameson).  James's stories always tease with ambiguity.  While there are descriptive passages of what the protagonist/victim suffers, we're left wondering what exactly it is that has been unleashed on them.  This clever absence of explanation leaves us unsure of how to avoid the same fate (though avoiding spiders wherever possible would seem a good start).

Gatiss is a godsend as a genuinely inventive writer who presumably enjoys writing for TV.  Are others with his talent champing at the bit?  We guess not, or not visibly to producers, who have at times denied us Christmas ghost stories altogether.  Perhaps the only, smallest of quibbles with the adaptation was the explicit visibility of the malevolence that haunts the pages of the book to such ill effect.  This was also in evidence in 'Crooked House' a few years ago, which until the flashing light sequence towards the end had proved the best Jamesian tale we had seen by another author.  (Jeremy Dyson's 'The Haunted Book' has a similar seen-in-strobe effect in one story).  Less is more when it comes to fear... but we're aware that it's a matter of personal taste, and that it's hard to convey visually what James manages so well in print.

At just over 30 minutes, a great little Christmas treat.