Will we ever wander an ancient quadrangle, enter an ivy-clad postern, or tiptoe into a panelled library again without feeling a tremor of disquiet? Dark academia is a booming genre, with only the cloven hooves of romantasy putting so much as a dent in its commercial dominance. But unlike its elven rival, dark academia has literary kudos, dating back to the hardcore classics background of its Dionysiac origin tome, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.
An unspecified college in Cambridge is the setting for Kate van der Borgh’s darkly glamorous debut, its narrator, a music student, so undistinguished that we never learn his name. It’s not that he’s not given one: his nemesis, fellow first year Bryn Cavendish, cavalierly dubs him first Tom and then John, as if to underline his sheer anonymity. Studying maths officially, and the occult unofficially, Bryn dominates the college’s wealthy, public school-educated set, one that outsiders with northern accents can’t hope to infiltrate. The music student gains a tenuous hold by dating Bryn’s cousin, Berenice. She for one is unsurprised when bad things start to happen to those closest to Bryn, an amateur magician whose brilliant tricks conceal a darker edge.
Not much actual work gets done outside the atmospheric bouts of heavy drinking and socialising, but the plot’s cultural underpinning concerns our narrator’s fascination with the devilish composer Peter Warlock, who changed his name from the more prosaic Philip Heseltine. Can a mere name change effect a switch in identity, and alter outcomes? As Bryn possesses a thrilling baritone, another opportunity to bond is a musical collaboration, performing songs from Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. Less wholesomely, Bryn is drawn to the Elizabethan magus Doctor Dee, whose partnership with the alchemist and soothsayer – or fraud – Edward Kelley mirrors the central relationship of the novel. Bryn needs his willing volunteer or stooge as much as any other stage magician. Completing the trio is the lovely assistant, in this case Alexa, Bryn’s casually mistreated girlfriend, also the narrator’s friend and secret crush: “I saw myself as a fulcrum between the two of them, the pivot chord.”
A dual timeframe sees our hero return fearfully years later to the college to adjudicate a music scholarship and lay old ghosts. Bryn is regularly identified with the angelic order that Dee and Kelley supposedly contacted, but invoke an angel and Lucifer is never far away. The narrator has read his MR James; perhaps the occult symbols written on slips of paper in Bryn’s study portend malign influence? As the boundaries between reality and illusion blur, And He Shall Appear suggests that we are all unreliable narrators of our own lives, apt to see significance in all the wrong places, and vastly to overstate our importance in the minds of others. It’s an insight that strikes a greater chill than any amount of gloomy staircases and creaking floorboards.
• And He Shall Appear by Kate van der Borgh is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
