All posts tagged mining

Felicity Hammond: V3 Model Collapse @ the Photographers’ Gallery

The main reason for visiting the Photographers’ Gallery at the moment is to see the hugely enjoyable exhibition of wonderful photos of the 1970s society, reggae and punk rock by Dennis Morris. But if you’re there it’s worth making the effort to check out this much more challenging installation by contemporary photo-artist Felicity Hammond.

As ‘V3’ suggests this is the third of a series of four installations. They are about contemporary issues around the brave new world of digital imagery, artificial intelligence, and their real-world costs and implications.

The key concept is model collapse which has at least two meanings.

AI model collapse

In the digital realm it refers to the progressive deterioration in quality of AI outputs. First generation AI is trained on all the content of the internet (which contains plenty that is imperfect or misleading). AI then generates a new generation of content which contains all the errors it inherited and adds countless ‘hallucinations’ and errors of its own. The next generation is then trained on a totality of data which contains a large amount of errors, and in turn generates fresh errors. Thus the introduction of artificial intelligence tools will inevitably and unstoppably lead to the degradation of information on the internet.

With conscious irony, here’s a definition of model collapse generate by Google AI:

Model collapse in AI refers to the phenomenon where generative models, trained on their own or other models’ outputs (synthetic data), degrade in performance over time. This degradation manifests as reduced diversity, increased bias, and ultimately, the model producing nonsensical or repetitive outputs. Essentially, the model ‘learns’ to imitate its own errors, leading to a decline in its ability to accurately represent the original data distribution.

Environmental collapse

At the same time as the digital world is being irreversibly degraded so, of course, is the real world. Presumably everyone knows that making AI work requires enormous new datacentres, in vast air-conditioned warehouses which, of course, use up a lot of energy and a lot of water, which is an increasingly precious resource in our overheating world. But there’s also the well-known mining of rare and precious metals which are needed in our shiny digital gadgets, namely smartphones.

So ‘collapse’ has a double meaning, referring to both the collapse and degradation of quality in an AI-infested digital world, and also the environmental collapse and degradation required by our digital technologies.

As it happens there’s also a double meaning to the word ‘mining’. In the digital world, data mining refers to the process of extracting information from vast datasets (like the whole internet); but ‘mining’ also has its older meaning of referring to digging up stuff under the ground, namely the rare minerals and metals required for this technology, such as lithium.

Ditto ‘extraction’: data extraction refers, fairly obviously, to AI’s mining of the internet’s data resources, and has obviously been adapted or copied from the older real-world term which describes the extraction of actual mineral wealth…

One wall label explains that one particular form of mining exposes buried sulphides which oxidise a bright orange on contact with air, and is often washed by the water involved in mining operations into streams and rivers and lakes, creating large toxic orange swamps, obviously killing all forms of life. These toxic orange waste dumps dominate the palette of the exhibition.

Model collapse summary

To summarise, then: ‘model collapse’ is a technical term referring to the degradation of AI information, which also echoes the physical degradation of the natural environment caused by the real-world requirements of supporting the digital realm.

Model collapse depicted in art

So what about the art? Well it comes in roughly two forms: there are relatively flat images hung on walls, and then there are a couple of big installations set back from the viewer with space in front covered in mining detritus etc. The biggest one, with huge, digitally fragmented images of orange mudpools at the back and industrial scraps and sacking scattered around in the foreground, kind of speaks for itself.

But something more complex is going on with many of her images. Basically she uses digital feedback to distort, degrade and fragment the original imagery. Grasp this simple principle and you understand most of what’s going on.

Also, this being V3, it refers back to the earlier versions, V1 and V2, so here’s a brief recap.

V1. Content Aware, 24 to 27 October 2024, Brighton

Installation view of V1: Content Aware (Photoworks Weekender, Brighton, October 2024)

V1 was staged in Brighton in a shipping container, the kind used in their tens of thousands to move goods around the world. these standardised objects bear coded numbers so are part of a digital system. they criss-cross the oceans above the deep sea cables which carry all our digital data. And, seen from above and at a distance, they resemble the pixels which digital images are made out of. Hammond’s images play with all these intersections and ambiguities. So it was a kind of the investigation of the global infrastructure that supports the digital economy,

‘Content Aware’ is also the name of an image editing tool. Hammond likes these puns or multiple meanings.

The installation included cameras which recorded visitors movements and interactions.

V2. Rigged, 13 March to 15 June 2025, Derby

Installation view of V2: Rigged (QUAD Gallery, FORMAT festival, Derby, March 2025)

Rigged is another pun in the sense that a rig can refer to the enormous structures which drill for oil land gas at sea. But it’s also the term for the structures which hold cameras in a studio setting. there’s also a connotation of the game being ‘rigged’ because Hammond used images of visitors to V1 and fed them through AI algorithms to generate ‘mean’ or ‘average’ images of humans. As you might expect, these didn’t come out too well.

V3. Model Collapse gallery

So what does it all look like?

Installations

Installation view of V3 Model Collapse by Felicity Hammond @ the Photographers’ Gallery (photo by the author)

Installation consisting of a massive photo of open cast mining, surrounded by detailed photos, all presented at the back of a kind of sandbox of industrial detritus.

Installation view of V3 Model Collapse by Felicity Hammond @ the Photographers’ Gallery © Felicity Hammond

On the wall

Shards and fragments, visual representations of the fragmented outputs of AI and the environmental collapse involved in digital technology.

Installation view of V3 Model Collapse by Felicity Hammond @ the Photographers’ Gallery (photo by the author)

On a screen made up of 80 or so imperfect mirrors, further muddied by white smearing, are hung four images which were probably originally fairly straightforward self-portraits taken against Hammond’s emblematic green and orange designs, but have been distorted to represent AI degradation.

Installation view of V3 Model Collapse by Felicity Hammond @ the Photographers’ Gallery (photo by the author)

Portrait of the artist, through an AI glass, distortedly

Close-up of one of those four self-portraits showing how AI mostly captures the details of the original but with inexplicable ‘hallucinations’ and distortions.

V3 Model Collapse by Felicity Hammond @ the Photographers’ Gallery © Felicity Hammond

The video

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by Simon on August 17, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Exhibition, Photography
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Posted by Simon on August 17, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/08/17/felicity-hammond-v3-model-collapse-the-photographers-gallery/

Golden Soak by Hammond Innes (1973)

Old mines, like old houses, have their own atmosphere – a feel, an aura compounded of many things , but chiefly of the way men have handled the problems of working underground. It’s there in the construction of the galleries, the cross-cuts, drifts and winzes, the way they have stoped and handled the ore. But down here, on the third level of Golden Soak, it was something different, as though the rock itself had absorbed such a radiation of human fear that it could still infect the atmosphere of the place.
(Golden Soak, page 97)

Hammond Innes has three great strengths:

  • He writes about ordinary men who didn’t go to public school and who aren’t writers and artists – real people with real jobs: miners and engineers, merchant seamen and Royal Navy sailors, soldiers and solicitors, whalers and railroad builders, oil prospectors and surveyors, captains and fishermen, bulldozer drivers and cafe owners.
  • He describes work, real work, hard physical work, designing and building and excavating and constructing and navigating and fishing and diving and drilling.

The rig was on exploratory work, drilling a test hole high up on Mount Whaleback. Across from where it was spudded in the view was of a mountainside being gnawed to destruction by blasting and giant shovels. And beyond the huge stepped gashes of industrial erosion stretched the ever-endless wastes of the Australian outback, iron hills throbbing through a miasma of ore dust so fine it hung like a haze that half-obscured the sun. They were adding a fresh rod when we arrived, Duhamel and his off-sider working in unison, both of them stripped to the waist and red with the grime of ore dust. (p.177)

  • And – when his heroes are not battling physical and psychological odds – there is a feeling in his descriptions, especially of anything touching on his beloved sailing, of real joy, excitement and exhiliration, delight at being alive in a beautiful world.

Coming to Innes after reading Graham Greene is like stepping from a pitch-black confessional where a suicidally depressed man has told you all his pornographic fantasies, out into the light of a beautiful spring morning. Though a morning which turns out to be not without its problems…

Golden Soak: part 1

The book opens at a fast pace as we watch mining engineer and surveyor Alec Falls driving drunkenly away from the meeting of the board of the tin mine in Cornwall which he set up, having punched one of the directors and facing the fact the mine was finished, all played out. Back at his house he finds his ‘bitch’ of a wife has left him and so, on a drunken whim, he fakes his own death and sets fire to his home. Drives drunk along the coast to Southampton, abandons his car and takes ship for Australia. He had met a young woman, Janet Garrety, touring mines in England who came from mining country in Western Australia and she’d invited him to go visit. By the end of chapter one he has travelled all the way out to her and her father’s ranch in Jarra Jarra, Western Australia, only to discover it is bankrupt, their mine is played out, no rain has fallen for a year and the cattle are dying.

Thus, like many an Innes’ protagonist, Alec is in a desperate plight.

I got suddenly to my feet. I must be mad even to think of it. I was a stranger in a strange land, alone, with no money and nobody to help me. (p.48)

The rest of the plot describes his attempts to secure a living in his new country and how, slowly, he becomes caught up in a web of old vendettas and allegiances to do with abandoned mines and legendary discoveries, overlaid with sharp business deals which see him accepting cash offers and then bribes to falsify geological reports, getting deeper and deeper into trouble though he doesn’t realise it until it’s too late.

Australia

As with all his novels, Golden Soak is the result of Innes’ own extensive travels through the territory described, a fact emphasised by the Author’s Note at the end of the text which carefully distinguishes the fictional locations and characters from the real-life places and people who helped and guided him on his tours. Viewed from one angle, Innes’ novels are really extended travelogues with sometimes rather contrived plots, or sometimes not even plots – just situations – embedded in them.

Golden Soak is a classic example and contains scores of passages describing the bleak desert landscape of Western Australia: in the blistering heat of the day, at the mercifully cool dusk, in the chill hours before dawn. Because it is a novel about mining, special attention is paid to the geology of the region, with quite technical descriptions of geological formations, underlying rocks, the different types of dust, and to the sun-toughened flora which just about survive in this harsh environment.

We clambered the broken rock to the small trees at the top, taking our personal clouds of flies with us. The sun was already blazingly hot and away to the south-west a salt-white glimmer marked the flat immensity of Lake Disappointment. All to the east now was nothing but desert, speckled with the golden yellow of spinifex, and the sandridges like a flat red swell coming in from the north-north-east. High overhead two wedge-tailed eagles worked the air currents, soaring on great wing spans, intent, searching for anything that still had life in that arid hell of drought-ridden sand. (p.215)

The book does demonstrate the full force of this weird Innes ability to describe oppressive and challenging landscapes, first and foremost the unrelenting descriptions of the desert in all its varieties, the different types of rock and dust and sand, the unforgiving heat, the buzz of the insects, the flights overhead of bright colourful birds, the dingoes crying at night, the sudden appearance of kangaroos one night – the whole book does very powerfully convey the strangeness of Australia.

(I guess Innes is not much read now: the fact that most of his novels are out of print suggests that. But a great anthology could be made of all the scores of stretches where he describes landscapes and scenery – and especially seascapes – in bold and striking colours.)

The human geography is described just as vividly (and presumably, as accurately): the rundown ranches, the abandoned mine workings, the hot metal shacks, the brick hotels, the dusty roadside diners. And the novel has a large number of incidental characters, of hard-pressed ranchers and embittered miners, who clump into the kitchens of their harassed wives after a long day of hard labour in the blistering sun, their faces and backs streaked with sweat and covered in the red dust, gagging for the first stubby of the day and some hot tucker.

Minor characters

Initially I thought the action would be confined to the Jarra Jarra ranch where Falls stays for a while with Janet Garrety, her tough old father, Ed Garrety, himself the son of local legend Big Bill Garrety who founded the ranch and homestead. But the father watches him getting closer to his daughter and doesn’t like it: there’s no work for Falls, the empty mine, Golden Soak, ruined his father and is long abandoned after a calamitous flood which killed seven men. And so Garrety none too politely suggest Falls leaves, and this kicks off his travels via harsh roadside cafes and tough pubs to raw frontier settlements like Nullagine, Meekathurra, Kalgoorlie and Ora Banda.

Which gives Innes the opportunity to depict different types of harsh Aussie terrain and to introduce us to a sizeable cast of vividly drawn minor characters.

  • Alec Falls: protagonist and narrator, embittered failed mining engineer and company owner
  • Rosa: his glamorous wife who never loved him and leaves him on the fateful night when he fights with his fellow directors and sets his own house on fire
  • Ferdie Kaden: son of a Serbian immigrant who worked himself to death in the mines round Kalgoorlie. Ferdie vows not to be like his father and becomes a sharp businessman, a chancer, who also writes to Falls offering him a job in W. Australia, and then inveigles him into a number of dodgy financial deals
  • Janet Garrety: stocky snub-nosed young woman he meets in England, who tells him all about her ranch in Western Australia and sparks the fantasy of escaping there
  • Ed Garrety: her tough rancher father, who was captured and held prisoner by the Japanese during the war, and returns afterwards to a homestead ruined almost beyond recognition
  • Big Bill Garrety: grandfather, the legendary figure who founded the homestead in the 1890s then squandered the family money on the ill-fated Golden Soak mine
  • Henry Garrety: Janet’s brother, Ed’s son: joined the Australian Army to escape the barrenness of Jarra Jarra and was one of the first Australians to be killed in Vietnam, aged 18
  • Pat McIlroy: Garrety’s partner; when the ill-fated mine failed he took off into the interior and was never seen again, leaving behind the rumour of some legendary mineral discovery
  • Andie Andersen and his Italian wife, Maria, who keep a dusty roadside pasta restaurant at Lynn Peak
  • Wolli: drunk aborigine whose father was with McIlroy during his last ill-fated expedition and who, therefore, Falls tries to get the truth out of
  • Prophecy: fag-smoking card-playing owner of the bar in the flyblown settlement of Nullagine
  • Phil Westrop: ‘just an ordinary, hard-drinking, hard-driving, mind-your-own-bloody-business Australian’ (p.83)
  • George Duhamel, owner of a mining rig Falls meets in a pub, and then hires to drill on a bluff next to Golden Soak
  • Josh: plays the guitar with Duhamel’s drilling gang
  • Chris Culpin: tough embittered miner, working for Ferdie Kadek
  • Edith: Culpin’s thin unhappy wife
  • Kennie: Culpin’s son; after an argument with his father which comes to blows, he leaves home and heads back north with Falls, thereafter becoming his sidekick
  • Les Freeman: chaiman and MD of Lone Minerals, in partnership with Ferdie Kadek, who – it turns out – is conning him with the reluctant help of Falls
  • Petersen: head of Petersen Geophysics, a small geology and assaying company, characterful Swede always slapping people on the back
  • the old prostitute who was one of the last to see McIlroy before he disappeared

Mystery and stasis

Innes has many strengths, but his novels share one massive weakness, which is they don’t really have much plot. By plot I mean a sequence of events which reveal incidents from the past or which string together current events into a meaningful pattern. Instead Innes novels tend to focus around an obsessive figure who keeps to himself what, in the final analysis, is a very simple revelation, which many of the characters know or suspect, but which everyone refuses to express, articulate, spit out or share over several hundred pages of aborted conversations, shrugs and silences.

Thus, in this novel, the protagonist soon learns there are one or two ‘mysteries’ connected with the Garrety family – What happened in the Golden Soak mine to cause it to be abandoned after Big Bill Garrety had ruined his family by spending all his capital on it and borrowing more to develop it? What happened to Phil McIlroy who had told everyone in the local bars that he’d struck it rich and discovered ‘McIlroy’s Monster’, a big copper deposit, out in the desert somewhere – and then disappeared off the face of the earth? Both events happened in 1939, on the eve of war, and thirty years ago – are they connected?

A well-constructed thriller would plant these mysteries early on and then lead the narrator (and reader) through a cunning sequence of revelations to a final understanding of the ‘real events’ behind them. Innes, however, here as in almost all his other novels, uses a peculiar technique of Obstruction: the narrator talks to a wide range of people who don’t know, can’t shed light, clam up, hesitate and shrug. The text doesn’t proceed by dramatic or subtle revelations, it doesn’t proceed in a line, but circles around the central ‘mysteries’ via innumerable inconclusive and frustrating conversations where characters don’t reveal what they know, turn away, go silent and gaze into the distance. The narrator (and the reader) never gets any further forward for literally hundreds of pages – until suddenly it all comes tumbling out in the end.

This blockage, obstruction and frustrating stasis isn’t accidental or a minor feature: it is absolutely central to Innes’ conception of the novel, to his narrative methodology, and occurs on almost every page.

After that she didn’t say anything… I sat there at a loss for words, the silence growing… There was a sudden silence and I looked up to find her staring at me… He didn’t say anything for a moment, a stillness settling on the room… I hesitated… The silence deepened, his face frozen… The stillness was absolute then… He shrugged and got to his feet… He went out then, leaving me with questions still unanswered… She didn’t seem to know… she shook her head… She hesitated… ‘I can’t explain, I don’t really understand it myself’ … She shrugged turning quickly away…She shook her head… Again she shook her head… But she shook her head… But he didn’t answer… But Lenny shook his head… She knew no more than I did… But I couldn’t answer that… It seemed a lot longer with Culpin sitting morose and tense at the wheel, not saying a word… I just stood there, silent, wondering what sort of a man I was… Kadek didn’t say anything. Nor did Freeman… He didn’t know… I shrugged… I started to say something and then I turned away… We left immediately, Culpin driving in silence… Kennie sitting beside me, tight-lipped and silent… I didn’t answer… In the end I drove in silence… ‘I hope not, but I don’t know’… He didn’t answer… Nobody said anything… A silence settled on the room… He stared at me, the room suddenly deathly silent… I didn’t answer… Ed Garrety shook his head… ‘I don’t know’… There was a long silence… ‘He won’t say what he’s up to, won’t tell me anything’… ‘It’s something else, but he won’t say. He won’t tell me anything’… ‘It was something else, but I don’t know what. I just don’t know’… He didn’t answer… Kennie shrugged… He hesitated again, as though unwilling to put his thoughts into words…We didn’t talk. We just sat huddled there… I sat down beside him, both of us silent for a long time… There were questions I wanted to ask but I didn’t know how to begin… He didn’t finish, but continued staring down at the ground… he gave me a long slow look, the nodded and turned away… He didn’t say anything, his eyes glinting in the starlight… ‘All in good time. Don’t rush me.’ He stood for a moment in complete silence… His voice trailed off… After that he closed right up on me, wouldn’t say another word… He was silent then and I didn’t know what to say… He didn’t answer, the silence heavy between us… Silence still and I had to repeat the question… And after that he wouldn’t say any more… There was a long silence… So I kept my mouth shut, the two of us staring at each other in silence… I didn’t answer… I should have warned Kennie… but I didn’t… He hardly spoke, he seemed shut up inside himself… We didn’t talk much, both of us wrapped up in our own thoughts…

Falls tries to talk to Ed Garratty:

It was a closed look, the blank stare of a man on the defensive… He didn’t answer, the silence stretching uncomfortably between us… He relapsed into silence then… I didn’t say anything for a moment… He sat there for a moment, not saying anything… But Ed Garrety didn’t answer… I asked him where he was going but he didn’t seem to hear… I didn’t know, I just didn’t know what my motive was…

Falls tries to get answers out of Janet Garrety:

But she didn’t answer, just sat there, quite still as though she’d suddenly been struck dumb (156)…’I don’t know… I don’t know’… She shook her head, God knows’, she breathed… But Janet didn’t answer… She looked away towards the window. ‘I don’t know,’ she said… She hesitated, half-shaking her head…

Falls tries to get answers out of the aboriginal woman, Brighteyes:

She shook her head… She shook her head, ‘I don’t know’… I didn’t know what to say… She shook her head… She didn’t answer but her eyes moved, evasive, uneasy…

Falls tries to get answers from the barkeeper Prophecy:

After that there was silence… ‘I don’t know. Nobody knows.’… She didn’t answer… It seemed she knew no more than I did…

Falls tries to get answers from the aborigine, Wolli:

He shook his head… To all these questions he just shook his head…

Falls tries to get answers from Phil Westrop:

He didn’t say anything, standing there with his beer in his hand…

Falls meets Chris Culpin in Kalgoorlie

He was silent for a moment… He was silent after that… He didn’t say anything more, nursing his grievance in silence…

Falls tries to get answers from Chris Culpin’s wife, Edith:

Again that hesitation, as though she wanted to tell me something else… She was silent…

Golden Soak: part 2

An early narrative climax comes when Golden Soak, precariously propped up as Falls discovers when he goes illicitly poking around in it, collapses with a boom and a lot of dust. Falls and Kennie were driving out towards it, chasing after Ed Garrety who had disappeared and, for a long ten minutes they think he must have been in it when it collapsed. Until he emerges covered in dust from the nearby workings…

Thereafter Falls goes touring round various townships in Western Australia, looking for work, having threatening conversations with various rough miners and prospectors and businessmen all looking after number one. Falls finds himself reluctantly taking money from the dodgy dealer, Kadek, in exchange for giving misleadingly optimistic information to the fairly honest businessman, Les Freeman. Falls then uses the money to hire the driller Duhamel and his crew to drill up at Golden Soak but is bitterly outwitted by the harsh, unforgiving Chris Culpin who has taken the trouble to get an official ‘claim’ made for the area: anything Falls finds will belong to Culpin. Falls ceases the drilling in disgust.

Defeated and depressed, Falls drives back to Jarra Jarra to discover Janet in hysterics because her father, Ed Garrety, has driven off into the desert.

Finally, after 200 pages of incommunicative peregrinations, this is the (typically Innes) climax of the novel. Falls grabs young Kennie and together they undertake a fifty-page adventure, loading the Land Rover with petrol and water and driving off with an old map and compass into the inhospitable Gibson desert. Really inhospitable. So blisteringly hot during the day you can’t drive or be outside, so they drive at night. The journey, and the extreme conditions, force Falls to review what he’s doing in Australia and what the hell he’s doing driving into the heart of one of its worst deserts to find an ageing, bitter, dying man who possibly has gone off to end it all. However, Falls also knows Garrety has a map showing the location of the McIlroy Monster: so he’s pursuing Garrety in order to save Janet’s father for her, and to try and redeem his damn fool decision to emigrate by finding the legendary hill of copper.

But he doesn’t. When he finally catches up with Garrety it turns out the dying old man has come all the way out into the desert to find the place where, back in 1939, he shot McIlroy dead. Aha. So that’s what happened. Why? Because somehow, it is implied, McIlroy had ruined his old man, deluded him with his damn fool plans and then lured Ed into a crazy expedition into the desert so that when Ed awakes one morning to find McIlroy shooting the camels to eat, Garrety flips, they fight over the gun and Garrety shoots McIlroy dead.

That’s it. That’s the bitter secret which Garrety has concealed for 30 years, which has eaten into his conscience, which has made him bitter and grouchy and led all the local gossips to speculate whether he killed McIlroy in the Golden Soak and arranged the flooding, or whether there really is a big hill of copper which he’s keeping from everybody. After this anti-climactic revelation, Falls passes out. Next morning he wakes to find Garrety has headed off in a raging sandstorm like Captain Oates deliberately seeking the oblivion of death.

Falls and Kennie turn round and their knackered Land Rover just about makes it back to civilisation where Falls is promptly arrested. We learn that this entire narrative has been written from prison.

Coda

The technicalities of his arrest and the charges are described with typical Innes thoroughness: courts martial and trials, dodgy business deals and boardroom manoeuvres feature in many of his novels. But, in summary, Falls is eventually released and, among other developments, persuades Kennie to return with him to the Gibson Desert. Here, after further suffering, they do at last, indeed, find McIlroy’s Monster, a great plateau of copper-bearing rock but again, only to seem to be frustrated. A helicopter lands and men start staking out the claim with professional pegs: it is Chris Culpin – Falls’s repeated nemesis, who foiled him when he was drilling up at Golden Soak. At this, the climax of the novel, Innes persuades us that Culpin’s son, Kennie, is wound up to such a state that he rushes forward – father and son argue, then fight, then Kennie grabs a rifle and shoots his father dead.

The men take Culpin’s body and Kennie into the chopper and fly off.

This leaves Falls free to stake out the claim himself, then spend ten days struggling back through the desert to Jarra Jarra. During this time – symbolically – it rains for the first time since his arrival in Australia, and when he arrives at Jarra Jarra it is to find the desert blooming, the herds of cattle thriving after Janet, Ed Garrety’s daughter, followed his suggestion of watering them at the new pool formed in the crater of the ruined collapsed Golden Soak mineworkings, and Janet herself running into his arms for a Hollywood ending.

In the last pages, he says they are now a pair, awaiting his divorce to come through from Britain, and Janet is pregnant. He has never worked so hard in his life, refencing the farm, drilling waterholes, and hopes that, if the child is a girl,

pray God she grows up with the same qualities as her mother, the same love of this harsh demanding place where I have now put down my roots. (p.285)

Fathers and sons

As with Levkas Man, The Doomed Oasis and others of his later novels, Golden Soak ends up being a tragedy about a son and a father in which the father dies. Sons and fathers run like a thread through the text. Big Bill Garrety, founder of the dynasty, who goes mad and his son Ed, who goes off into the desert to die, and his son Henry, who is killed in Vietnam. Culpin’s son Kennie, who kills his father.

There is a strong Gothic element in these doomed relationships of fathers and sons.

A tale of two women

Innes also goes out of his way to contrast between the two lead female characters in the novel.

Falls repeatedly describes his wife, Rosalind, Rosa, as being stunningly good looking: there’s a page or so mulling over his marriage as he comes to realise that he never loved her, he just wanted – in the heady days of his success when the tin mine in Cornwall was showering money – to ‘own’ her, to possess her like a flash sports car.

Two thirds of the way through the story Falls is horrified to learn that Rosa has figured out he never died in the fire and tracked him down all the way to the ranch at Jarra Jarra. Falls returns from a day out drilling to find Rosa in a tense stand-off with Janet, her polar opposite. After an edgy dinner, later that night when he’s in bed, Rosa quietly slips into his room and there’s quite a powerful description of how they have sex, even though he hates her and he knows she despises him, but she is just so damn erotic. Here, as in a number of the other novels (eg Air Bridge) Innes is very good at honestly depicting the way a man can simply be overcome with lust and be attracted to a woman he positively dislikes.

All this is deliberately and repeatedly contrasted with not so attractive, stocky Janet with her turned-up nose and freckles, with her agonised love for her troubled father and her daily struggle to keep the ranch alive.

Innes is making a deliberate contrast between beautiful heartlessness and not-so-beautiful honesty and truth and, after everything they’ve been through, it is Janet and Alec’s honest, open, homely declaration of love right at the end of the story which, to be honest, brought a tear to my eye.

Environmentalism

It is fairly understated but at several points characters make the point that man has severely damaged the natural environment of Australia. Towards the end the opposition between Kennie Culpin and his father comes to represent the conflict between the older generation, grasping, selfish, only out to make a short-term profit from mining, and the younger generation who think their elders murdered the black aborigines and devastated the flora by over-farming it, until the place has become an inhospitable desert.

40 years later Australia is, of course, still inhabited, though I have read articles claiming that, with climate change, it might in the long-term become unviable for human life.

Certainly Innes gives a sympathetic if unblinking portrayal of a number of aborigines, the original owners of the land who knew how to live in harmony with it, degraded by service to the white man and all too often addicted to white man’s alcohol, but many retaining their mysterious link to the soil, to their tribal languages and customs. And at one of the key moments, when Falls confronts Garrety out in the desert and he confesses his murder of McIlroy, the old man’s head is leant back against a rock covered in the strangely powerful geometric designs of the country’s long-dead aboriginal owners, as if this white man’s tragedy is unfolding against a much larger canvas of history and culture.

And the symbolic rainfall at the very end of the novel and the miraculous greening of the land, also represent an earnest, a glimmering gesture towards Garrety’s dying wish that the land not be raped for mineral deposits but that its human masters learn to use its resources more wisely to revive and restore it.

Adaptation

Golden Soak was made into a six part TV mini-series by Australian TV, which you can watch on YouTube, but only appears to be available in a version dubbed into German.

Related links

Fontanta paperback cover of Golden Soak

Fontanta paperback cover of Golden Soak

Hammond Innes reviews

1 Comment
by Simon on April 21, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Adventure, Novel, Thriller
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Posted by Simon on April 21, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/golden-soak-hammond-innes/

The Killer Mine by Hammond Innes (1947)

If I had been told as I strode over the mist-shrouded road to Penzance, that I was walking straight into a terrible mine disaster – not only that, but into a pitiful story of madness and greed that involved my own family history – then I just should not have believed it.
(The Killer Mine, page 22)

A little biography

Innes was born in 1913. His first novel was published in 1937, his last in 1996, so his career spanned two-thirds of the twentieth century. Whereas his contemporary Eric Ambler (b.1909) focused on what could loosely be called ‘spy’ novels, which always have a political aspect and often involve shady East European governments, Innes’ novels are more straightforward ‘adventure’ stories. In Innes an innocent and unsuspecting everyman character is thrown into a dangerous and threatening situation. Like Ambler, his writing career was interrupted by the War. He started out manning an anti-aircraft gun before moving on to edit Army newspapers in various theatres of war abroad.

The Killer Mine

This is Innes’ second peacetime novel. It has a strong Gothic feeling being a) set among the ruins of an abandoned Cornish tin mine and b) with a sub-plot about family madness, suicide and murder. Jane Eyre in a tin mine.

Other Innes protagonists have been nicely middle class, for example Kilmartin the barrister in The Trojan Horse. The protagonist of this one, Jim Pryce, is a great bear of a man who deserted in the face of the enemy in the Italian campaign at Monte Cassino. He runs off and finds work with Italians in lignite mines. Now, after two years slaving away, he has saved enough money to buy a black market passage back to England.

But things are rough, criminal, lowdown and nasty from the start: the crooked captain Mulligan swindles Pryce out of his last remaining money for setting him ashore, a disagreement which leads to a fight and Pryce being knocked unconscious, then waking in the surf after being flung onto an empty Cornish beach.

Things continue badly as he makes his way to the contact who wrote to him in Italy promising to fix him up with a job and accommodation. He arrives at the moment that this man, David Jones, is being treated for a gunshot wound received in a fight with coastguards. These Revenue men had boarded the boat he was using to bring contraband alcohol to England but the boat had been booby-trapped. When the Revenue opened the hold it blew up, killing coastguard and crew, leaving Jones the only survivor and, incidentally, leading to a criminal investigation and the threat of the police closing in on the gang.

The wounded Jones takes Pryce to an old abandoned mine workings, Wheal Garth, and there, in the dark and isolated house, in the midst of a howling storm, Pryce meets the father and son duo – the Manacks – who own and operate the mine and who are at loggerheads about its future. The father is convinced he has found a vast lode of tin which will make their fortunes and revive the Cornish mining industry. The son, Captain Manack, wants to blow a hole at the end of a mine shaft which leads out under the sea in order to create a more secure underwater route via which his regular smuggling ships can offload their cargo.

It is Captain Manack who has hired Pryce to help perform this operation and the timeframe of the novel is the two or three days during which Pryce supervises the other miners in blasting through the rock face above the end of the shaft, up towards the sea bed. The idea is that this will then flood the shaft, creating a hole through which the contraband cargo will be lowered onto a kind of underwater rail system and then hauled inland and above the water level, into the heart of the mine where it can be easily reclaimed and stored.

Pryce doesn’t want to do it. He wants to get away from the wretched house and this crazy job, but Manack locks up his money and threatens to give Pryce up to the police. As a deserter he would be liable to a long prison sentence. When pushed, Manack pulls a gun on him. So Pryce is trapped until he can complete the job.

Gothic madness

BUT – as if this situation wasn’t dodgy enough, Pryce discovers a monumental family coincidence which fuels the Gothic and eerie tone of the book.

His father had emigrated to Canada, taking him with him as a four year-old boy, but had always spoken lovingly of his Cornish roots and it is these family memories which have prompted Pryce to return. Now he slowly unravels the family secret: that his mother abandoned his father and himself to run off with the older Manack. But Manack refused to leave his current wife, forcing Jim’s mother to become a mistress; and even when Manack’s wife did die, Manack married someone else, keeping Jim’s mother on in the humiliating role of housekeeper.

Furthermore, Pryce discovers from Kitty, the reluctant maid of the house, in her final years his mother was kept imprisoned in the small attic room of the creepy old house with its barred windows and locked door. Everyone was convinced she had gone mad. Mad because she is found wandering the cliffs after someone had pushed the legitimate lady of the house, Manack’s second wife, down an abandoned mine shaft. Everyone, including Pryce’s distraught mother, too dazed to remember the event, assumes she did it out of jealousy, that she is a murderer.

Only once, when the door was left unlocked, does Jim’s mother scribble a quick note to her wronged husband and escape out of the house and make to the headland where she throws herself off the cliffs to her death. This haunting note is given to Pryce by the servant Kitty, and upsets him for days.

Gothic The text is full of premonitions of doom, of hints and allusions to this dark and Gothic family history. Pryce is not only menaced by men with guns in the present, but by these memories of madness and suicide from the past. As narrator he repeatedly drops heavy hints about destiny, doom, the thread of fate, the fatal legacy of the killer mine and so on.

But like the ruined mine shafts which honeycomb the cliffs, Pryce’s family story goes on to reveal fresh convolutions and complications. Towards the end of the novel he realises that

  • his mother wasn’t a murderer: that old man Manack murdered his own wife to inherit her shares in the mine, and that he blamed Pryce’s distraught mother who was so upset that she acquiesced in her own incarceration
  • that Manack cleverly provided the opportunity for her suicide because she, too, owned some shares in the mine

In other words, that old man Manack has killed two women in his megalomaniac quest to gain complete control of the mine. It is he who is stark staring mad. And it is he who escapes from the house to precipitate the final, catastrophic dénouement of the novel.

Underground chases

Like Bond movies, all these thrillers have to include exciting chases: in The Trojan Horse it is Kilmartin’s flight through the sewers of London; in Wreckers Must Breathe it is the escape in the U-boat which is depth-charged by an RN ship; in The Lonely Skier it is the long dangerous ski chase which ends with the hero almost being killed.

Here in The Killer Mine there is the long sequence where Pryce follows old man Manack deeper and deeper into the honeycomb of disused mine shafts, imagining he is following him towards some secret. Only slowly does it dawn on him that he has been deliberately lured and then trapped underground to face a hideous death by starvation and thirst. Pages dwell on the horror of his fate until – not too surprisingly – he is, fortunately, rescued. By Kitty with whom, by this stage, he is falling love…

Disused mines

In Wreckers Must Breathe the German U-boat station is built out of a disused Cornish mine and the novel features vivid descriptions of descents into its ancient tunnels; same setting as The Killer Mine.

Left-wing

Like Ambler, Innes was politically left-wing and this view is dramatised, not always convincingly, in the mouths of some characters:

His eyes blazed at me across the fire. ‘What are laws? They’re not made by the men who starve. They’re made to protect the moneyed class. they’re my enemies, aren’t they? Well, aren’t they?’ (1973 Fontana paperback edition, page 40)

Cast

  • Jim Pryce: British Army deserter and miner, brought to England by crooks who promise him his freedom once he’s carried out some mining work in their disused mine-cum-smuggling operation.
  • Captain Mulligan: two-timing captain of the ship which smuggles Pryce from Italy back to England
  • David Jones: Welshman and crook who first writes to Pryce in Italy, offering him passage to and work in England. Responsible for blowing up a coastguard ship and killing its crew of customs officers which brings the police down on their trail, a thread which adds to the sense of danger and urgency among the cast – though it is not the police who precipitate the final disaster.
  • Captain Manack: son of old man Manack, he runs the booze smuggling operation, head of the old pub-cum-house named Cripples’ Ease where the action is set, and it is his plan to blast open to the sea one of the underground shafts, thus creating a clever underwater passage for smuggled goods, preferable to the current difficult and too-obvious method of landing them by boat on exposed beaches.
  • Manack Senior: obsessed for decades with gaining total control of Wheal Garth mine, he correctly discovers there is plenty of tin yet to mine in her and has a megalomaniac fantasy of re-opening the mine and reviving the entire Cornish mining industry of his youth. In this he is contradicted by his son who wants to flood the very gallery where the tin is in order to create an underwater smuggling route. Pryce witnesses several fierce arguments between them but has no idea how mad the old man is until it is too late. ‘Stark madness stared out of those pale eyes. (p.167)
  • Ruth Nearne: Pryce’s mother who left her husband for love of Manack Senior who proceeded to humiliate her, persuaded her she was mad and engineered her eventual suicide.
  • Bob Pryce: the narrator’s father. After his wife left him he took his young son abroad and raised him in various mining comunities around the world.
  • Kitty: housemaid in Cripples’ Ease, herself part of the Gothic plot. After Manack’s first wife dies, he remarries but not Pryce’s mother, instead a glamorous society woman. This woman is Kitty’s mother but since she is often absent living the high life, Kitty is actually raised by and loves Pryce’s mother. It is Kitty’s glamorous mother who everyone believes was murdered by Pryce’s mother, who everyone, as a result, thinks is was mad. As the real story emerges, Kitty and Pryce form an alliance, fall in love and, at the dramatic climax of the book, help to save each others’ lives and escape from the underground catastrophe. Kitty is described in physical detail unusual for books of this time: ‘Her eyes sparkled and I knew she wasn’t angry. She was a big girl, but well proportioned with firm breasts that thrust at the cotton of her blouse, so that I could see the outline of her nipples.’ (p.65) In the last pages they set off together for a new life abroad 🙂
  • Friar: one of the deserters Captain Manack has had clearing out the Mermaid Gallery preparatory to the final blasting.
  • Slim Matthews: the other deserter Captain Manack has had preparing the Mermaid Gallery.
  • Cripples’ Ease: the old pub-cum-headquarters of the smuggling gang: a place of ill omen, dark shadows, with a small light from the madwoman’s attic at which haunting faces regularly appear.
  • Wheal Garth: the tin mine where the novel is set, which old Manack has murdered to gain complete control of, which he lures Pryce into the deepest bowels of intending him to die there, and where the final catastophe takes place. It is The Killer Mine both because it inspires mad old Manack to murder, but because it ends up killing almost everyone connected with it.
  • Come Lucky: neighbouring mine, open to the sea and above Wheal Garth: old man Manack blasts this mine in order to flood Wheal Garth and kill everyone in it.

Mining terminology

  • adit: horizontal entrance to an underground mine
  • cross-cut: a tunnel driven from one seam to another through or across the intervening measures
  • gallery: a horizontal passage in an underground mine
  • raise: a minor connection from a lower level to a higher level in a mine
  • stoping: extracting ore from underground
  • stull: a round timber used to support the back or sides of a mine
  • winze: a minor connection between different levels in an underground mine

It didn’t seem there could be any world, but this nightmare maze of tunnels creeping tortuously through dripping, slime-covered rock. (p.145)

The fear I had felt down there in those twisting galleries, the sense of being lost, the darkness – it was all like some ghastly nightmare. I could not believe that it had really happened. It was as though I had just woken up. It just didn’t seem real. (p.162)

Related links

Cover of The Killer Mine

Cover of The Killer Mine

Hammond Innes reviews

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by Simon on November 2, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Adventure, Books, Novel, Thriller
Tagged , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on November 2, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/11/02/the-killer-mine-hammond-innes/