64 pages • 2-hour read
The Ritual
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Themes
The Complicated Nature of Anger
Content Warning: This section includes discussion of death and graphic violence.
In The Ritual, Nevill explores controlled and uncontrolled male anger through Hutch and Luke, respectively. Nevill also examines the root causes of Luke’s anger and how his anger can be a destructive or constructive force depending on the context. In these ways, Nevill examines the complicated nature of anger.
Hutch experiences intense bouts of anger, but is able to manage them. When Dom and Phil walk slowly because of their injuries, Hutch “could feel his irritation evolving into anger, manifesting as a tightening across his chest” (6). However, Hutch doesn’t lash out at his friends, as it is against his moral code to do so. As Hutch explains to Luke, “God knows I’ve thought of giving Dom a shoeing over the years, but people like us just don’t do things this way” (96). Hutch categorizes himself and his friends as good and civilized people, that is, people who don’t violently act on their internal anger. Rather, goodness and mental health come from being able to control emotions.
By contrast, Luke acts on his rage impulsively, which harms his well-being and his relationships with others, especially in urban environments. Luke physically attacks someone for pushing past him on a train, which reflects how damaging and unprovoked his anger can often be. Luke’s anger is an externalization of feelings he has about himself: He knows that “much of his anger should have been directed at himself. He was transferring it onto the others” (121). For example, Luke becomes angry because he doesn’t insist on going back to the trail and abandoning the shortcut. He doesn’t properly communicate his feelings, which turn out to be accurate. His anger also leads to clashes with Dom and Phil, whom he envies, which threatens to fracture his relationships with them permanently. In detailing how anger harms Luke, Nevill suggests that anger born of self-loathing and envy is a destructive force.
However, it is Luke’s anger that saves him in the virgin forest, as it turns from a destructive force into a constructive one that has a clear, guilty target in the form of the threatening antagonists. Luke reflects upon the necessity of anger when he determines what he needs to do to survive:
He would need to go to the red, hot, unthinking place inside himself: the place he inhabited when he attacked the passenger on the train, and punched poor Dom off his feet […] His life depended upon it happening. And he would need to stay inside that hot red place of instinct and rage until they or he were dead (370).
This rage is how he is able to kill his captors, Fenris, Loki, and the old woman, and escape from the house. Luke’s rage is also how he is able to defend himself against the creature and make it out of the forest. The extreme circumstances in the wilderness offer acceptable outlets for Luke’s anger—people and a creature that threaten his life—unlike Dom, the train passenger, and other Londoners.
Most significantly, at the end of the novel, Luke’s anger reveals that he does want to live, despite being angry at himself for what he hasn’t achieved. As he overcomes his tormentors and frees himself from the forest, Luke realizes that he no longer envies others for their material and financial success—instead, simply surviving and appreciating what he has are enough. The novel’s ending thus implies that, from now on, Luke will no longer be so unhappy and angry with himself and his life.
Masculinity In and Out of Civilization
The Ritual explores how masculinity is constructed both in and out of urban civilization. Dom and Phil represent achieving an ideal masculinity in London, then losing it, highlighting how the social construction is tenuous. Blood Frenzy embodies a masculinity that completely rejects the norms that Dom and Phil, and other civilized people, live by. Luke reconfigures his masculinity from freewheeling, but self-loathing, bachelor in the city to finding a more positive self-conception in the forest.
Dom and Phil present successful urban masculinity, with Luke initially envying his friends. Being a student was when Luke was happiest, as society accepts students being bachelors and hopping from job to job. After university, Dom and Phil followed the traditional path of getting married, having children, and making lots of money in respectable, long-term jobs. These things make them grown men, according to society, while Luke remains in a state of arrested development. However, these achievements do not last, as both Dom and Phil lose their money and their families. For them, maintaining the image of masculinity in society is harder than attaining it, which suggests the fragile and arbitrary nature of masculinity in urban society.
Fenris and Loki reject the norms that Dom and Phil spend their lives trying to attain. Instead, the black metal band believes that masculinity lies in violently rejecting civilized life and returning to older, more violent, ways. They promote their teenage rebellion in their music. Luke wonders “why they produced such music in the social utopia of Scandinavia […] Perhaps it was […] an act of rebellion against having everything” (281). Fenris and Loki, living in a society that provides for its citizens, come to the virgin forests to control a god and practice magic. In other words, they believe men should protest the stable and healthy hegemony urban society has created, instead favoring the violent masculinity they associate with Vikings. Their conception of masculinity is thus destructive and actively harmful toward others.
Luke lies in between these positions: He secretly longs for the life that Dom and Phil have, and while he refuses to put in the effort to attain it, he also doesn’t reject all of society and its norms. Luke may sometimes clash with his friends, but he doesn’t want to kill people who represent social norms, as Blood Frenzy do. Luke is angry because his bachelor life isn’t as fulfilling as he hoped. He thinks, “If you had no partner or career then who gave a shit about you at his age? That had been the whole point: to disengage from any responsibility so he could do his own thing” (156). He has social freedom, but lacks the economic ability to move freely because of his limited income. His friends are angry that he doesn’t pursue traditional masculinity because it leads to them camping instead of going on a more expensive and comfortable vacation.
However, Luke discovers what really matters when he leaves society and loses his friends: survival. He realizes that “the things that held him in place, and reflected an image of who he had once been back to himself […] that those things a man should strive for and achieve in the old world were all now unimportant” (417). Monetary and familial success are meaningless when faced with a monster and human killers. Instead, what matters is wanting to live and doing whatever is necessary to ensure survival. Thus, in surviving his ordeals in the forest, Luke ends up at peace with his masculinity and with the society he once felt alienated from.
The Clash Between Modernity and Ancient Beliefs
The goat/human creature in The Ritual, its offspring, and its magic only exist beyond the realms of human civilization. It resides in the “the oldest forest in Europe” (162), past known and traveled trails in places never seen by humans, or places that only a few humans inhabit. The humans, and human/animal hybrids that live near the creature worship it and have rituals involving blood sacrifices, invoking an older, more violent paganism. In The Ritual, the protagonists thus come face-to-face with the clash between modernity and ancient beliefs.
As the men get further and further into the forest, they begin to sense that the atmosphere around them has become more mysterious and threatening, hinting at the dominance of a more ancient, untamed order. Hutch notes that the forest itself seems to respond to the presence of humans by becoming more impassible and inhospitable, as well as guiding them toward the creature. The day after they stay in the black house, Hutch notes he “‘can’t see further than fifteen feet. It’s worse than anything we saw yesterday.’ Like it built up overnight, he was tempted to say out loud” (64). He is not willing to voice his suspicions about the magic of the land, but notices how it hinders and directs them. Luke develops this idea later in the novel: “The terrible will of this place demanded the renewal of old rites. Such things existed up here. Here. Called by the oldest name, they came back to life” (348, emphasis added). The ancient creature can only live in an old land, animated by “old rites,” invoking the violent pagan past.
The creature is a Baphomet-like figure, part-goat, part-human. It embodies the violence and bestiality of the old paganism, threatening the urban men as they draw further into the forest and away from the comforts of urban civilization. The creature’s voice is “a mixture of a bovine cough and a jackal’s bark, but one so deep and powerful it suggested a chest more expansive and a mouth wider than either of those comparisons. Bestial. Ferocious. To be avoided” (139). Loki refers to the creature as the “Black Yule Goat” (325), while the old woman refers to the creature as “Moder,” or mother, indicating that she is likely one of its offspring. The creature’s unchecked violence and bloodlust transforms the forest into a region filled with terror and lawlessness, with the Blood Frenzy members explicitly rejecting urban civilization’s social norms in favor of the murderous ancient beliefs the creature embodies.
Toward the novel’s close, Luke thinks that “Moder’s rule and her pitiful congregation had to end. She was an isolated God; the last black goat of the woods” (395). Luke’s killing of the creature and escape from the forest thus embody the reassertion of civilization and modernity, with Luke rejecting the violent, ancient beliefs that have threatened to overwhelm him throughout the narrative. In rejecting such beliefs and escaping, Luke chooses civilization over the world of the forest.
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