mewsings in March 2024

After the first three Books of Blood came out, both Barker and his publishers knew he needed to present the world with a novel. His initial idea was for something Sphere thought too fantasy-ish for a man they were intent on marketing as a horror writer, so he put that idea to one side (it would eventually become Weaveworld), and set about writing something more traditionally in the horror mould. Initially titled Mamoulian’s Game, it came out in 1985 as The Damnation Game.

The novel opens in war-ravaged Warsaw, in which “the thief” hears about a legendary man who never loses at cards. Seeking him out among the rubble and destruction proves tricky, but it seems this man has been waiting for him… The story then leaps forward to the present day, where Marty Strauss is serving time for robbery in Wandsworth Prison. He’s offered the chance of an early release, if he goes to work for Joseph Whitehead, the super-rich head of a worldwide pharmaceutical empire. Whitehead, it seems, is expecting trouble, and needs a bodyguard he can trust — and a man with gambling debts (which is what drove Marty to crime), is just the sort of person he needs. But when the trouble comes, it’s in the form of Mamoulian, a man possessed of supernatural power, including the ability to raise and control the dead. This is the card-player that Whitehead (“the thief”) met and played in Warsaw, in a moment that started him on the path to being the head of a massive corporate empire. But Mamoulian considers there’s a debt to be repaid, and has come to claim it.

The first thing to say about Barker’s first novel, I think, is how naturally he seems to have taken to novel-writing after the (admittedly long) short stories of the Books of Blood. Barker is focused in every scene, taking time to bring out of every character and situation some special detail, as though he’s relishing each moment like a fine wine. That said, this is a long novel, with surprisingly few characters. Perhaps an ingrained habit from short stories and plays with a limited troupe of players kept him from sprawling into the sort of large cast you’d expect in a longer book?

Whenever he’s spoken or written about The Damnation Game, Barker has made it clear what its core inspiration was: “At the heart of the novel is the story of Faust.” In particular, it seems what fascinated him was how a modern version of the Faust story, shorn of its religious underpinnings (he characterised the original Faust as being a Renaissance man punished by a Medieval world) would play out.

I have to admit, though, I’m not so sure the Faust aspect really stands out for me. There are two things you really need for a Faust story: a Devil, and a Pact. As the novel goes on, instead of, for instance, Mamoulian developing into a truly Mephistophelean figure, he gets watered down. Initially threatening and mysterious, the more we learn about him, the more merely human he’s revealed to be. He’s no Devil, just a man who has some magician’s tricks, and what’s more is a very old man, with “depleted energies”. He’s not some all-powerful archetypal Evil come to claim a soul, he’s tired and he doesn’t make it clear for a long time exactly what he wants. Because, it turns out, there’s also no real pact, either. Whatever Mamoulian has turned up to claim, it wasn’t agreed by him and Whitehead. (It certainly wasn’t signed in blood.) It turns out, in fact, more to be something Mamoulian assumed he’d be getting but didn’t, so he starts to come across as more petulant and resentful than full of the sort of Judgement of Hell you’d get in a Faust story. Barker has said his modern version of Faust is about a world in which “Every man is his own Mephistopheles”, but I don’t really see how that works with this narrative. Perhaps it’s simply because Barker would go on to create a far more effective and powerful Faustian story in The Hellbound Heart/Hellraiser.

The strongest theme in The Damnation Game, for me, was something quite different. It popped up in the first paragraph, with a sentence describing war-torn Warsaw:

“Mountains of rubble — still nurturing the dead like bulbs ready to sprout as the spring weather warmed…”

This struck me as evoking the first section of T S Eliot’s The Waste-Land, which is shot through with the contrast between plant-life reviving in the Spring, and the un-reviving dead of the Great War, most explicitly in the lines:

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?”

The novel focuses on Marty, brought out of prison (a kind of death) into the new life of the outside world once more. He even thinks, at one point: “I’ve been dead, and I’m coming back to life.” But The Damnation Game is dealing not in the dead coming back to life, but a sort of false resurrection of various kinds. Marty is not fully alive again, because his job for Whitehead keeps him for the most part in Whitehead’s (luxurious, but fenced-in) estate. (Whose most telling feature, perhaps, is an abandoned dovecote: an empty space abandoned by love.) It’s made clear Marty isn’t his own man, merely a living body there for Whitehead’s use:

“You’re my property, Strauss. You concern yourself with me, or you get the Hell out of here tomorrow morning. Me! … Not yourself. Forget yourself.”

The novel is full of characters existing in states of living death. Sometimes literally, as in the case of Breer, whom Mamoulian claims from a death by suicide so as to use him as his agent in the world. Others more figuratively, as in Whitehead’s daughter Carys, with her addiction to heroin, or Whitehead himself, retreating from the world out of fear of Mamoulian, and Mamoulian as well, fastidious and nihilistic, a walking emptiness, yet too afraid of death to leave this life he seems to despise. Marty at one point finds himself infused with “unwelcome thoughts of lying face up in the ground, dead perhaps, but anticipating resurrection.” But this isn’t a resurrection type of world, not with Mamoulian and Whitehead in charge. It’s a living-death world, always holding off the first step towards a true resurrection.

Although it’s unfailing readable, I felt The Damnation Game began to lose its initial focus from the mid-point on, and I place the blame firmly with the character of Mamoulian. It’s at the halfway point the much-anticipated meeting between Whitehead and Mamoulian occurs — the moment Whitehead has been dreading, because he knows it will lead to his death. Only, it doesn’t. Mamoulian turns up, says he will come again, and leaves. Later, he comes again, kills a few secondary characters, and leaves again. The second half of the novel is a series of confrontations with Mamoulian where nothing gets resolved, and for no clear reason. And perhaps nothing gets resolved because it’s not clear for a long time just what Mamoulian wants.

Mamoulian lacks the sort of clearly-defined meaning Barker is usually so good at giving his antagonists. He’s wonderful at creating larger-than-life, loquacious monsters who expound their philosophies of excess — of experience, pain, power. (Or, as in the case of, say, Rawhead Rex, are so blatantly symbolic they don’t have to explain themselves.) Mamoulian never does this. It’s only after a while we get a glimpse of what his inner world is like, and it turns out to be a foggy world of nihilism, asceticism, and absence. It’s not even a fierce nihilism, it’s all rather tired. Mamoulian is clearly at the end of his life, fed up with it all, and doesn’t make for a very powerful figure — he just keeps lingering. Even his title — he calls himself “the Last European” — comes across more as writerly bravura on Barker’s part than having any real meaning. This makes confrontations with Mamoulian difficult — just what is it you’re confronting? What’s the ideological battle that needs to be fought while the supernatural shenanigans are going on?

I think you can find an opposite to Mamoulian in the novel, but it’s not spelled out. There’s an intensity of living, a relishing of experience, as with Marty when he’s finally let out on his own for a night from Whitehead’s estate:

“He felt real. God in Heaven, that was it. At last he was able to operate in the world again, affect it, shape it.”

The “game” of the novel’s title, perhaps, isn’t so much about the rules of what’s going on, as the feeling of being a player in the world, being part of it all, taking your chances, getting your hands dirty. (Something the fastidious Mamoulian doesn’t want to do. This, perhaps, is at the root of his ability to always win at cards — that chance-phobic ultra-control of his smacks more of anxiety than a Devil’s power.)

And the one power Marty and Carys can wield against Mamoulian, it turns out, is the connection they feel. Both Whitehead and Mamoulian are powerful figures, locked by their very power into their own solipsistic worlds, able to hold off what they fear, and so become all the more imprisoned by that fear. It’s the more human characters, with their vulnerability and need to connect, that overcome the powerful, in their own small way.

As I say, The Damnation Game remains readable, but I don’t think it has the sort of lasting meaning it might have had if Mamoulian had been a figure who really stood for something — as, say, “the Hell Priest” (whom we all know as Pinhead) does in Barker’s next piece of long-form fiction.

After a couple of recent reminders — her sketch map for the novel appeared at the Fantasy: Realms of Imagination exhibition, and she was interviewed alongside Alan Moore at a related online event in January — I’ve finally got round to reading Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, which I’d been meaning to do since it came out in 2020. (A publishing event that caused minor tremors in this blog, as an old entry from 2009, “Giovanni Battista Piranesi and the Three-Dimensional Labyrinth” — in which, ahem, I link to my own short story called “Piranesi” — started getting hits.)

The novel is narrated by a man who gives himself no name, but is called “Piranesi” by the only other living person he knows (whom he refers to as “the Other”). Piranesi lives in a strange world, which he refers to as “the House”, a world of vast, light and airy halls peopled by statues and birds, with sea-tides sometimes surging up from the lower levels, and rain-forming clouds in the higher. He busies himself with staying alive (eating fish and seaweed, and drinking water he collects from the clouds) while making a catalogue of the statues in the potentially infinite array of halls, as well as caring for the remains of the few dead he has found in his explorations. He regularly meets the Other, a man seeking an ancient knowledge that will give him extraordinary powers. Piranesi, though keen to help his one and only friend — though the Other, it’s obvious to the reader from the start, is not much of a friend — realises he doesn’t actually want such powers himself, and even wonders if the search may be leading them down the wrong path. As he explains to the Other:

“I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted…”

Which couldn’t help come across, to me, as a reader’s warning. The mysterious nature of the world of “the House”, of Piranesi’s identity, and of the Other’s clearly our-worldly nature, were all encouraging me to read Piranesi as a puzzle to be solved. I expected it all to be a profound metaphor of some sort, a fable about the nature of human existence perhaps, and hunted for clues among the inconsistencies. (The fact, for instance, that Piranesi, who as far as he can remember has always lived in the House, knows of such things as trees, chess, lobster traps, angels, husbands and wives, even Prince of Wales check-pattern suits.)

Piranesi himself has no feeling there’s a puzzle to be solved. For him, the House is an entirely benevolent environment, to be accepted — and celebrated — as it is:

“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite…”

“The Beautiful Orderliness of the House is what gives us Life…”

“It is my belief that the World (or, if you will, the House, since the two are for all practical purposes identical) wishes an inhabitant for itself to be a witness to its Beauty and the recipient of its Mercies…”

“The World feels Complete and Whole, and I, its Child, fit into it seamlessly…”

My own initial approach to the novel as primarily an intellectual puzzle started to turn to a slight disappointment when it was obvious the whole thing wasn’t going to unlock into some tightly-argued philosophical metaphor — but in fact that approach had blinded me to the purely emotional side of Piranesi’s story, which gained all the more of an impact when it hit home. And all the more so, considering Piranesi is a thoroughly innocent and childlike man, industrious, friendly, kind, trusting, considerate, and full of wonder at all around him in the manner of a kind of Holy Fool.

The novel has resonances to some classic works of fantasy. That sentence quoted above — “the World (or, if you will, the House, since the two are for all practical purposes identical)” — echoes the opening of Borges’s “Library of Babel” (“The universe (which others call the Library)…”). There’s Peake’s Gormenghast books (and perhaps a Peake’s law should be coined, stating that any sufficiently Gormenghastian structure will inevitably attract a flood). Clarke opens her novel with a quote from The Magician’s Nephew, and one of the many statues Piranesi encounters is of a faun, which inspires him to dream of it “…standing in a snowy forest and speaking to a female child” — a clear reference to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Perhaps the dreams of the House are the imaginative stories of our world?

I at first wondered if there wasn’t a reference, also, to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, in the albatross that appears near the start of the novel. There’s certainly something of the shipwrecked loon about poor Piranesi, but maybe there’s a deeper link, too. The Ancient Mariner escapes the horrors of the “Night-mare Life-in-Death” when he spontaneously blesses the slimy creatures (which he’s at first repulsed by) crowding the oceans. Piranesi seems to have slipped into a similar state of wanting to bless everything in the world. “It is my belief that the House itself loves and blesses equally everything that it has created,” he says early on, and by this belief he blesses himself and everything in the House.

It’s perhaps a hint at how he has survived in a situation whose clearest non-fantastic parallels are to mental breakdown and imprisonment: an almost holy acceptance of the world around him, a commitment to seeing its beauty, and his own humble place in it, a radical affirmation in the face of what must also, surely, include the pains of loneliness. Set against this, the Other is all too clearly selfish, cynical, uncaring, even abusive, right from the start — and that’s before we get to know what he’s up to.

It’s a short book, but it packs an emotional punch in its last sections that made it an absolutely worthwhile read, for me.

There could, certainly, be more to the story. Two characters at least — the dark occultist Laurence Arne-Sayles, and the (surely series-ready) Sarah Raphael — feel untapped of their full potential. I’d love to see them face off. But, on its own, Piranesi is a really fine read, and one I’m glad I finally got round to.

(As one more plug, here’s that link to my own story, “Piranesi”.)

Following on from Rendezvous with Rama and Solaris, next up in my sporadic reading of SF that deals with the cosmic weird is the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic (coincidentally — or not — another book adapted by Andrei Tarkovsky). First published in the Russian literary magazine Avrova in 1972, then in book form after a five-year delay (the brothers became somewhat frowned upon by the Communist authorities), it first came out in English in 1977, translated by A W Bouis. I read the 2012 translation by Olena Bormashenko (you can read an interview with her here).

The novel is divided into four chapters, dipping into the life of Redrick Schuhart, or “Red” as he’s known, between the ages of 23 and 31. Red is a Stalker, one of a small group of “desperate young men who, despite the grave risks, sneak into the Zone and smuggle out whatever they find”. What, then, is “the Zone”?

Six of these mysteriously transformed areas appeared, suddenly, after an incident known simply as “the Visit”, during which it’s assumed aliens briefly landed on Earth. (It was later calculated, from the path the scattered Zones describe across the surface of the Earth, that they originated from the star Deneb in Cygnus.)

The Zones’ weirdness is never fully catalogued or even remotely explained. Everything about them seems to defy human understanding of the physical universe. There are, for instance, pockets of sudden, intense gravity (known as “bug traps” to the Stalkers, “graviconcentrate” to the scientists), stepping into which will immediately crush you flat. There are similar areas of intense, blistering heat. A substance the Stalkers call “hell slime” (a “colloidal gas” to the scientists) turns anything that touches it into a similar slime. A voyage of just a few hundred steps into the Zone, then, is fraught with mortal danger, and a need to be constantly ready for something new, deadly, and unexplainable at any moment. The authorities, naturally, stop people from entering, so Stalkers go in at night.

Why go in at all? The Zone is littered with objects of immense value — alien artefacts that scientists are still struggling to understand, but which the black market has found uses (and prices) for. “Spacells”, for instance, are inexhaustible batteries. “Black sparks” are used in jewellery for their property of absorbing light then emitting it in modified form. There’s a bracelet that seems to promote health, and a substance called “blue panacea”. There are also highly dangerous items such as the “death lamp”, which emits a deadly ray (and whose current whereabouts are unknown, along with the Stalker who found it). Other objects are simply mysterious, though are studied at length by scientists. For instance, the numerous “empties”, which are pairs of saucer-sized copper-coloured disks that remain paired together, with a constant 18-inch gap between them, yet no physical connection. In an echo of Lem’s Solaris, numerous papers have been written about these things without anyone coming any closer to understanding how they work, or what they’re for.

The weirdness of the Zones (though we only see one, in the town of Harmont, in an unspecified country) isn’t, though, the focus of the tale. Rather, Roadside Picnic (whose name draws an analogy between the alien detritus of the Zones and what human visitors to a forest might leave behind after a picnic), centres on the lives of people trying to make a living from it. To the Stalkers, the Zone is both a “treasure trove” and “an evil temptation” — “The damned hag. My lifeblood,” as Red says — a place that draws them with the promise of much-needed gains, while ruining them both psychologically and physically. The constant mortal danger, for instance, instils an ingrained cynicism about their own and others’ lives. (Do you rescue a fellow Stalker when he loses his legs to hell slime, or leave him, perhaps even give him a quick death?) And if they do escape, they’re at constant risk of discovery by the authorities; all of them have spent time in jail. There are weirder effects, too. Red, for instance, has had several moments in the Zone when his perceptions become preternaturally, almost painfully, acute. These moments seem to be leaking into his outside-the-Zone life, too, like LSD flashbacks. And then there are the children. Although the Zone is not radioactive, Stalkers’ children tend to have mutations. Red’s daughter is known as the Monkey for her pelt of silky fur. Another Stalker’s daughter is exceptionally beautiful, yet resembles neither of her parents.

As the Stalkers’ dealings with the Zone are on a practical level — how to survive, what to retrieve, how to sell it on afterwards — none of them really pause to think about the deeper implications. That aspect — the more cosmically weird aspect — only gets brought up once, in a conversation with a scientist, Dr Valentine Pillman, to whom the most profound fact about the Zones is their mere existence. They tell us, he says, that we are not alone in the universe, and this single fact outweighs everything else about them. That said, he’s aware that what’s found in the Zones “could potentially allow us to skip a few rungs in the ladder of progress”, if only any of it could be even remotely understood. The current state of Zone-related studies, though, is just a series of “miraculously received answers to questions we don’t yet know how to pose”. (Pillman has the best line in the book, when he speaks of the possible world they might live in if all of the Zones’ mysteries were unleashed: a “time of cruel miracles”.)

So, if Roadside Picnic isn’t explicitly about the weirdness of the universe that’s implied by the Zones, what is it about? One obvious possibility, considering it was written and published in the USSR, is that it’s a criticism of capitalism, in the way the semi-miraculous weirdness of the Zone is immediately exploited in every possible way by these (evidently Western) humans — and, of course, the way this exploitation leads to a moral and spiritual decay in the exploiters. But equally, I wondered if the novel wasn’t a highly-veiled satire on living in a totalitarian state, in the way it presents ordinary human beings doing their best to make a living in the face of this incomprehensible but powerful thing, which operates under no stable set of rules and can issue instant death without a moment’s notice.

The best take I found on the novel, though, came from Theodore Sturgeon, who emphasised the positive moral qualities brought out in the book (the full article is here):

“Add the Strugatskys’ deft and supple handling of loyalty and greed, of friendship and love, of despair and frustration and loneliness, and you have a truly superb tale, ending most poignantly in what can only be called a blessing. You won’t forget it. ”

The ultimate prize to be found in the Zone is the Golden Sphere, a rumoured object said to be able to grant any wish. It sounds like pure fantasy, but none of the Stalkers question it, and in the final chapter Red sets out to find it. But if the Golden Sphere is the Holy Grail, and the Stalkers the flawed knights that seek it, Red is no pure-souled Galahad. Yet, however cynical and bitter he thinks he’s become, the mere proximity of this ultimate magical object brings out, from some long-dormant depth, a benevolence for all humankind that surprises even himself. And, in a way, this may be the best thing this Holy Grail has to offer him: if it can’t set the entire world magically to rights, the mere possibility of its existence might, nevertheless, restore his deeper humanity.

Areas of weirdness like the Zone have popped up in this blog before. Ballard’s ever-spreading area of “time dilation” in The Crystal World, for instance. William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land could be seen as a sort of inverted zone-of-weirdness, in that its weirdness covers all the world except the one, final island of human normality in the Great Redoubt. Ryhope Wood from the Mythago Wood books is a fantasy zone-of-weirdness, with its own version of “cruel miracles”. The earliest example I can think of is in Lovecraft’s “Colour Out of Space” (the Strugatskys’ Zones have odd colour effects, too), while a more modern take is in Annihilation, based on Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (which I’ve not read).

Reading Roadside Picnic, I felt sure John Clute must have covered Zones, as a category, in the Encyclopedia of SF. And yes, they’re there — and, as a bonus, they’re not even given the wildly unexplanatory sort of nomenclature he so often uses (“Polder”, “Braid”, etc.). I guess Zones are just too strange, and primal, to be given any other name than “Zone”.

Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker was based on his pick of a number of scenarios the Strugatskys suggested, based on their book. It reduces the novel to its simplest element: a journey into the Zone, in search of the central room where wishes come true. The fact that the Stalker leads two men, known only as the Writer (a cynic, to whom the world is “hopelessly boring… ruled by cast iron laws” with no room for miracles or wonders) and the Professor (a physicist, who, it turns out, sees the wish-fulfilling room as a potential creator of would-be-tyrants and world-dictators), made me at first think it was going to be about bringing the “two cultures”, science and art, before a source of mystery and awe. But by the end it’s apparent the actual dichotomy is between these two — who are both intellectuals — and the Stalker himself, a much more innocent and instinctual man, who leads people to the wish-fulfilling room but feels no need to partake of its wonders himself. If this film is about art then the Stalker, not the Writer, is the artist, leading people to the vision, the wonder, and letting them decide how to see it, what to do with it. (He believes the dangers of the Zone aren’t there to ensure only the “good” or the “bad” reach the room, but those “who have lost all hope… the wretched.” The essential survival qualities, for him, are “pliancy” and “weakness”.)

It feels rather like a science fictional version of Waiting for Godot, with an ending almost opposite to the Strugatskys’ burst of hope. Here, the Stalker, who is driven by faith in humanity and a basic sense of wonder, feels worn down by the cynicism of those he takes into the Zone. Nevertheless, he’s drawn back to guiding people into the Zone, for, as his wife says: “It’s better to have a bitter happiness than a dull, grey life.”