Sphere 2007 PB
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.
Berkley Books, 2021 edition
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.
Sphere 1988 PB, art by Steve Crisp
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.”
1985 HB, art by Geoff Shields
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.
1990 Penguin edition
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.)
1988 Charter Books PB
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.
