First published in 1994, Everville is the sequel to 1989’s The Great and Secret Show, and so the second Book of the Art. It is, according to Barker himself, “the first of my large novels written on my adopted soil” (the USA), and it’s also the first of his novels to return to a world and characters he’d written about before (not counting Harry D’Amour’s appearance in The Great and Secret Show, after his introduction in the Books of Blood story “The Last Illusion”).
Everville opens with a prologue set in America’s pioneer days. A wagon train is heading west from Missouri to Oregon, floundering as it encounters the Blue Mountains. Among its number is Harmon O’Connell, a man who has created in his mind, and in countless drawn plans, the shining city of Everville, which he intends to found once they reach their destination. He has a gold cross, given to him by a man named Owen Buddenbaum, to plant as a foundation to the city—not a crucifix, but the fellow to the one owned by Randolph Jaffe in the previous novel, emblematic of the magical Art, showing a human figure at the centre of four paths: “One to the dream-world, one to the real; one to the bestial, one to the divine.” When this seemingly Satanic cross is discovered by his fellow travellers, Harmon is blamed for all the ill-fortune that has befallen the trip so far and is killed. His 10-year-old daughter Maeve takes the cross and escapes, to found her father’s dream-city herself.
Skip to the present, where five years have passed since the events of The Great and Secret Show. Tesla Bombeck, carrying the spirit of the evolved monkey Raul within her, has been ranging across America, and picks up rumours that Fletcher, whom she’d immolated at his own request back in Palomo Grove, has somehow returned. Meanwhile her old friend Grillo, now holed up in Omaha (where the previous novel began), is using a bank of computers to collate the endless stream of weird news stories popping up throughout the nation. Both, along with noir-ish private eye Harry D’Amour in New York, are drawn to the Oregon town of Everville, just as it’s holding its annual festival. Also arriving there are Owen Buddenbaum—still alive after all these years, and ready to reap what he sowed when he gave that gold cross to Harmon O’Connell—and that figure who some think is the returned Fletcher, but who turns out to be something much darker. Added to this are some new characters, drawn from the ordinary folk of Everville, and yet to be introduced to the weird wonders coming their way: solicitor Erwin Toothaker, who uncovers a scandal in the town’s past; teen Seth Lundy, who “can hear angels hammering on the sky from Heaven’s side”; and Phoebe Cobb and her lover Joe Flicker, whose affair, once discovered, leads to Joe having to go on the run, and his finding an open doorway to the shores of Quiddity in the mountains above the town.
One thing to ask about Everville, it being the second book in a trilogy, is whether it’s worth reading, given that the third book of the series has yet to be (perhaps is never to be) written. I’d say that, just as the first book, The Great and Secret Show, works on its own, Everville could easily be the concluding part to a duology: it picks up characters from the previous book (I’m not so sure you could start with Everville), but finishes what it starts in terms of character and plot. The only way in which Everville doesn’t feel like a satisfactory conclusion is in terms of its themes. There’s so much going on, so many characters, so much incident, and lots of ideas offered up along the way, but none of those ideas is really pursued to the sort of depth you’d expect of an overall central theme. As such, the book doesn’t end with the feeling that it’s just delivered a big novel’s-worth of meaning—which Barker certainly did in Imajica (with its meditations on the need for balance in the spiritual and divine powers that govern us) or The Great and Secret Show (which could be read as a fable about the imagination being a battleground between fears and dreams).
There’s plenty that Everville could have pursed to greater depth. The Great and Secret Show was about the glitzy, glamorous side of America; Everville addresses itself to the complimentary small-town side of petty prejudices, small scale dreams and local scandals. The series itself has some ideas baked into it, for instance about evolution, whether physical or spiritual (as Raul says in this book: “We’re born to rise. To see more. To know more. Maybe to know everything one day.”), but Everville doesn’t take those notions any further than The Great and Secret Show. There’s the corresponding idea of change, and how things don’t end but merely transform (and this is a novel where at least two major characters spend a good time of the book as ghosts), but this feels more like an aspect of Barker’s world in general than something he’s directly addressing here.
The Great and Secret Show, art by Sanjulian
Even on the plot level, big ideas raised in The Great and Secret Show don’t seem to get much further examination. The nature of the Iad Orobouros, for instance, which in the first book we were told thirsted “For purity. For singularity. For madness.”, and again represents the main ticking-bomb threat as their dark wave travels across Quiddity towards our world. Although there are speculations about the nature of the Iad (is it created from the dark side of the human unconscious, or were humans in fact created from its depths?), there are no answers, and the Iad sort of peters out at the end, more of a maguffin to drive the plot than a carrier of meaning.
Two of Barker’s key strengths, I think, are his depiction of believable human beings encountering realms of the fantastic and having their lives transformed, and his creation of fantastic cosmologies that capture some essence of the human experience untouched by many authors. But in a way, Everville, being the second book in a series, is setting itself up not to play to those strengths. We’ve already been introduced to the cosmology, and as I say, it’s not really explored to any greater depth (though there is a lot more paddling about); and, as many of the novel’s key characters are returning from the previous book, they’ve already had their transformative moments—and the new characters’ encounters with the fantastic are got over more quickly, as Barker no doubt felt it was material he’d already dealt with.
What I’d say Everville is, is a generous slice of Barker: it’s well-written (more readable than The Great and Secret Show), full of interesting characters, weird images and situations, and constantly sparking off ideas (there’s enough ideas to fuel another couple of Books of Blood, if he’d wanted), but it’s not doing anything new. It reads like a horror-fantasy adventure, written with a great deal of invention and verve, which would be enough for any other author. But I think Barker is capable of going deeper. Perhaps, this being the second book of a series, he didn’t have the elbow room to really turn it into something new.
In the novel, Tesla finds a note Grillo left himself on how he should address his attempt to write up what happened in Palomo Grove (the events of The Great and Secret Show): that he should let the telling “be ragged and contradictory, like stories have to be.” Perhaps that was Barker talking to himself here, too, giving himself permission to let the story sprawl, like the growth of that meant-to-be shining town of Everville itself. If so, perhaps the permission was needed because he perhaps felt, at some level, he should have been pushing Everville into some sharper focus, some more definite meaning, some higher level than the previous book of the series? (It’s towards the end of the book that Barker takes up the idea of “the story tree”, and how every human life is a telling of one leaf of that tree—an idea, I’d say, that would definitely have given this book the thematic weight it was lacking, if only it had been woven in from the start. Instead, from what I’ve read of Barker’s intentions, this is actually the idea he’s going to pursue in the third Book of the Art, if it gets written.)
There are plenty of recurring Barker tropes, in Everville—something I always like to keep track of—sometimes changed in new and interesting ways: the showman/salesman semi-villain, in the figure of Owen Buddenbaum; the “walking anatomy lesson” of a painfully reforming being, in Phoebe Cobb bringing her dead-but-not-dead lover Joe back to corporeality and being interrupted halfway, resulting in him existing for a while in “an agonised and unfinished state”; the massacre of a secret group of beautiful creatures; the intolerant mob roused into action by incursions of the fantastic; a key character turning out to be the offspring of a human mother and a monstrous (or non-human) father—a theme from some of the earliest Books of Blood—though in this case the progeny is itself monstrous in the moral sense… And most of all, the feeling that one should embrace every aspect of the human condition: the transcendent and the bestial, the fantastic and the normal. Barker is a thorough inclusionist, a celebrator of the entire human carnival. (It’s such a Barker-ish thing that Maeve O’Connell kicks off her father’s dream city by opening a whorehouse. In any other writer’s hands, this could be a satirical commentary on America’s being driven by money and selling the idea of a certain type of unrealistic dream; but for Barker, it’s just a carnal counterbalance to the ideas of spiritual transcendence behind the “shining city”: for him, there has to be both sides of the flesh-spirit equation.)
Everville isn’t a bad book. All the same, I’m looking forward to getting on with the later, mid-career Barker novels, each of which was standalone, and written by a man who has now very much found his place as a purveyor of wild, weird, transcendent and carnivalesque fantasy-horrors. Though actually it’s with his next novel, Sacrament, that I remember stumbling as a reader of Barker the first time round. I’m interested to see how I feel about it on a second read.
