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If the “cosy catastrophe” is the archetypal post-WWII English SF story, surely the quiet invasion comes a close second (The Midwich Cuckoos or Quatermass II being prime examples). They’re quiet because they either occur in an isolated location (a cut off village in Cuckoos) or by hiding in plain sight (an industrial processing plant in Quatermass II). John Christopher’s The Possessors (first published in 1965) is of the former type, being set in a ski-chalet high in the Swiss Alps, which is further isolated from its nearest village when an avalanche blocks the one mountain road leading to it.

At first, the holidaymakers (all Brits, having chosen this chalet for the English-American couple who run it) continue as normal, expecting the pass to be cleared in a couple of days. They’re a hung-up bunch, many of them recovering (or not recovering) from a variety of losses: Jane Winchmore is a widow in her thirties, Douglas Poole is on the rebound from an abruptly ended affair, while hostess Mandy Hamilton left the three children from her first marriage behind in America. Others have clear compromises or unbalances in their relationships: plastic surgeon Selby Grainger is the eternal dallier-with-women, while his wife, the cooly beautiful Elizabeth, puts up with it, confident he won’t actually leave her, and Ruth Deeping clearly favours her younger son Andy over ten-year-old Stephen, whom she constantly nags. Perhaps the only fully happy one of the bunch, in fact, is eight-year-old Andy, so beloved by his mother, which is perhaps why he’s the first victim of the alien invasion. Thinking he’s found a glowing blue ball in the snow, he touches it and instantly drops to the ground. Selby declares him dead, and he’s put in a makeshift coffin in the cellar—only for him to get up and leave the chalet sometime in the night. Everyone joins in the search, though only his mother, Ruth, has any faith that a boy in so few clothes and no shoes can survive for any length of time in the snow. But he does return—only, not quite himself. Significantly colder to the touch and slightly less human, he has (as we, the readers, know from the book’s opening section) been taken over by an alien spore, flung out from its dying home planet millions of years ago, which landed by chance on the Earth and was uncovered by the recent avalanche.

The alien—symbiotic or parasitic, depending on whether you take its point of view or ours—needs to isolate the humans, one by one, so as to infect them. And of course the humans take a long time working out what’s happening, speculating first of all that it’s some new kind of illness, or an infectious mass hysteria, or even demonic possession. And all the time, the survivors are becoming increasingly besieged in the chalet, boarding themselves up against the possessors trying to get in, get them alone, and take them over.

For most of the book the story is driven by suspense and the increasing tensions between the already flawed characters. In this, there’s an obvious contrast to be drawn between the aliens (who work effortlessly together, and tempt in at least one character with the promise of an end to human struggles) and the humans, whose only working relationships are those founded on long-held compromises. Chalet owner George Hamilton, for instance, is a good husband to his wife Mandy because he ignores the bottles of gin she’s got stashed about the place, and is pretty much an alcoholic himself. (There’s a lot of drinking in the book. Interviewed in a special issue of Interzone, Sam Youd—the real name of John Christopher, and meant to rhyme with “cloud”, apparently—admitted: “It’s the way I live, yes, I do drink alcohol, and quite a bit of alcohol, though only wine…” Though it seems to have been pretty much part of the times anyway.)

It’s hard not to compare Christopher with his contemporary John Wyndham, both of whom were the face of general-readership SF in Britain at the time. Christopher’s characters are much more evidently flawed, and come with a greater dose of cynicism about human relationships, a sense that there can never be anything more than a “total failure of comprehension” between people. Offered the slightest sign of sympathy for her widowhood, young Jane just wants to escape, and instantly regrets it the one time she shares her feelings of despair with someone else. The sense is that isolation and compromise are built-in to the human condition, whereas the characters in, say, Day of the Triffids, though they have to overcome external difficulties and the occasional dangerous human, will eventually find some sense of community, even family, in the end. For Wyndham, decency is a struggle but a worthwhile one; for Christopher it feels, at times, like a lost cause.

But there are resonances with other SF-horror, too. The most obvious to me was The Thing, for its icy setting and its alien that takes on human form, but also for its sense that if the invasion isn’t stopped here, the whole of the human race is at risk: “there can be no question of toleration between it and us. We have to wipe it out, if we are not going to be assimilated by it.” Invasion of the Body Snatchers is another, as is one of my favourite Doctor Who serials, The Horror of Fang Rock (where, as here, the isolation is prolonged by a lingering thick fog).

It’s certainly a suspenseful read, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been filmed (it was optioned, apparently), because it could surely be made on a reasonable budget. (Special effects: one glowing blue sphere.) It perhaps has less of the weird feeling I might have liked—I’d have preferred more of what seems to be promised by the German translation of the book, titled Die Unheimlichen (“The Uncanny Ones”). This is far more of an adventure/disaster tale (and the cast of flawed characters, each with their cross to bear, recalls the set-up to so many 70s disaster movies), and a successful one, at that. I’d definitely like to read more by Christopher. I’ve been meaning to read The Tripods since around the end of the 1970s…

First published in 1992, The Children of Men was P D James’s first non-crime novel, written when she was 71 and recently made a life peer. It was sparked off by her reading an article about a drop in male fertility, which led to her wondering what the world would be like if children simply stopped being born. I decided to read it thinking of it as part of the British tradition of post-apocalyptic fiction—“cosy catastrophes”, even—along the lines of John Wyndham and John Christopher. (And, of course, Brian Aldiss, who not only coined the term “cosy catastrophe”, but wrote Greybeard, a 1964 novel about, well, a future in which children stopped being born…)

The Children of Men is set in the year 2021, 25 years after the last human birth. Since then, men have produced no fertile sperm—and, oddly, all the sperm stored in fertility banks has been found to be infertile, too. (A detail that may have been added simply because someone pointed it out as a loophole in James’s set-up, but it actually has quite an implication for what sort of novel this is. Without it, if men had simply become infertile from one date onwards, this would be SF. But with that detail, it implies a sort supernatural—even divine—cause to the infertility, backdated as it is. This is, then, perhaps a religious fantasy.)

The sometime narrator (via his occasional diary), otherwise protagonist, Theo Faron, is a lecturer on Victorian history at Oxford. (His pupils, now, aren’t young undergraduates, but adults taking evening classes. There aren’t any young to teach, anymore.)

He’s divorced, his wife having left him after the death of their 18-month-old daughter, whom he killed, not realising she was behind him when he reversed their car. But that death, devastating though it was, just seems to have confirmed the general air of emotional distance and lovelessness in his life: his mother was distant, his father was ill, and died when Theo was 12, and Theo has since come to admit that he never really loved his wife. Now, he’s perhaps one of the few people to be glad there are no children around to act as a reminder of what he lost.

Although the human race basically knows it’s heading for extinction, things are, in general (in England, anyway), pottering along much the same, or at least putting up with the slow erosion of a way of life—with resignation and a quiet sort of despair, rather than the rushing around and violence associated with your more dramatic apocalypse. Slowly, and mostly by their own volition, the populace is moving into the cities, as outlying villages become harder to maintain and supply with power. The old and infirm are encouraged to end their own lives (their partners receive an enhanced pension), and there are even mass events known as the Quietus, in which coach-loads of the elderly are sent out into the ocean on boats that are then sunk. Elsewhere, there’s a fashion among some women for pushing expensive dolls about in prams—dolls which can be updated every six months, to provide some illusion of growth—and the social convention is to treat these dolls as real babies, with people stopping to coo at them in their prams. (Though one early shocking incident in the novel has a woman snatch such a doll and dash it to pieces, leaving its owner as distraught as if it had been real.) Others treat their pets a little more like human babies, with Christening ceremonies and kittens in prams.

There are darker aspects, too. The last generation of humans to be born have become known as the Omegas. Now in their mid-twenties, they have a marked psychopathic character. Often handsome and intelligent, they’re also “cruel, arrogant and violent”. Some abandon society to form gangs. One such, known as the Painted Faces, attack travellers in an oddly ritualistic way, dancing round their cars and chanting, before burning the vehicle and sometimes killing one or more of the passengers, while the others are allowed to go. They are, in a sense, the ultimate lost generation: “Their unspoken question, ‘What is the point of all this?’”

And then there’s the government. While the majority of the ageing populace do their best to get on with a slowly failing normality (“the small domestic concerns of a shrinking world”), the Warden of England, Xan Lyppiatt, keeps things in check through a subtly tightening totalitarian grip. The SSP—the State Security Police—are able to make dissenters disappear, while criminals are sent to the (Isle of) Man Penal Colony, which seems to have been left to run wild. Foreign workers (known euphemistically as “Sojourners”) are imported to do manual labour, but are given no right to stay in the country once their stint is over, and are kept in camps.

Xan, as it happens, is Theo’s cousin, and the two spent a deal of time together growing up, though only enough to recognise a certain shared emotional coldness in one another. Theo was, for a time, on the Council of England as Xan’s advisor, but gave the position up, as he knew his advice was never followed.

Then one day Theo is contacted by a group of five people who ask him to take their message to his cousin. They want certain political changes—a proper oversight of the Man Penal Colony (as it’s pretty much run by internal gangs), an end to the Quietus, and rights for Sojourners. Theo does as he’s asked, more because he likes the young woman who first approached him, Julian (the spelling she insists on, rather than Julianne). Xan and the Council patiently explain to Theo that they’re doing the best they can in a changing world. “I’m not a tyrant, but I can’t afford to be merciful,” Xan says. Which is probably what all tyrants say.

But then, some time later, the group contacts Theo again. They had been blowing up the platforms used in the Quietus, and one of their group has been caught. Knowing it’s only a matter of time before he’s forced to reveal the names of the rest of the group, they have to go into hiding, and need Theo’s help. The clincher is that Julian is pregnant, and does not want her baby to be handed over to Xan, as will surely happen if they’re caught. Theo at first believes they’re deluding themselves, but Julian has him lay his hand on her belly and he feels the baby kick…

The Children of Men is, in a way, the cosiest of catastrophes: it allows everyone to continue their middle-class lives pretty much as before, only with the added knowledge that with them, the human race will die out. The likes of Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids and Christopher’s Death of Grass are about the fragility of civilisation, and how easily it can descend into barbarism and amoral chaos—written by a generation who had survived the Second World War and walked the precipice beside such a descent. James’s slow apocalypse, on the other hand, is a slip into despondency and resignation—it’s “a world overcome with ennui”, “a world with no future”—while a totalitarian dystopia takes hold. With its promises of “security, comfort, pleasure”, the Warden provides:

“…the illusion of democracy to people who no longer have the energy to care how or by whom they are governed as long as they get what the Warden has promised: freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from boredom.”

It’s perhaps notable that the world of Children of Men is wholly middle-class. Physical labour in the England of 2021 is carried out, it seems, entirely by the “Sojourners”, who are basically treated as temporary slaves. (We only glimpse them once in the book, and no mention is made of any working classes among the English.) In a way, then, the novel could be seen as a sort of exaggerated view of England from an over-anxious middle-class viewpoint, where physical labour is invisible, conformity is assured, foreigners are used but kept out of sight, and the rebellious element among the youth are a sort of nightmare of what frightened pensioners think punk rockers must be: barely rational murderous savages loose in the wilds. (The Omegas even feel a little like grown-up versions of the children from The Midwich Cuckoos: alien, and more than slightly inhuman.)

Perhaps it’s a telling remark when James said, in an interview from the time of the book’s publication: “I didn’t want it to be science fiction. I accept that there is some excellent writing in science fiction … but it’s not a genre I personally enjoy. I like to be in a world I know.” The Children of Men is, perhaps then, a picture not of a possible future, but of the world she knew. I don’t know if the point she was making, back then, was that middle-class life in the Britain of the 1990s was unsustainable in the face of increasingly harsh global and economic realities (which would be odd, considering she was a Conservative peer). She doesn’t really provide a glimpse outside her characters’ class bubble to really bring that home (making me wonder if she herself didn’t consider it, either). But, reading the novel today, that’s what it feels to me that it’s about. (It’s certainly the direction the film adaptation takes.)

There is a religious strand to the novel, though mostly in Theo’s worrying about whether other characters believe in God, in a world where most people (including him) don’t. Julian, though, does, as does the father of her baby—a significant detail? Is the mass infertility an equivalent of the Biblical flood, and this new birth a miracle? The novel ends before that can be decided.

In fact, the ending is even ambiguous about what will happen politically now hope might just have returned to this dying world. There is a regime change, but how much is it a case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”? Any remotely SF or fantasy writer would no doubt turn this book into the first of a trilogy; P D James returned to her detective novels, so there’s no way of telling where things in her version of 2021 would have headed.

Alfonso Cuarón’s film version, released in 2006, is a world apart from the novel, much more hard-hitting and unquestionably dystopian. A small detail—it’s women who are infertile in this future, not men—does away with that awkwardly supernatural-feeling point about sperm banks, and the focus is far more on the “fugees”, the refugees who flock to Britain, and how they’re treated (not just camps but cages). It’s a very powerful film, and certainly no cosy catastrophe.

I started this read-through of Barker’s fiction wondering why it was I’d stopped reading him the first time round, and I’m pretty sure I’ve found it. I think I’d have bought and started reading Galilee (1999) when it first came out in paperback, but I can’t remember finishing it. Reading it this time, I came to a point where I was absolutely ready to give up (as I’m sure I actually did, back then), and it was only my determination not to bail out on this Barker read-through that meant I broke through to the later (better) parts of the book. Maybe this one just isn’t for me—it certainly had mixed reactions among its initial reviewers—but I think there are parts of it that just aren’t up to Barker’s usual standards. And, this being a long book (his second-longest, after Imajica; in some pre-interviews, he talks about it being a two book series) those parts are as long as other people’s actual novels.

Galilee is also the furthest Barker has got from the Books of Blood-style horror that initially made his name. Even in the novels that followed, where he took pains to point out that what he was writing was fantasy, not horror, the darkness was still there, and was still weird, demonic, and grandiose in that very Barkerish way. Galilee is subtitled “a romance”, and although it’s a romance tinged with fantasy, it’s not, to my tastes, tinged enough. (For me, romance needs something else to make it work—Jane Austen levels of wit and social satire, for instance—or should boil along in a subplot alongside adventure, mystery, horror, or whatever.)

Galilee is the tale of two families whose destinies became entwined in the dying days of the American Civil War. On the one hand, we have the Barbarossas, whose roots lie in Africa, but whose generations are few, because their central line are immortal divinities. As the titular Galilee explains, he has no grandparents, because his parents weren’t born. (There are “those creatures God made, but also those who made themselves by force of will or appetite”, and Cesaria and Nicodemus Barbarossa are two such. Though, it has to be said, Nicodemus has managed to get himself killed over a century ago, leaving only the fearsome matriarch Cesaria to preside over the family.)

The Barbarossas live hidden away in their house called L’Enfant des Carolinas (designed for Cesaria by her one-time lover Thomas Jefferson), and it’s there that one of Nicodemus’s bastard sons (the half-divine, half-human Maddox) sets out to write this book, the history of his family. But he realises he can’t write about the Barbarossas without also writing about the Gearys.

The Geary clan are, we’re told, “American royalty”, “As rich as the Rockerfellers and as influential as the Kennedys”. Where the Barbarossas have magical power, the Gearys have worldly power—and a dark heart, for they are “fierce in love, and fierce still in hatred… iron-willed and long-lived… casually cruel and just as casually charismatic”:

“There was a dark, bloody spirit in their collective soul, a Geary daemon if you will, who invested them with an authority out of all proportion to their secular rights.”

Although it starts out sounding as though it’s going to be a dynastic history, chock-full of events from the past, Galilee really just focuses on one event from the present, the marriage of Rachel Pallenberg and Mitchell Geary. Mitchell—rich, handsome and single—is the most eligible bachelor in the USA; Rachel is just an ordinary (but beautiful) girl from an ordinary background, who catches Mitch’s eye while working in a jeweller’s shop. He asks her out, they go on dates, they get engaged and married—it all sounds like a fairy tale. Then Rachel realises how shallow Mitch is—charming, but shallow—and how loveless their relationship is. But the Geary women are used to this, and have a solution. Rachel is told to go for a stay at a certain house on the island of Kaua’i, which only the Geary women are allowed into. There, she’s visited by Galilee Barbarossa, who, it turns out, provides a certain service for all the Geary women when their marriages prove empty. One night with him gives them “A taste of an emotion that struck deep into their being, and offered them a glimpse of what their souls needed to stay bright.” After which they can return to their empty lives. Only, Rachel doesn’t want to return. She and Galilee fall in love, and that love will destroy the delicate balance of hatred and power that exists between the Gearys and the Barbarossas.

Quoted in Clive Barker’s Dark Worlds (by Phil & Sarah Stokes), Barker says, of this novel:

“What I tried to do is take what I learned about writing about the real world in Sacrament and marry it to what I learned about writing a sort of poetic, almost religious fantasy in Imajica. I wanted those to be put side by side.”

He goes on to add: “it’s much easier to relate to some of the chief characters, because there they are, living in our world”.

It’s always been an archetypal situation for Barker—and one of his strengths as a writer—presenting the effect on ordinary people of encountering the fantastic, and having it transform their lives. It was only while reading Galilee that I realised this “encounter with the fantastic” occurs in other ways in Barker’s fiction, too: people are also transformed in his stories by encounters with super-heated passion (think of Julia’s one-night-stand with her husband’s brother Frank in The Hellbound Heart). That’s what happens in this novel, too—Galilee is, in a sense, the novel-length version of novella-length Frank—but Rachel’s life is also transformed by her encounter with another sort of the unordinary, the world of the incredibly wealthy. (Only, that’s not a positive transformation.)

And it’s here where one of my complaints about the book lies. Barker says this is a novel where it will be easier to relate to the characters because they’re living recognisable lives, but, aside from a couple of minor back-story characters, none of these characters is living a life that could be described as normal. Even Rachel, who comes from an ordinary background, is obviously beautiful enough to attract the country’s most eligible bachelor, so she’s already out of the ordinary. And once she’s swept up into the world of the ultra-rich (which doesn’t take long) her life is not ordinary, and nor are the people around her. That wouldn’t matter, but these characters are all so uninteresting. They are what I imagine the ultra-rich to be: spoiled, festering in their own insecurities, hang-ups and (this being Barker) perversities, but so very shallow, and I just don’t care about them or, sadly, Rachel. Compared to them, the plainly dysfunctional but gleefully Bohemian Barbarossas are by far the more “normal” people, despite being semi-divine. (Though, for all but the fearsome force of nature that is Cesaria, that divinity extends to nothing more than being long-lived. And being long-lived hasn’t exactly imparted wisdom on these messed-up beings.)

This wouldn’t matter, perhaps, if it wasn’t for my other complaint about Rachel’s story (which takes up most of this book). The non-fantastic parts—dealing with Rachel’s wooing, her marriage, the breakdown of that marriage—are boring. Nothing surprising happens, and the dialogue is just platitudes and clichés. Perhaps this is an expression of the emptiness of the Geary family, but the limpness of the dialogue extends to Rachel herself, and even to the most lively of the Geary wives, the down-to-earth and frankly alcoholic Margie, who becomes Rachel’s closest ally. This section of the book just had nothing to offer me, as a reader—no wit, no character, no surprises, no ideas. It’s certainly where I’d have stopped reading on my first go at this novel.

But this time I pushed on through, and things got a little better. If nothing else, I was driven by my interest in the themes Barker has developed throughout his fiction, and how they play out in this book. (Though I have to say, I found Galilee the most devoid of the sort of metaphysical and philosophical ideas that can usually be found in his work.)

Fictionally, the stand-out moments for me were two background stories. Both, notably, are about genuinely ordinary people encountering the fantastic. The first was the tale of the fisherman Zelim who meets Cesaria and Nicodemus as they’re baptising their first-born, Galilee. This one moment is enough to upend his life, and he eventually becomes a renowned storyteller. (Which echoes Sacrament’s tale of an encounter with a fantastic couple leading to a life driven by imagination and creativity, making me think this may be Barker’s own version of the artistic initiation story.)

The other is the story of Captain Holt, who meets Galilee in the final days of the American Civil War, a moment which recalls another Barker trope, this one from his first novel, The Damnation Game: the Faustian pact made in the aftermath of a war. There, it was a deal made in the ruins of WWII-era Warsaw that led to a man becoming fabulously wealthy; here, it’s a deal made in the Civil War-ravaged south that leads to the Geary clan becoming fabulously wealthy. In both cases the deal turns toxic, as Faustian pacts do.

As I say, there’s a lot of another Barker archetype—Uncle Frank from Hellraiser—in the character of Galilee. Not only does he spice up the lives of the Geary women, and Rachel in particular, with his skills in the bedroom, but he goes through something of Frank’s painful reconstruction when Rachel nurses him back from near-death following a shipwreck. (This makes me start to see this painful-return-to-life trope in Barker’s fiction as something almost shamanic. In some traditions, the shaman’s visionary initiation sees them being torn apart, stripped to the bones or cooked in a big pot, then reconstituted before their return to the world.)

Just to tick off another Barker theme I’ve noted in his fiction since The Books of Blood, here we also have the situation where women are allied to fantastic males or monsters, as opposed to human males, who are presented, in this trio, as murderous and toxically powerful. It’s been there since “Skins of the Fathers”; the Geary women and Galilee versus the nasty Geary men (most of whom are murderers and abusers of women) are just the latest version of it.

It may be that Galilee just isn’t my type of book. Contemporary reviews I’ve been able to find have certainly been polarised. Kirkus Reviews said it was “Overheated and intermittently risible, but the thing is entertaining”; The Birmingham Mail said “This is Barker’s greatest achievement—an addictive read that is nigh-impossible to put down.” But The Bookseller said, “We’ve all been waiting for another Weaveworld, but sadly this isn’t it… It’s a fan’s book, I feel—not one to expand his readership.” And Maxim magazine (not one I’d usually go to for literary analysis) called it “well-written Jackie Collins with a dose of X-Men,” but went on to note that “Loyal Barker fans will feel cheated.”

Barker himself was certainly in a happy place when he wrote it (the character of Galilee was based on his new partner at the time, and the house on Kaua’i was inspired by Barker’s holiday home on the same island). And he deliberately chose to make the book narrated—in fact, written—so he could freely comment on his own creative process. So, we get some glimpses of how he feels when he’s writing:

“Nothing is beyond my ambition right now, and nothing is beneath my notice. I will attempt to conjure common divinities and show you the loveliness of filth.”

As well as perhaps his most explicit echo of William Blake:

“I suspect, by the way, that in the creation of divinities we see the most revealing work of the human imagination. And of course in the life of that imagination, the most compelling evidence of the divine in man.”

My own reading of Galilee was more powered by my interest in Barker’s work as a whole than the book itself, but I’ve found my enthusiasm for this Barker read-through undampened. For some reason I’ve got my heart set on reading Coldheart Canyon no matter what, perhaps because I bought it but never read it when it first came out. Here’s hoping it’s a return to the sort of Barker I like.