books, page 19 of 133

A second collection of Suzuki’s stories, following on from last year’s Terminal Boredom, this book contains her breakthrough SF story “Trial Witch” — a title which wrongfooted me, because those words inevitably conjure the phrase “witch trials”, whereas in this case it means “apprentice witch on her trial period”. It’s the comical story of a woman who, out of the blue, is told she’s been selected by the League of Witches to become one of their number. She’s granted magical powers for a limited period, but finds her main ability is to transform her husband into a variety of new forms, which she either can’t, or doesn’t want to (he’s unfaithful), undo by the time the trial ends. It’s fun to imagine this story as the image of Suzuki herself, self-trialling herself as a writer in the fantastical vein. Only, unlike with the story’s protagonist, Suzuki turned out to have, with this story, won herself a place as a writer of SF in Japan (though not, it turns out, to have been allowed into the all-male SF Writers Club of Japan).

The main feeling I came away from in my review of Terminal Boredom was of emotional disconnection in human relationships, edging its way into emotional disconnection from oneself. With some of the stories of Hit Parade of Tears, that aspect is ramped up, with sometimes quite extreme self-alienation being a predominant theme in the longer, more serious tales.

That feeling of distanced relationships is still there, as in this, from the opening story, “My Guy”, about a young woman who finds herself picking up a man who says he’s an alien from another world:

“I guess I’d never really been in love, or even learned what was involved in ‘liking’ someone. This could be why I always seemed to wind up in relationships defined by mutual distaste and an inability to walk away.”

The alien man tells her things are the same on his world:

“Back home, everyone starts making love, so to speak, once they reach adulthood, except only with the partner that the government assigns them. Then they spend the rest of their lives as a happy couple who never fight. But that isn’t what you’d call ‘love’ now, is it…”

But elsewhere in the book — in what I feel is probably a later tale — Suzuki seems to have hit on something of a solution, only a messily human one, when in the story “I’ll Never Forget” she presents us with an ever-squabbling-and-making-it-up couple, who keep their relationship fuelled by the failures of previous ones:

“They were a strange pair, these two. They each prodded at some past infidelity, real or not, and that’s what formed the basis of their relationship.”

Which leads to the realisation:

“…love isn’t like a house you can just kick back and live in once it’s completed. No, it gets more worn and tattered day by day. So unless you keep on making it up, day by day, it disappears in all but name.”

But it’s the alienation from oneself that dominates Hit Parade of Tears. In what may be the longest tale, “Hey, It’s a Love Psychedelic”, a woman, initially called Reico, then Reyko, then Reiko, finds herself transplanted to what seem to be alternative versions of her own life. In each, she’s aware that things are wrong, usually through her knowledge of popular culture — an album that should have been out, or a brand of cigarettes that shouldn’t be available yet. The time-stream of her life is being manipulated by someone, taking her further away from the life she knew: whereas in the first section of this tale, she’s actively involved in the 1960s/70s rock music scene, by the last section she’s merely reading about it in a trashy novel called Groupie.

“The Covenant” starts with a somewhat useless-seeming husband figure who claims to be telepathic and in contact with aliens from another world, who he somehow helps with his mental powers. Then we meet a girl whose self-alienation starts out as an emotional self-disconnection similar to other Suzuki characters:

“Akiko had been alone ever since she was a child. She’d never had friends. She’d been a taciturn, expressionless, polite child. Her good grades had made her something of a teacher’s pet, but she never cared about any of that. After many long years of resenting the fact that no one loved her, she had conceived a vague hatred for this world.”

But she comes to realise these feelings are because she is (or so she believes), an alien from another world, here on Earth to fulfil the covenant of the story’s title. She forms a friendship with another similarly outsiderish girl, and things get a bit Charles Manson-ish.

The starkest image of self-alienation, though, is in “Memory of Water”. Here, the main character is a woman whose agoraphobia has led to her being mostly cut off from the world, and barely leaving her flat. But there are inexplicable (and, to her, alarming) intrusions into even that safe space, such as phone calls from a man who seems to know her, and items of clothing she’d never wear suddenly appearing in her wardrobe. Unknown to herself, she has a second self, one who is not anxious, depressed and sick, but whose idea of a free, adventurous life is one she’s so afraid of, she has cut that whole self off to the point that it has managed to break away and live an independent life. But instead of embracing this new self, the anxious woman only retreats further.

This feeling of being linked to another person, one whose mental and physical ill-health is dragging you down, also pops up in a tale I’ve already mentioned, “I’ll Never Forget”, which is actually a sequel to the story “Forgotten” from Terminal Boredom. “Forgotten” presented us with an alien but humanlike race, the Meelians, who never forget, which is why they don’t have war on their planet. In “I’ll Never Forget”, though, we learn there’s a downside to this never forgetting, as Meelians’ emotional experiences never fade; as a result, when “their heart has exceeded its capacity”, they tend to take their own life. (Human beings, on the other hand, merely descend into “a sort of hellish torment”. Thanks.) The main character, a Meelian woman who’s on Earth to do some modelling work, finds herself unconsciously targeted by the telepathic emanations of the human woman from “Forgotten”, who loved a Meelian man, Sol, who’s now dead. Alongside this feeling of being burdened by a stream of negativity that mixes physical ill-health, depression, and a feeling of life-failure, there’s the helplessness of not being able to do anything about it. In this sense, both “I’ll Never Forget” and “Memory of Water” are quite despairing tales.

As with Terminal Boredom, there’s no indication of when the Japanese originals from Hit Parade of Tears were first published, but I’m willing to bet that “The Memory of Water” and “I’ll Never Forget” date from the end of Suzuki’s career. That feeling of being burdened by longstanding physical ill-health, as well as mental ill-health and a feeling of the failure of human relationships chimes too much with Suzuki’s biography to ignore. (And I realised I should have taken my own advice from my review of Terminal Boredom: “I’d like to read some more stories by Suzuki, though perhaps I wouldn’t read them back-to-back, as that malaise of disaffection can be hard to read too much of.”)

There are some tales in Hit Parade of Tears that escape this negativity, though. Perhaps my favourite is one of the most explicitly genre-science-fictional, “Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise”, about the human crew of a spaceship exploring other planets, not for the purposes of scientific advancement — there are just too many planets out there for every one of them to be treated with such care and attention — but as part of “a get-rich-quick scheme to collect unusual animals for Earth’s leisure class”. This mismatched, flawed, and very un-military-SF crew, collect a bunch of animals from various planets, half of which die, some of which injure or poison the crew. On this planet, they find what seems to be a human baby, and their disagreements about what to do with it lead to a near mutiny. But the captain, who is equally fed-up with their mission, decides to take a new, and very un-Captain Kirk-ish solution: she says maybe they should give up and just live on this planet as they are.

It would be interesting to know when this story was written. The idea of a crew setting down on an alien planet and collecting specimens has been done in SF before, but the crew’s mismatchedness, and the detail that, back on Earth, there’s a “nerve centre linking the computers used by the various government ministries” called “MOTHER”, recalls the fact that the Nostromo’s computer is also called “Mother”, which makes me wonder if this isn’t a jokey take on Alien.

I think I like Suzuki most when she’s engaging explicitly with the sort of big ideas you find in genre SF — she inevitably has a fresh and meaningful take on them, alongside a carefree sense of humour and a wide acceptance of human foibles. But elsewhere there’s that overpowering emotional malaise and feelings of despair that just can’t be channelled into the sort of punky kicking back at society that would give this collection the life it needs. I really didn’t enjoy that aspect this time around.

After the literary “incident” (to use the terminology of motorway signage) of Crash in 1973, 1974’s Concrete Island, in its slightness, can come across as something of a leftover, a using up of spare energies — the literary equivalent of a hubcap still trundling along the tarmac in the wake of a major collision. It’s the second volume in what has been called Ballard’s “urban disaster triptych” — the others being Crash and High-Rise (1975) — but aside from the fact it starts with a car crash and takes places in a concrete-bounded patch of wasteland, as a novel it doesn’t really share those two longer books’ future-shock levels of deadpan, maxed-out satire. Concrete Island isn’t, in the end, about the modern world, but, as with Ballard’s early, landscape-based fantasies (The Drowned World, The Crystal World), it’s about a retreat into the inner landscape of its protagonist.

The story begins with 35-year-old architect Robert Maitland emerging from a feeder tunnel adjoining the Westway/M4 [correction: A40(M), see comments] interchange when a tyre blowout throws him off the road into a triangle of long-grassed wasteland bordered on two sides by steep motorway embankments, and on the third by an impenetrable chainlink fence. Recovering from the accident, he finds his leg injured, perhaps broken, and when he struggles up the loose soil of the embankment to try to flag down a passing car, soon realises nobody’s going to stop — they’re all going too fast — and almost gets himself run over for his troubles. Retreating, exhausted and injured, he returns to the “island”, as he terms it, and starts working out how to get help, as well as how to survive on his limited resources in the meantime.

After a period of hunger and fever, punctuated by the constant frustration of his every attempt to signal for help, he begins to explore the island and finds it anything but barren. Beneath its long grass it’s “a labyrinth of depths and hollows”, containing the vestiges of some Edwardian terraced houses, a World War II air-raid shelter, the basement of a ruined post-war cinema, and an abandoned printer’s shop. Far from empty, the island — “this immense green creature eager to protect and guide him” — is almost alive. What’s more, he’s not its only inhabitant.

Despite its harking back to those earlier inner-landscape novels, to me there’s also a feel of hints, in Concrete Island, of new directions in Ballard’s writing. Jane Sheppard, one of the two people Maitland finds living in what he’d assumed to be a wasteland, is different from the usually cool, mature and glamorous fifties-Hollywood-style femmes fatale Ballard presents us with as the female lead/object of obsession in his fiction. Rather, she’s young, spiky, and dresses like a “cheap tart”; she swears and smokes pot. About the only thing she shares with Ballard’s usual female characters is that’s she’s clearly damaged, but unlike the overly-cool, deeply traumatised Giocondas he usually produces, Jane makes no attempt to hide it. Writing in 1980, David Pringle said this character was “the nearest thing to a ‘well-rounded’ female character in all [Ballard’s] novels”.

Another hint of something new comes when, at one point, Jane breaks into a stream-of-consciousness rant — but it turns out (from an interview reprinted in Extreme Metaphors) these passages were the result of Ballard transcribing a recording he’d made of a real-life angry outburst from his girlfriend. Nevertheless, these passages come across as a rare moment of stylistic wildness in Ballard’s usually very controlled prose, an opening up to something new.

The other character on the island is Proctor, a clumsy, wounded ex-acrobat with the intellect of a child. Proctor, and the way Maitland takes command of him, makes it easy to suggest some parallels for Ballard’s novel: Robinson Crusoe (with Proctor as Man Friday), or The Tempest (Proctor as Caliban). In which case, is Jane, with her ability to leave the island, Ariel? (At one point I found myself wondering if Jane’s name didn’t suggest Maitland as a sort of Tarzan of the urban jungle, with Proctor as the chimp Cheetah.) And there’s the inevitable feeling, as with High-Rise, that this might devolve into a sort of inner-city Lord of the Flies, with Maitland hoping to be rescued while trying to fend off the breakdown of even this little, three-person social structure, before it murders him.

But Maitland, it turns out, was already living on a sort of island. He’d carefully arranged his life to keep a certain distance between himself and everyone else. He won’t be missed after his accident because his wife (the “cool, formal house with its large white rooms” he shares with her gives a good idea of the temperature of that relationship) will assume he’s with his mistress, and his mistress will assume he’s with his wife; meanwhile, his son will make his own way home when he’s not picked up from school, and his office is too used to his not turning up for days at a time to be concerned.

The roots of this isolation are deep. The concrete island begins to remind Maitland of the main image he has of his childhood, of him playing alone in a high-walled garden. Are, then, Jane and Proctor some warped evocation of his divorced parents? Is Proctor an image of himself as an un-grown-up child in an adult body, socially awkward and clumsy? Is Jane some confused mix of all the women in Maitland’s life, the caring then suddenly distant mother, the coolly transactional lover, and the vulnerable, damaged little girl?

There’s definitely a feeling that what’s going on here is not some moral fable about the disconnection of modern life, but a psychodrama with its roots in childhood. (John Baxter, in his biography of Ballard, calls this book “the most overtly self-analytical of his novels”, but to me it doesn’t really come across as especially personal to Ballard — though perhaps that’s just in retrospect, with the Empire of the Sun a couple of novels away.)

Maitland, it seems, was only too eager to find himself marooned on this concrete island, and once he is, his real work is not to be rescued, but to let these nagging figures that the accident has shaken free from his brain — whatever they represent — run through their dramas until, played out, they leave him genuinely alone at last. Concrete Island, then, is about a man in search of a moment of inner peace — even if it takes a car crash, fever, and near starvation to achieve it.

The book has an interesting writing history. After its first draft, Ballard wrote a screenplay (now housed in the British Library) adapting what he’d written. He then went back to the novel and revised it extensively into its final, published form. The screenplay went unfilmed, but seems to have acted as a way of getting perspective on the novel prior to honing it into its final shape.

It remains something of a minor Ballard novel, lacking the iconic feeling of those books that grapple with the sort of archetypal (modern or timeless) landscapes found in The Drowned World, The Crystal World, Crash and High-Rise. But the book’s touching on childhood, in combination with its protagonist’s extended periods of hunger and fever, point towards it being another step closer to his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun. After all, once the post-collision hubcap stops rolling and comes to halt, its bright chromium surface provides a perfect little mirror for what Ballard is doing here: a moment of self-reflection after some traumatic event.

Unlike the stories in the first three Books of Blood, those collected in volumes IV to VI weren’t started as personal pieces for the delectation of Barker and his friends, but were part of a now burgeoning career as a writer — in fact, they were mostly written, according to Douglas E Winter in his 2002 biography of Barker, The Dark Fantastic, whilst Barker was also writing his first novel, The Damnation Game. All three of this second set of The Books of Blood (as well as The Damnation Game) came out in 1985. (In the UK, anyway. In the US, they were published later, in individually-titled volumes: The Inhuman Condition in 1986, In the Flesh in 1987, and, packaged with a new novella, Cabal in 1988.)

To me it feels — certainly in volumes V and VI — that Barker’s style is a lot more assured, perhaps less wild and experimental, but always peppered with moments of his particular storytelling voice. The tales are, sometimes, less bombastically fantastic than those in the first three volumes, as though Barker were deliberately concentrating on the more traditional literary elements in his arsenal: character, setting, and realism. Barker himself felt the stories were “Much denser, much richer, much more confident, much more paradoxical, and on one level, much, much more vicious.” (This quote from a 1986 interview, reproduced at CliveBarker.info.)

There are still some experimental-feeling stories, though unlike with the first three Books of Blood, here they’re the less successful stories, to my mind. “The Body Politic”, for instance, has the premise of a revolution in which human hands begin to seek independence from their (to them, parasitic) hosts. For a moment it feels it’s going to be a political allegory/satire, particularly when the left hand is the first to achieve this revolutionary freedom, but the right is generally acknowledged as the leader. But instead it devolves into a series of kill-scenes involving hordes of human hands skittering about like James Herbert’s Rats. I suspect Barker just isn’t a political writer. His most overtly political tale in these three books, “Babel’s Children”, is really just a joke/cynical statement about the arbitrariness and superficiality of the people who are in charge of the world, whatever their political persuasions.

Elsewhere, Barker is still trying out genres, as in the spy story “Twilight at the Towers” (which is also a werewolf story, and ends with a touch of the “tribe of monsters” theme found throughout Barker’s work, most notably in Cabal), and the hard-boiled detective yarn of “The Last Illusion” (which is also a Faustian pact tale — another Barker mainstay — with plenty of demons). Neither’s among the better stories here.

The standout, for me, is “The Forbidden”, which, like “In the Hills, the Cities” works in a sort of dreamlike way. Its story doesn’t make complete sense, but exists just to lead us closer and closer to the moment we’re presented with one of Barker’s eloquent monsters, whose eloquence encapsulates something that transcends the story’s logic.

“The Forbidden”’s protagonist, Helen Buchanan, is a young academic who wants to apply anthropological methods to the graffiti she finds in a rundown Liverpool estate. (Maybe the same one, Cantril Farm, as Ramsey Campbell used in The Face That Must Die?) Finding a particularly striking, almost shrine-like graffiti’d artwork, and an intriguing slogan (“Sweets to the Sweet”) that’s never particularly explained, she gets caught up with trying to trace the source of vague rumours of a violent killing, and so comes to meet the Candyman, a Barkerian figure that occupies the twilight zone between actuality and urban legend:

“I am rumour,” he sang in her ear. “It’s a blessed condition, believe me. To live in people’s dreams; to be whispered at street-corners; but not have to be.”

Did Candyman commit the killings Helen heard about? Yet the story presents these not as actual killings, but urban legends, rumours, always heard from the friend of a friend, and occurring in the next block. The implication is, then, that they didn’t occur, but instead express some potential for such things, a reaction against the extreme social breakdown of the estate where they’re supposed to have occurred. So why does Candyman then manifest and actualise them with a genuine killing (and through someone else, not by his own hooked hand), if his nature is rumour? But none of this matters once the Candyman’s there, whispering his Barkerish aphorisms in Helen’s ear. It’s a woozy, dreamlike tale, with a mood perfectly suited to the more dreamlike direction cinematic horror took in the 80s, making its 1992 adaptation Candyman perhaps the most artistically successful film based on Barker’s writing (though Hellraiser remains my favourite).

“The Madonna” is another glimpse-of-a-monster tale, and one of the better ones in these three volumes. Here, the monster isn’t verbally eloquent, but is nevertheless pregnant with meaning — literally. Taking up the theme of monstrous births and the balance between masculine and feminine from the first three Books’ “Skins of the Fathers” and “Rawhead Rex”, here we have two men, whose relationship with the females in their lives is exploitative or at least dismissive, encountering something of a more primal female nature. Again, the tale is about the encounter, the revelation of the thing at the centre of the story’s spiral — the inward spiral towards revelation perhaps being the classic Barker story-shape — rather than the whys and what-happens-nexts.

If there’s one more tale I’d single out, it’s “The Life of Death”, and for a quite different reason. Barker had already written at least one entirely non-supernatural tale (“Dread”), but here we have a far less sensationalistic story, almost a character-piece, as we follow the never-quite-stated mood of a young woman in the days after a hysterectomy. Entering a previously-sealed crypt beneath a church that’s in the process of demolition, she comes into an entirely new relationship with death. It touches on the supernatural, but those supernatural elements can also be read as entirely metaphorical or poetic, and it’s the overall (dark) poetry of the piece that makes it such a standout.

It was while reading this and the other less wildly fantastic pieces that I found myself wondering what made Barker’s most characteristic writing still so indubitably his. I keep wanting to call it “theatricality”, but that’s probably more down to his being a playwright, actor, and director. One part of it, though, is theatrical, or certainly showy, in its preoccupation with the idea of glitzy appearance as opposed to substance. On the one hand, Barker’s apt to underline the superficiality of something we’d initially value, as in this:

“Sunlight was a showman. It threw its brightness down with such flamboyance, eager as any tinsel-merchant to dazzle and distract. But beneath the gleaming surface it illuminated was another state; one that sunlight – ever the crowd-pleaser – conspired to conceal. It was vile and desperate, that condition.”

Or, even more direct:

“Miracles are useless. Magic is a distraction from the real concerns. It’s rhetoric. Melodrama.”

But on the other hand, with Barker, there is real magic, and real miracles, but they’re often to be found far away from the glitz and glamour, among the tawdry, the downtrodden, the grubby. (And the criminal — Barker evidently likes the air of forbiddenness and freedom that surrounds his less salubrious characters.) In “The Inhuman Condition”, for instance, a young thug called Karney takes a curiously knotted string from the pocket of a tramp he and his friends have beaten up and, fascinated by its complex knots, finds himself releasing monsters as he unpicks them — much as the puzzle-box of the Lament Configuration releases demons in Hellraiser.

The essence of Barker’s most characteristic style, though, is the way he’ll take a step back from the narrative to highlight some story moment, to bring out the archetypal nature of some character, or the elemental nature of some conflict, to recast an otherwise realistic narrative in terms of masks worn by actors and timeworn styles of drama (the love story, the longed-for tragedy, the sad comedy, the melodrama). For instance, he’ll describe a character as “a common killer, a street-corner Cain”, in a way that both disparages them and elevates them with a Biblical pedigree. And perhaps that’s where the likes of the Candyman get their story-power: they speak, knowingly, of their own roles, and they see and live in the story-world that interpenetrates the real. If this is “theatricality”, it’s the theatricality of archetypal theatre — of morality plays, Greek tragedies, Renaissance dramas, and pantomimes. It’s the bones of story, showing through.

In The Dark Fantastic, Douglas E Winter says that “Flesh is a trap” for Barker “here [in The Books of Blood] and throughout his career” — but, to me, the body is Barker’s main theme, and it’s only the untransformed flesh that’s a trap. Escape, for Barker, isn’t escape from the body, but escape into new fleshly forms and shapes. For all his talk of revelations and transcendence, for Barker, there’s nothing but the body — the transcendence he demands is fleshly transcendence, the revelations he seeks are ones of blood and nerves and muscle, not spirit and soul.

In “The Last Illusion”, for instance, when the illusionist/magician Swann dies, it’s his body — not, as in a more traditional version of the tale, his soul — that has to be protected to stop Hell from claiming it. And the ghosts in “Revelations” are, aside from being unseen by most people, just of a different degree of physicality than the rest of us. They still bear the wounds that killed them, and their interests are still interests of the flesh (i.e., physical pleasures). Hell in “In the Flesh” is a Hell of murderers being trapped in the physical locations where they performed their murders, while freedom is a return to the physical world of the living.

Which raises the question of what realms Barker is hinting at when he talks of enlightenment, transcendence, Hell and so on. It seems to me that, in these books at least, he avoids any sort of theology or system of higher worlds, invented or otherwise. (What, for instance, forces the murderers in “In the Flesh” to haunt the scenes of their crimes? If it’s a judgemental God, He’s not referred to.) It seems, rather, that Barker just wants the elbow room provided by talk of transcendence, enlightenment, Heaven and Hell, angels and demons — without having to commit to anything but the potential for these things, for a wider realm of experience than the mundane world allows.