books, page 2 of 133

First published in 1991, Imajica is Barker’s longest novel yet (and ironically for a novel whose main theme is unification, at one time it was split into two volumes in paperback). Another notable point about Imajica is that, unlike so many of the works I’ve already covered in this Barker re-read, when he wrote it he worked on Imajica alone. There were no plays (as with The Books of Blood I-III), stories (as with The Damnation Game) or films (several of the other novels) going on at the same time. Imajica became, virtually, Barker’s whole life for the eighteen (in some accounts fourteen) months he was working on it, during which he put in up to fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. He’d write Imajica during the day, then go to bed and dream Imajica at night. And I think it shows: there’s no sense of the distraction I sometimes felt with The Great and Secret Show, and it’s probably his best work since Weaveworld. (Barker’s biographer Douglas E Winter suggests this regime may have been down to the frustration of his experience directing the film Nightbreed, and how that was ultimately taken out of his hands. Barker wanted a major project he could feel proud of, and to do that, he needed total control, something in which a novel easily beats a film.)

Imajica is a hefty work, and not just in terms of page count (1,136 in my paperback copy). Even for a man who’s not shy at bringing in Heaven and Hell, demons and angels, and the whole great and secret show, it’s got more scope than anything he’d done before, not just in terms of length and geography (not one but five worlds), but depth and ambition of theme. If Weaveworld, with its magic carpet and gypsy-like tribe of Seerkind is a fairy tale, and The Great and Secret Show an attempt at a new myth along the lines of The Lord of the Rings, Imajica takes things further still, by being, essentially, a work of the religious fantastic. Barker had always dealt in such concepts as redemption, damnation, transcendence and revelation, but here he was giving himself the elbow-room to not just hint at these things, but see them through to the end.

The novel opens in 1990s London. But this, our world, is merely one of five Dominions that together form the Imajica. Ours, the Fifth Dominion, is cut off from the others. Whereas people can pass from, say, the Second Dominion to the Third, or the Third to the Fourth, between the Fifth and the others is an abyssal realm known as the In Ovo, populated by deadly monsters. This schism opened thousands of years ago, and although there have been multiple attempts at Reconciliation—the re-joining of the Fifth to the other Dominions—they’ve so far ended in disaster. Now the Fifth has all but forgotten its fellow realms, as well as the magical arts one can use to reach them. (In a neat detail, the Fifth has acquired a cultural cool in the other Dominions, whose peoples adopt our fashions, covet rare exports—including cars but not, for some reason, telephones—even naming their children using random Fifth Dimension words, like Hoi-Polloi, Huzzah and Coaxial.)

The other exception is the First Dominion, the home of the Unbeheld Himself—the Creator, Hapexamendios, swathed behind a wall of mist known as the Erasure. (Barker, I have to say, is very good at naming things. Types of magic, for instance: feits, sways, writs, pneumas, uredos. Goddesses: Uma Umagammagi, Tishalullé, Jackalaylau. Monsters from the In Ovo: voiders, and the fearsome gek-a-gek. You just know from the name alone that you do not want to meet a gek-a-gek.)

For such a big novel, the main focus is on only a few main characters. First we have John Furie Zacharias, known as Gentle, whose day job is painting forgeries, and whose time is otherwise given over to his singular obsession for women. Then we have the beautiful Judith Odell, whose abandonment of her rich husband kicks off the action when the jealous Estabrook, unable to live without her, decides to have her assassinated. The man hired to do the job turns out not to be a man at all, but Pie’oh’Pah, a being from the other Dominions known as a mystif, who is seen, by each person who looks at it, as the person they most desire. When the first attempt on Judith’s life fails, she contacts Gentle, and Gentle, seeing Pie’oh’Pah, becomes entranced. Pie, in turn, evidently recognises Gentle, though Gentle doesn’t know why. Gentle has a peculiarity, that every ten years or so he remakes his life and forgets the previous decade. Almost as though he were under a spell of some sort. But whose spell, and why? The answer to that question will eventually lead to the next attempt at the Reconciliation of the five Dominions.

Imajica came out during the height of Barker’s fame as a creator. It was widely, and—according to the book’s Wikipedia page—positively, reviewed. (The reviews from UK sources I’ve been able to find, including a few newspapers and Interzone, weren’t entirely positive. Perhaps the UK was engaging in its usual practice of denigrating anyone once they started to get too successful. Or perhaps it sensed Barker was leaving: he’d finished writing Imajica in his empty London house, after his possessions had all been shipped to his new home in the US.) The criticism most often levelled at it, though, seems to have been about its length. At about a third of the way through, when Gentle has left the Fifth Dominion and started exploring the Imajica, I might have been inclined to agree. At this point, the growing mystery and hints of dark fantasy of the first third were replaced by outright otherworld fantasy of the sort done just as well—if not better—by so many other writers, and I found myself wondering if Barker would have made such a name for himself if he’d started off writing fantasy rather than horror. But as things in the Dominions darken, and even more so when Gentle returns to the Fifth in the final third of the book, things not only got back to being as good as they were at the start, but began to reap the rewards of this novel’s breadth of narrative, invention, and theme. It’s hard to put a finger on, but after a thousand pages of talk of redemption, transformation and revelation, when the point arrives for Barker to start delivering on his promises, he actually does, in a way it’s hard to imagine many other writers being able to.

The writers that most often popped into my head while reading Imajica were C S Lewis and Philip Pullman. Lewis, primarily, for this being a similar set-up to the solar system of the Space Trilogy. The Fifth, isolated as it is from the other Dominions, recalls Earth/Thulcandra from the Space Trilogy, and how it has become cut off from the other planets, as well as any awareness of the higher spiritual reality behind it all. But the similarity to Pullman’s His Dark Materials is more evident, as both his and Barker’s novels feature protagonists going through multiple worlds leading to a confrontation with God, who in both cases is a deity and a sort of physical being. But Barker—do I need to say?—adds more, often weird, sex into the mix than either.

Lewis, Pullman and Barker were all directly working with Christian myths: Lewis as one he believed in, Pullman as one he was attacking. Barker, ever ready to see the potential in anything that partakes of the imagination, seems to have employed it due to its being the most resonant Western-world myth of our times, and long overdue exploration in the literature of the fantastic. In interviews (here, from the Starburst Yearbook 1991/92, with David J Howe), Barker is frank about this being the seed of the whole novel:

“Imajica started with my thinking about the images which appear in the great paintings of Christian mythology. Whether or not they’re true, they seemed to me to be potent, powerful and important cyphers of image and meaning.”

But, as he said in another interview (in Cemetery Dance, Winter 1992), “I don’t think I’m going to get good reviews from the Christian Monitor, you understand…” Because, Barker’s God Hapexamendios does not come out well in this. Imajica is a deepening and further exploration of a theme that’s been in his fiction from the start (in such Books of Blood stories as “Skins of the Fathers”, “Rawhead Rex” and “The Madonna”): the imbalance caused by masculine domination, and the necessity of re-accessing the power of the female divine. Hapexamendios wants to be the only god: “only one name on your lips, one prayer, one altar”, though this leads to a “joyless, loveless, corrupt thing”—super-powerful, but with no human sympathies. Hapexamendios is “One, and simple”; the goddesses are “many, and diverse”. But, as Barker says, you cannot go against the deepest nature of things:

“Creation and its maker are one and the same… And Creation’s as full of women as it is of men.”

Imajica is too vast a novel for me to even list its many themes. Pick a Barker trope (reviled and persecuted tribes, for instance), type (the magical-murderous sidekick/servant), or image (the slow and painful formation of a living body, like an “anatomy lesson, raw and wet”, in a bare dusty room, a la Frank in Hellraiser), and you’ll find it here, in some new or deeper variant. Perhaps the main thing I noticed that I hadn’t before (but which I’m sure I’d find in his earlier fiction if I looked) is a concern with identity. Gentle, whose name is also John Furie Zacharias, as well as another name by which he went many years ago, not only has lived multiple lives (separated by his regular amnesias), but has a magically-created identical twin, who is sometimes his close brother, at others his greatest enemy, but nevertheless deeply tied to him: his shadow, his other self. Judith has a similar multiplicity of pasts, as well as her own mirror self. In a novel about a return to wholeness, and a unification of what has been sundered, such themes run deep, uniting the psychological and personal with the religious, philosophical and mythical.

Plus, of course, there’s so much simply on the level of imagination: a sea that only moves when the sun shines on it; a woman imprisoned for centuries in a doorless cell beneath the ground, wreathed so tightly in cords they cover her entire body; beings whose heads resemble pairs of giant hands; a city of tents on the edge of the world; an ancient society dedicated to repressing all magic; the ghost of a lover who died from AIDS—there is so much in this novel, and no sense at all that its size means the invention has been spread thin.

I still, perhaps, prefer Weaveworld, but maybe only because it’s a little bit shorter, a little bit less overwhelming in scale. (If nothing else, it’s easier to hold while reading.)

Ultimately, this is a novel about unification:the balancing of the rational and irrational, the masculine and the feminine, the mundane and the divine. The Imajica, Barker tells us, is “a single, infinitely elaborate pattern of transformation”. What can you add to that?

I’ve previously written about Joan North’s The Cloud Forest and The Light Maze; The Whirling Shapes came out between those two, and so completes the trio of her gently mystical early-teen novels. (I assume I’ll never find a copy of her first published book, The Emperor of the Moon, which is so rare the only review on Amazon is from North’s own daughter wanting to find a copy!)

Published in 1968 in both the UK and US, The Whirling Shapes begins with 14-year-old Liz Blake going to live with her Aunt Paula, Uncle Charles, and their 16-year-old daughter Miranda, while her mother has to spend time in a sanatorium (it’s not said why in the book, but one reviewer says it’s a TB sanatorium). Aunt Paula is a bit of a North type: a busybody, always rushing out to this class or that event, usually to do with some faddish idea (she herself teaches the “Helen Tregonna method of dancing”), while also imposing her busyness on others: “an overwhelming sort of person”, “it never occurs to her that she could possibly be wrong about anything” . Fortunately, she’s out most of the time, so is too busy to make much of an impact on the story.

Far more to Liz’s liking is Great Aunt (but just called Aunt) Hilda, who lives at the top of the house. A retired anthropologist, her grandfather was the famous explorer Sir William Harbottle, and she’s currently writing her memoirs. Aunt Paula has already introduced Liz to the paintings of a young man called James Mortlake—all of vaguely whirling shapes, which Liz finds rather depressing. At Aunt Hilda’s she meets the man himself, and he turns out to be as morose as his art. (It’s only later revealed, and pretty much as an aside, that his father, a millionaire, shot himself when James was only four years old, after which his father’s business collapsed and his mother took an overdose of pills. Nobody seems to think of this when considering the generally dark tone of James’s art. When later speculating on why this young man paints such miserable pictures, and is somewhat miserable himself, Liz says he can’t help it, it’s just the sort of face he has!)

Strange things begin happening from the first night of Liz’s stay. The house is on the edge of a London heath, and looking out of the window that first night, Liz sees another house that, the next day, isn’t there. Later, the whirlwind-like shapes from James’s paintings begin to appear in reality, and a fog—only visible, at first, from inside the house—starts to surround the household and cut it off from not just the rest of the world, but reality itself. Aunt Paula and Uncle Charles disappear, and pretty soon the others find they can’t get far from the house before the whirling shapes surround them and threaten to make them disappear, too. Finally, though, the little group—Liz, Miranda, Aunt Hilda, James Mortlake, and Miranda’s medical student/poet boyfriend Tom—have no choice but to set out into the fog and find their way back to reality, before the house itself fades away entirely, and them with it.

What caused this incursion of the unreal? James’s paintings are a key part of it, as well as his insomniac wanderings on the heath, but another part is Aunt Hilda’s use of an artefact brought back from an anthropological trip, an egg-shaped thing carved from the wood of “the sacred tree of the Dingas—the Tree of Dreaming True” (the Dingas being “a very exclusive and retiring Central Indian tribe”). She had been holding this object and thinking of the house she grew up in when that very same house started to appear on the heath—the house which Liz then saw. As Aunt Hilda explains, “when I hold it in my hands, my thoughts have great power”. So, James’s depressiveness has been attracting the attention of the whirling shapes, but Aunt Hilda seems to have been the one to finally open the way from their world to ours. (The odd thing is, once things get desperate in the fog-enshrouded house, nobody thinks of using the power of this sacred artefact again. It’s utterly forgotten.)

As for the whirling shapes, they are, it turns out, “spiritual scavengers”, who “feed on dead mechanical desires”. Dementor-like, they surround their victims, chilling them both physically and spiritually, before making them disappear. They aren’t so much villains (though they’re described as the “messengers of greater and darker powers”) as simply one of the perils of the otherworld where Liz and co. find themselves—a dream-like realm of symbolic trials and archetypal landscapes.

As this is the last of North’s books I’m reviewing, it’s worth looking at the similarities between them. North evidently likes a feisty, no-nonsense but open-minded heroine, though often one more inclined to speak her mind than think about the effect of her words. This heroine is sympathetic towards others, though, and it’s one of the strengths of North’s books that although she presents us with casts of characters with widely different temperaments, they’re generally quite accepting of one another, and there’s rarely any real tension between them. Her feisty main female characters, for instance, are often paired with a slightly sorry-for-themselves older boy, but get on well. (And even busybody Aunt Paula isn’t presented as a villain, merely one of those annoying types of people you have to put up with when you’re a child.)

There are often understated aspects of loss and even tragedy lurking in the background of North’s books. The younger main characters are always parentless, even if only temporarily (as in this book), but there are also the genuine tragedies: here, the twin suicides of James’s parents, in The Cloud Forest the death of Raymond Annerlie’s brother’s family in a car accident, and in The Light Maze the sudden disappearance of Sally’s husband. These never impose themselves too much on the narratives, but it’s notable there’s always something of the sort present.

The fantasy element in her books is the presence of another realm that quite clearly represents the imagination or the inner world, but which is nevertheless a very real place, with genuine dangers. This realm is formless and changeable rather than being a solid otherworld like Narnia, and the presences within it are representative of psychological or spiritual dangers, but (as in the serpent and eagle guardian figures Liz meets in this book) also of positive forces. The general feeling is that humans, though connected to this realm, shouldn’t be interacting with it in such a direct way, and it’s only misguided or greedy people (as with the occult-tinged groups of The Cloud Forest and The Light Maze) or those with unhealthy unconscious preoccupations (James Mortlake’s gloomy art in this book) that threaten to bring that realm directly into contact with human beings, making it much more perilous. The message is that this realm, and the imagination or unconscious generally, should be treated with seriousness, respect, and disinterest rather than power-hunger or desire.

Throughout, though, North’s writing is light and gently humorous. (I particularly liked her description of Uncle Charles as looking “like a gently enquiring camel”, though there’s not a lot of that Wodehousian use of language.) Her plots take their time (perhaps too much for a modern readership—I certainly wondered why Liz and co., trapped in a fog-beset and slowly disappearing house, didn’t do something about it far earlier), and though they’re about genuine dangers, they’re never oppressive or overly dark.

In general, North’s books seem to belong to that end-of-the-sixties period of spiritual seeking, where they veer mostly towards a Buddhistic detachment from worldly passions and a moderation in all things, along with an easy tolerance of the many sorts of people to be found in the world (though, at the same time, a lightly satirical eye cast on those that North disapproves of: the faddish, the busybodies, and those who want power). But her books aren’t really part of the trend that most interests me in YA fiction as it headed into the 70s, with that greater sense of socially-conscious realism, starker drama, and darker fantasy from the likes of Alan Garner, William Mayne, Louise Lawrence, and so on. Perhaps the closest equivalent is Penelope Farmer’s Castle of Bone—though North is no way near as outright weird as that book.

It’s worth pausing first of all to consider what a Clive Barker-ish title that is, combining as it does his love of the grand and awesome, of secrets, and of the theatrical. And as the “Great and Secret Show” is a thing glimpsed, in dreams, three times in every human life, which fuels the very meaning of those lives, it’s obvious he’s talking about the nature of reality itself, Clive Barker style: great, and secret, but also a show. (Though also: a show, but great and secret.)

Started in late 1987 (when he’d just released his major calling card to the world, Hellraiser), and planned as the first in a trilogy, The Great and Secret Show was published in 1989. A US-set equivalent to the UK-set fantasy-horror of Weaveworld, it could, then, be seen as a creative and commercial gambit to capture more readers. Certainly, it was the first of his novels to sell more than a million copies.

The story starts in 1969, in the dead letter room of the Omaha Central Post Office, where the nobody-ish Randolph Ernest Jaffe is given the job of sorting through the undeliverables. He’s supposed to be checking for valuables to share among the post office staff, but becomes fascinated by hints of a secret knowledge and power being rumoured across America. Although it has many names—“The Final Great Work… The Forbidden Fruit… da Vinci’s Despair… The Finger in the Pie”—the best overall term for it is the vaguest yet most promising: the Art. He’s a dowdy nothing of man, but Jaffe has always had a secret desire to be King of the World, and the Art, he thinks, is how to do it. He sets out on a quest to learn the Art. (Though first he murders his boss. Jaffe is not this novel’s hero.)

It leads him, eventually, to an abandoned town in a New Mexico desert, where Kissoon, the last of a group dedicated to preserving the Art, is hiding in a self-made time-loop. Kissoon offers to teach Jaffe the Art, but something about the deal is a little off, and Jaffe flees. One of Kissoon’s comments, about his not being evolved enough—he’s “too much of an ape”—sets him on a new path. Teaming up with an evolutionary biologist (and mescaline addict), Richard Wesley Fletcher, the pair start work on a project combining “Alchemy, biology, and metaphysics in one discipline”: the creation of a substance called the Nuncio, which accelerates evolution. But by the time it’s done, Fletcher has come to realise Jaffe’s intentions are no good. Both take the Nuncio and become transformed (Jaffe renames himself “the Jaff”—a crucial difference to himself, I’m sure), and they lock in battle. Eventually they’re caught in an impasse, deep in a cave beneath the Californian town of Palomo Springs.

A few years later, heavy rains have caused a temporary pool to form over the cave, and a heat wave leads four young women to go swimming. Sensing a means of continuing their battle by other means, the Jaff and Fletcher reach up and plant something in these women, which causes them to single-mindedly seek to get themselves pregnant, whereupon their children will be the children of the nunciates Fletcher and the Jaff. The novel proper begins when Howie Katz, the now grown-up son of one of these women (and so, the “son” of Fletcher) returns to Palomo Grove and instantly falls in love with Jo-Beth McGuire, “daughter” of the Jaff and meant to be his deadly enemy. (Fortunately—or not fortunately—she has a twin brother, Tommy-Ray, who proves more loyal to his power-mad father.) And so, the battle is set to recommence, in a modern-day small Californian town.

The Great and Secret Show is, essentially, a fable about imagination, as it’s battled for by the twin forces of fear (the Jaff, who creates an army of “terata”: living fears drawn from his victims) and dreams/hopes/fantasies (Fletcher, whose counter-army is made of “hallucigenia”: living fantasy figures drawn from people’s desires). Behind all this, Barker sets up a myth of the dream-ocean Quiddity, where we swim every night. There is an island in this ocean, called the Ephemeris, on which dreamers land three times in their lifetime: “At birth, at death and for one night when we sleep beside the love of our lives…” On this island, they get to see the Great and Secret Show itself, and this, somehow, heals them, and preserves their sanity against an often harsh reality.

But the Jaffe wants to use the Art to enter Quiddity on his own terms, and take control. (Aside from overweening ambition, he doesn’t have specific plans. I assume, like other merely power-hungry figures of the real world, he basically just wants to exercise power for its own sake, to seize what he can seize, and claim it all for himself, even if he doesn’t understand its true value.) The threat is real, then—he’s going to unleash insanity on all humankind—but vague. And perhaps Barker knew such a vague threat wasn’t enough to power what he intended as a trilogy, so there’s another, and greater, danger. Across the dream-sea, on the far shore, is the realm of the Iad Orobouros, and the moment the Jaff opens a doorway into Quiddity, these incomprehensible Lovecraftian beings start their lumbering way towards our world. The size of mountains, and seemingly made of insects (though this could just be the appearance of their harbingers), their appetite is: “For purity. For singularity. For madness.”

I have to say that, for me, The Great and Secret Show didn’t really take off, on this re-read, until the opening of part six (of seven)—and so, at page 405 of nearly 700. Before that, I felt Barker wasn’t really telling the tale as he usually did, more just sort of getting through the plot points. (It’s evidently a thoroughly plotted-out novel.) I couldn’t help but picture him working on other projects at the same time, and perhaps knowing he had to get this contracted novel written, and perhaps not quite being in the right frame of mind. The trouble is, I think this matters more for Barker than other writers. Because he’s combining the realistic and the often boldly fantastic in a characteristic way, he really has to make it work, and that, it seems to me, comes about through his style of storytelling (showmanship might be a better term, for Barker) as much as plot or character. When he’s not 100% there, it can all seem a little too wild and weird to be really engaging. Barker himself said it was “a very tough book to write”, which makes me wonder if it just wasn’t flowing. But, on the other hand, there’s this, from an interview with David J Howe (from 1989, when the book was first published):

“Barker admits it was a conscious decision not to use the same intricate, detailed style of the previous books, but to attempt a lightness of touch to compliment the wide breadth of narrative that it encompasses…”

(Both of these quotes, and more about the book, from the official Clive Barker site.)

To give an example of where the story isn’t being fully told, there’s a scene where reporter Nathan Grillo steps out of the shower and has a conversation with his boss. He’s given a new assignment and sets off. It’s never stated that the two are talking on the phone, and I only realised at the end of it that this must have been the case. It just seemed Barker hadn’t properly set the scene, as though he was working off his plot summary and not really telling the tale.

Fortunately, in the final three hundred pages, this changes. Barker starts writing as his old self again and the novel really works for its final, extended, apocalyptic climax.

(I’m only going into this in such detail because one of the things I’m trying to work out, on this re-read of Barker’s fiction, is why I stopped reading him when the novels first came out. Something happened, or failed to happen, and I don’t believe it was lack of invention or failure of ideas on Barker’s part. (And the fault, of course, may be mine.) I still think Barker’s best fiction is Weaveworld, but I’m keen to see how the other novels read a second time.)

With The Great and Secret Show, Barker was aiming to create his equivalent of The Lord of the Rings: a weighty, mythically-infused fantasy trilogy, but with the crucial difference of being set in our world. It’s impossible at the moment to judge how successful he’d have been, because the trilogy is unfinished—though there is a second novel in the series, Everville, which came out five years later. I think, though, that The Great and Secret Show works perfectly well as a standalone read, a book that’s about the crucial importance of imagination, both as a source of the meaningfulness of life (dreams in all senses, love, mystery and wonder), and as a source of pitfalls and dangers (power-hunger, madness, fear). It’s a book about the deepest of all dreams:

“Most dreams are just juggling acts. Folks picking up their memories and trying to put them in some kind of order. But there’s another kind of dream… It’s a dream of what it means to be born, and fall in love, and die. A dream that explains what being is for…”

(Which I like to think chimes with David Lindsay’s Sphinx, with its “dreams we dream during deep sleep and remember nothing of afterwards.”)

The Great and Secret Show is not Barker’s best book, but it’s certainly an interesting part of his body of work. Next up on my Barker re-read, though, is the novel I’ve been most looking forward to revisiting: his mega-doorstop, Imajica.