fantasy, page 1 of 91

As the 1970s moved towards the 1980s, and as punk rock replaced prog, it seems the inner city began to replace the countryside as the standard location for YA novels. Where formerly the natural world had been the more closely associated with childhood (endless summer holidays spent mucking around in fields), the inner city, with its more evident social problems, came to seem the more authentic, or at least relevant. Judy Allen’s first two YA books, The Spring on the Mountain and The Stones of the Moon, were firmly set not just in the country, but in the Earth Mysteries-flavoured country of Janet and Colin Bord’s Mysterious Britain—stone circles, ancient tracks, Merlin, Arthur, druids and so on. With her next two YA fantasies, Lord of the Dance (1976) and The Dream Thing (1980), the action moved to the town/city, and the fantasy element was no longer ancient forces in the landscape but dreams and the inner world.

(After writing on her first two YA fantasies a while back, I was hoping to review her next book, Lord of the Dance, but it’s been impossible to find a copy. Eventually, I gave in and read the ebook version that’s currently available, only to find something odd. It was originally published in 1976, but the ebook contained references to things like CDs and horror films on home video. I looked up some reviews for the original release, and even their brief plot summaries made me realise it must have been extensively rewritten at some point, presumably in the 1980s.)

The Dream Thing starts with its teen protagonist Jen sitting down to write a school essay about what matters most to her, and realising what she’s most concerned with is hate. Some gypsies have recently moved into a patch of unused land under a nearby motorway flyover, and she wants nothing more than for them to go away. She herself is half-gypsy—her father was a gypsy, though he was killed in a fight with his cousin before he could marry her mother, and before she herself was born—and now everyone at school is taunting her about “her relatives” having moved in, and asking if she’s going to join them.

She starts to have a frightening dream dominated by some monstrous thing, all sharp metal scales and a big tail spike. Convinced the gypsies (whom she early on confronts, telling them they’re not wanted round here) have put a curse on her—she also feels random sharp pains all the time, is convinced she’s going to die, and thinks she’s being followed—she draws this dream monster, in an attempt to work out what it might be. Having finished the drawing, she realises this dragon-like thing has no eye, so she puts one in, to finish it—and, like the old rabbi putting the final letter on the golem’s forehead, she feels something change, as though it has now come alive. Soon after, one of the gypsy caravans seems to have been attacked, with a large dent and suggestive scratches along its side, as though something big and rough had scraped against it.

Jen learns from her friend Tom (whose fascination with Native Americans, and his understanding of their persecution by European settlers, makes him sympathetic to the gypsies) that the land the travellers are on was bequeathed to the public over a century ago. Researching the exact wording of the bequest in the local library, she finds the land was actually given to the residents for their use, which, strictly speaking, excludes the gypsies; she brings the book to Tom’s and accidentally-on-purpose lets his parents (who are very much anti-gypsy) see it. Soon after, the police turn up in force to tell the gypsies to move on. They can’t immediately—one of them has recently given birth—so they’re given a week. Jen, weirdly open and honest about her dislike of them, takes the opportunity to let the head gypsy know that she was the one who provided the clue that meant they were going to have to move. But when she finds herself still gripped by nightmares of the dream-thing, her mother says the only thing to do is go to the gypsies and ask if they, with their knowledge of such things, can help.

Jen is plainly not what you’d call an entirely sympathetic character. Having decided it’s the gypsies’ fault she’s being bullied at school, she focuses entirely on wanting rid of them. In a way, the reader is left in the position of watching the car crash she’s making of the situation, how she’s letting this hatred of the gypsies take over her life, to the point where it acquires a supernatural life of its own. (And mentioning car crashes, I couldn’t help wondering if the patch of wasteland the gypsies occupy might be near the one where Maitland is stranded in Concrete Island, while Crash’s Robert Vaughan perhaps cruises by on the motorway above. Such hemmed-in remnants of the natural world took on a certain resonance in this time of cultural handover from countryside to city.)

But as an adult reader, I couldn’t help being aware of Jen as a troubled child (a teen, yes, but still a child) under serious pressure. The gypsies didn’t just kick off a spate of isolating bullying at school—which even her supposed friend Tom joins in with—their presence brings up Jen’s buried feelings about her father, whom she never knew, and his violent death. And all this is packed into the dream-thing: not only is it a scaly metal dragon-thing intent on attacking the gypsies, it’s also an armour-plated symbol of Jen’s own spiky self-protectiveness covering her emotional vulnerability. It’s also a thing that persecutes her, through nightmares and a sense that she’s being followed, just as this melange of hatred and fear is persecuting her. She’s a girl in serious need of guidance.

Her mother does make some attempts at help, but I can’t help feeling they’re woefully inadequate (though perhaps up to 1970s standards). Learning that Jen is being bullied at school, her mother says “they tease you because you rise to it”, as though it were basically her fault. In a midnight talk after one of Jen’s nightmares, after which Jen admits to feeling she’s going to die, her mother does at least talk about Jen’s father’s death, but goes on to say that Jen is too young to think about death and should just not do it. (Despite the fact that Jen’s father clearly died too young.) There’s a distinct sense of the adults giving one piece of cool advice, with an air of, “Well, I’ve told you how to deal with it, the rest is up to you.” (Jen’s best friend Tom, meanwhile, tells her “You share the Führer’s views on gypsies.” True—if exaggerated—but also perhaps a little unhelpful.) It’s the how of dealing with it that Jen clearly doesn’t have, and nobody guides her towards it.

Dream-fantasy like this, with a clear psychological grounding, can easily turn into straightforward allegory: Jen’s hatred of the gypsies gains a monstrous autonomy in the dream-thing dragon-scorpion whatever-it-is. Her hatred is monstrous, and the monster is her hatred. But that symbol, of the armour-plated spiky monster, has a lot more resonance than that—as I said above, it’s as much about Jen’s self-protection and self-persecution as it is her hatred. But I can’t help feeling that The Dream Thing resolves by treating it entirely as Jen’s hatred, and nothing else. The head gypsy tells her “Your dream… is born of your venom. It has nothing to do with us…” Which is perhaps a truth Jen needs to be told, but it’s also not the whole truth. The symbol of the dream-thing itself is far more eloquent than any of the reductive explanations, but there’s an air, at the end, of tying it to this too-simple explanation, and so leaving its many resonances unexplored. We’re left with a simple message: hate is bad, and it can take you over. But the roots of that hatred in fear and loss and isolation aren’t addressed.

(To give another example. Jen lives with her mother in a small flat, and the building is surrounded by a black metal fence with semi-ornamental spikes. The fence is only a short distance from the building itself, so what it’s protecting is a basically useless strip of land, and anyway, the fence can just be walked around, so its protecting nothing. It is, instead, an embodiment of the feelings people have about their homes, the need that they have a certain space around them, and an air of protection. In the limited space of a city, this has to be formalised into an ornamental fence and a tiny strip of land, but the psychological value is still there. The metal of the railings, and the spikes of the ornaments, clearly tie in with the metallic spikiness of the dream-thing, and bring out the feelings of self-protection rather than hatred in the dream-thing—though, such self-protection can also spill into hatred: the gypsies offer no threat, but so many people want them “not in my back yard”.)

I can’t help feeling that if the fantasy element had been given freer reign instead of being tied down to one interpretation, the ending might have been richer and more satisfying—a true resolution rather than a lesson only apparently learned. If, for instance, Jen had seen her own dream-thing in the metal/flesh, she might have seen herself in it, both her vulnerability and her spikiness. (A situation handled far better, and also with a dragon-sized thing of hate, disgust, and vulnerability, in William Mayne’s A Game of Dark.) But she doesn’t face it like that, it’s explained away. The fantasy loses its resonance, and becomes an allegory.

The Dream Thing’s ending does have a certain bleakness of realism. The gypsies are forced to move on. Jen’s friend Tom is no longer speaking to her, but she has a female friend in reserve, so it’s not the end of the world. It’s all part of the messiness of growing up.

It’s an interesting book, praised in its day for the realism of its characters, and certainly unafraid to take its main character through some uncomfortable emotions. It was reissued in 1990 (and, from a quick comparison of the text thanks to an Archive.org scan, it seems the same as the 1978 version, rather than being rewritten as with Lord of the Dance).

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.

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.

Begun while Carter was still living in Japan, and first published in 1972 (after her return to the UK), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is Carter’s most outrightly fantastic novel, and deservedly finds a place in Moorcock & Cawthorn’s Fantasy: The 100 Best Books and David Pringle’s Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels. (It was retitled The War on Dreams in the US.)

It begins in an unnamed city in an unnamed South American country. The narrator is Desiderio (“the desired one”), writing the memoir of his young life, when he was branded a hero for his role in ending the war that Doctor Hoffman launched upon the people of that unnamed city—and upon reality itself. Hoffman’s assaults warp time, space, and reason, causing people to sprout peacock feathers, warehouses to turn into palaces, and apparitions of the dead to appear. As Desiderio writes: “in the early days of the war, life itself had become nothing but a complex labyrinth and everything that could possibly exist, did so… the city was no longer the conscious production of humanity; it had become the arbitrary realm of dream.”

The Minister for Determination (to whom Desiderio is private secretary), constitutionally resistant to unreality (he’s convinced Hoffman has released a virus “which causes a cancer of the mind, so that the cells of the imagination run wild”) attempts to counter this encroachment of dream with a series of futile measures, from the use of radar to the use of torture as a means of forcing the unreal to differentiate itself from the real. Sensing they’re losing the war, the Minister gives Desiderio a secret mission: to find and assassinate the elusive Doctor Hoffman.

Desiderio leaves the city for the town of S, where the proprietor of a travelling peepshow is rumoured to be one of Hoffman’s disciples. Thus begins a series of picaresque adventures that see our young hero living with the native river people (with whom he, having part native parentage, seamlessly blends), working with a circus, travelling with a monstrous libertine known as the Count, stranded with a tribe on the coast of Africa and, finally, dwelling amongst a community of centaurs—before finally arriving at the “Wagnerian castle” of Doctor Hoffman. Throughout, Desiderio is haunted by, and often accompanied by (in a series of disguises he always sees through) Hoffman’s beautiful daughter Albertina, with whom he has, of course, fallen in love.

Just as Heroes and Villains was about the conflict between desire and need, this novel is about the conflict between dream and reason, or desire and reality. At first it seems the Minister (“not a man but a theorem, clear, hard, unified and harmonious”, who “had never in all his life felt the slightest quiver of empirical uncertainty”) represents reality and Doctor Hoffman dream, but when we finally meet Hoffman, he is an equally unimaginative patriarch (“cold, grey, still and fathomless—not a man; the sea”, who “had examined the world by the light of the intellect alone”). Both form a type with other such controlling paternal figures (which includes Doctor Donnelly from Heroes and Villains and Uncle Philip from The Magic Toyshop—what Lorna Sage, in her Writers and their Work volume on Carter, calls “Carter’s puppet-masters”). Contemplating Hoffman, this supposed unleasher of dreams, in all his disappointing rationality, Desiderio writes: “I did not think he knew what desire was.” (And, he muses, perhaps of Carter’s work as a whole: “Were all the potential masters the world held for me to be revealed as nothing but monsters or charlatans or wraiths?”)

If these are the dark fathers, balancing maternal figures seem absent—Desiderio’s mother was a prostitute who left him to be raised by nuns, Albertina’s mother (Hoffman’s wife) is dead (though she was, at least, a poet). Rather, the presiding maternal force is even more implacable and desire-less than those two male figures: mother nature, at her most arbitrary and indifferent. When the entire circus with which Desiderio has been travelling is killed in a freak natural event, he notes that “the landslide could only be a simple assertion of the dominance of nature herself”. On the coast of Africa (later revealed to be a fantastic coast, and an emanation of the monstrous Count’s desire for self-destruction), Desiderio meets a people who represent “Man in his constitutionally vicious, instinctively evil and studiously ferocious form—in a word, in the closest possible harmony with the natural world”. Mother nature, then, is no refuge from dark puppet-master fathers.

Desire and dream come across as perhaps the only humanising elements in a world otherwise caught between the polarities of cold intellect and a starkly uncaring nature. But even then, desire in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is no romantic fantasy. In Carter’s hands, it’s full of casual brutality, tragedy and the darker extremes of perversity. Desiderio’s story takes him through a series of episodes, in each of which he enters a period of narrative stasis, where he lingers among a group of people and experiences their way of life. When he’s with the river-people, we get a disquisition on their beliefs and customs (outwardly placid, they prove to include cannibalism and paedophilia); we learn the histories and nature of the various people who make up the circus, some poignant (as with Madame la Barbe, whose beardedness raised her from being an ordinary girl to being “immensely handsome, widely travelled”, but, nevertheless, “the loneliest woman in the world”) others grotesque (the all-male troupe known as the Acrobats of Desire, who are capable of exchanging body parts with one another, and who gang-rape Desiderio). As far as trigger warnings go, this novel should come with a submachine gun logo on the cover.

Perhaps the most notable episode is that of the Count, a figure I can’t help feeling is based on de Sade (and Carter would go on to write a study of de Sade a few years after The Infernal Desire Machines). So incredibly self-centred he never seems to speak to anyone but himself, the Count is “a connoisseur of catastrophe”, “a blasphemous libertine, a blood-thirsty debauchee”, who claims to have “devoted my life to the humiliation and exaltation of the flesh”. Perhaps it’s characteristic of all the male “father” figures in the novel that Desiderio at one point thinks the Count might be the Minister, then later that he might be Doctor Hoffman…

The Infernal Desire Machines has been called a Surrealist novel, but I think that though Hoffman’s efforts are creating a surrealist reality, the novel doesn’t have Surrealist fiction’s lack of narrative coherence. Carter isn’t just letting “psychic automatism” (as the Surrealists have it) take over; rather, her narrative is a balance between the strange images of Surrealism and a conscious engagement with the more nebulous forces of the human condition: desire, dream, imagination, cold reason. Unlike pure Surrealism, it comes with thought applied.

Set as it is in South America, it naturally feels as though it might be called Magical Realism, but I think it’s one of those novels that absorbs so many genre labels—Gothic, Fantastica, Picaresque—without entirely belonging to any of them. (It’s tempting to read the “War on Reason” as sourced in the same media-frenzied, accelerated 1960s as Ballard addressed in The Atrocity Exhibition. But Carter isn’t presenting a dystopia, here. Hers is a world in constant conflict, though the feeling is not of warning about how things might become, it’s about how, for her, the world simply is.)

Carter is generous with her references, and has obviously absorbed a lot of imaginative literature and cinema—far more than would have been admitted in your standard English literary novel of the day: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Rotwang’s laboratory in Metropolis get a mention, as does Gulliver’s Travels and Freud. And there’s a distinct air of Kafka, de Sade, ETA Hoffmann and Borges too. There’s a certain Moorcock-ishness to the Law-versus-Chaos conflict between Reason and Dream/Desire, though it’s probably not down to influence. To my surprise, Lovecraft gets a direct quote (“the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear”). And I’d even throw in the 007 films, as Hoffman’s castle, with its high-tech inner chambers, represents nothing so much as a Bond villain’s lair.

Me being me, I even suspected David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus might have been part of the mince fed into this particular sausage-machine, not just for their shared picaresque form which leads to a disillusioning/mind-opening revelation (which goes back at least to Apuleius’ The Golden Ass), but some specific details. For instance, shortly after meeting the monstrous Count, Desiderio says “His quality of being was more dense than that of any man I have ever met”, which instantly reminded me of Lindsay’s Spadevil, another larger-than-life figure met on the road whom the protagonist takes up with, and whose “body seemed to be composed of some substance heavier and denser than solid matter”. Later, Carter gives us a vision of nature at its most chaotically creative, mixing animal and plant forms: “nature had absolved her creations from an adherence to the formal divisions so biology and botany were quite overthrown and the only animals we saw… seemed more an ambulant vegetable than anything else.” Lindsay’s Matterplay (coming at a similar point in his novel) has a walking tree spontaneously forming from mid-air, before noting “Pure plants and pure animals by degrees disappeared, and their place was filled by singular creatures which seemed to partake of both characters.” Later still, Desiderio meets a hermaphrodite in Hoffman’s castle, with “a voice like a sexual ’cello”; Lindsay’s third-sex Leehallfae has an equally musical voice, “oddly suggestive of a mystical forest-horn, heard from a great distance.”

Throughout, Desiderio is led on by Hoffman’s Fah Lo Suee-like daughter—but is she like Muspel fire drawing Maskull on, or like Crystalman in one of his many deceptive forms? Their relationship is less fraught than that of Marianne and Jewel in Heroes and Villains—unless you read the messiness of that pairing as being externalised in all the horrors and brutality that surround them on their journey—but ultimately it ends as all such highly-strung desire must end: Desiderio tells us early on that Albertina is dead, and that he killed her, even as he loved her.

There is so much going on in The Infernal Desire Machines, it would be impossible to say it was trying to say one thing. It’s not saying desire is good or bad, or that reason is good or bad, rather it’s exaggerating both, and the conflict between them, and laying them out in all their messy, tangled complexity, with lashings of casual brutality, surreal imagery, and a lot of good writing. (My favourite line in the book is early on in the dream-beleaguered city, where Desiderio falls into “a sleep which had now become as aesthetically exhausting as Wagner”.)

From what I’ve read, there’s a lot more going on in The Infernal Desire Machines than I would be aware of: references to continental philosophy (are the principles of Hoffman’s philosophy to be taken as philosophy, or a satire upon such attempts to intellectualise the unintellectualisable?). At one point Albertina says: “the most monstrous aberrations are bound to flourish in soil once it has been disinfected of the imagination”, which seems the complimentary opposite of Goya’s “The sleep of reason breeds monsters.” Which is true? If both are, and the ideal is balance, then The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is not a book about finding a balance. Although, as Albertina says, “Love is the synthesis of dream and actuality”, The Infernal Desire Machines itself pursues both to the point of breakage, leaving poor Desiderio old and alone, living with the memories of the desires of the past, plus a hot drink at bedtime. Perhaps “the time of actualised desire”, as he calls the invasion of the real by dream, was simply his youth.

Lorna Sage notes that The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman was “ignored, or treated with incomprehension and contempt, by most mainstream critics”, perhaps because the taint of the fantastic—particularly in a novel that so evidently takes a glee in its own imaginative fecundity—wasn’t generally considered acceptable at the time by the British literary establishment.

Although I am ultimately impressed, I wasn’t always engaged by the book. When the narrative slowed to examine, at length, the lives of the river-people or the brutal centaurs, I was puzzled as to what it was doing. Maybe another read might make it fit together, but for now I have to think of such moments as sparks of imagination given free reign, jewels thrown into this bag of strange riches. It’s part of this novel’s character that it contains such a cornucopia of ideas, scenes, characters, and even longueurs.

(And the jewel image reminds me of Fritz Leiber on Clark Ashton Smith, who said Smith’s tales were “Innsmouth Jewellery; like strange ornaments, the metal elaborately inlaid and fired, studded with unknown semi-precious stones, from an unknown and timeless culture.” And Leiber, oddly, is another fantasist I found contained in Carter’s capacious novel, in the image of a night-time visitor to Desiderio’s rooms—Albertina, again, in yet another guise—a being with transparent flesh, so she appears as a “miraculous bouquet of bones”. Like the ghouls of Leiber’s Llankhmar. Had Carter read Leiber, too? Or was it just that her imagination was so wild, in this novel, it lapped on all these far shores of the fantastic?)