fantasy, page 52 of 92

Clive Barker’s new novel may open with the resurrection of a magician, but its primary purpose is not to revive the magical past, it’s to lay a ghost. Or, rather, exorcise a demon. For here, in a literary kill-off move that’s surely been played out too many times for anyone to believe it’ll work, Barker does a Reichenbach Falls on his most famous creation: the Hell Priest.

Who?

That’s Pinhead, to you and me — or the Lead Cenobite, if you’re a purist, as that was how he was credited in the first Hellraiser film (while in The Hellbound Heart, he wasn’t even the lead) — but apparently the entity in question prefers to be addressed as the Hell Priest. At least, until he slaughters the rest of his order and embarks on a new career as would-be King of Hell. (The Devil, in this version of Hell, having been absent for some time.)

It’s here, I think, Barker’s trouble begins. If you’re going to kill someone off, you’ve got to at least get their name right. I don’t even think he gets the location right. The Hell Priest is to be killed off in Hell, right? But Pinhead — the creature who, to me, made his one and only definitive appearance in Hellraiser, and whose name ought to be Pinhead, because it shows the proper degree of fear-hiding-behind-irreverence that such truly terrible monsters are often treated with — doesn’t belong in Hell. The ‘Hell’ in Hellraiser is figurative, not literal. ‘Hell’ is a state you go through — toils and torments raised to religious levels — not a place. (Certainly not as quotidian a place as Barker presents in The Scarlet Gospels: a Hell with uniformed police, bicycles, money, and other much-too-mundane details, far more reminiscent of the Hell of Barker’s mostly disappointing previous novel, Mister B Gone. It does have some glorious architecture, though.)

To me, Pinhead is a far different creature to this troublesome Hell Priest. His origins — along with those of Barker’s first (and best) feature film — lie in an experimental short film, The Forbidden, first glimpsed on The South Bank Show in 1994. Here, Barker presents us with a variant on the Faust myth, in which a lone magician in search of ‘the further reaches of experience’ summons a ghostly lover, then passes onto more esoteric pleasures, culminating in his being skinned alive. The Forbidden is scattered with abstract, purely cinematic sequences (which can be seen sneaking their way into Hellraiser, too — as in the shot of an unfurling, blood-red flower that precedes Kirsty’s waking up in hospital), some of which are of Barker’s ‘nail-board’: a square wooden base, criss-crossed with regular score marks, six-inch nails hammered into each juncture. Moving a light around it, Barker explores this for its abstract visual qualities (as he does the lights-through-slats that precede the appearance of the Cenobites in Hellraiser), but it’s unmistakably the origin of Pinhead:

‘Every inch of its head had been tattooed with an intricate grid, and at every intersection of horizontal and vertical axes a jewelled pin driven through the bone.’ — The Hellbound Heart

Contrasted with the Faust character’s visions and torments, the image of the nail-board contains, I think, a sort of boiled-down abstraction of crucifixion: nails (significantly, these aren’t points-upwards, as you’d expect from an image of torture), crosses and wood, simplified and multiplied, as though transcendence were being sold by the yard, and made available to anyone with a DIY temperament.

Moving from the nail-board to Pinhead, you see a man (or creature) who is in his own, permanent, self-crucified state, the very image of pain and transcendence unified. Summoned by Uncle Frank — who’s more interested in a far different meaning of the phrase ‘getting nailed’ — the Cenobites are ‘Angels to some. Demons to others.’ So they are, in Hellraiser, not evil, and do not belong to Hell. Instead, they’re a gateway to extreme experience that transcends the idea of pain being opposite to pleasure, or of evil being opposed to good. Heaven is their Hell, and vice versa; one is reached through the other. Their whole point is that they do not belong in a duality. Which means that, by putting its ‘Hell Priest’ in a very traditional Hell, The Scarlet Gospels, to me, strikes a false note. The Hell Priest that Barker is killing off isn’t the Cenobite known to the rest of us as Pinhead; he’s an imposter.

(Mind you, the Hellraiser movies have been doing just as convincing a job of removing Pinhead from his original ‘beyond good and evil’ meaning and turning him into a standard movie monster since the second film. And this, no doubt, is the version of the creature Barker wants to kill off.)

I’ve said before that Barker’s work is all about unifying the divides between, for instance, imagination and mundanity, between day-to-day experience and the transcendent extremes. For much of it, The Scarlet Gospels is too concerned, I think, with a storyline that doesn’t allow any of this deeper theme to come through. It reads like a checklist of what a Clive Barker novel ought to be: a very gruesome beginning, and then a lot of excessive, perverse, blood-soaked demonic goings on after that, but very little of the higher themes like transcendence.

Which isn’t to say there’s no transcendence. As well as being about the Hell Priest, The Scarlet Gospels is about two other characters with a literary pedigree: Harry D’Amour, Barker’s longstanding supernatural PI, and Lucifer. Both of these are transformed by the events of The Scarlet Gospels, in far different (and more convincing) ways than the demise of Pinhead (which can’t help being unconvincing — he’s been offed too many times in the movies).

The Scarlet Gospels isn’t the best of Barker, but that’s not to say it’s not worth reading. If at times it feels a little dated in its constant excess, it also feels like a reminder of the days when major publishers put out stuff that actually seemed dangerous and transgressive but which also had artistic intent. Barker is an artist, and I’d certainly like to read more of him — but moved on, not dwelling on the same old stuff in the same old way. And I wonder if there aren’t signs Barker might want this too:

Now Harry realized with terrifying clarity that he no longer wished to be the witness of such sights. This was not the world in which he belonged.

And:

“I have heard this story. I have seen you. I have seen all of you! In countless incarnations!” the Devil shouted to the crowd who attentively watched his every move. When he spoke again, it was slow and deliberate. “I do not want this anymore.”

After Neither Sea Nor Sand, I thought I’d give Gordon Honeycombe’s second novel a go. Dragon Under the Hill (published 1972) takes place over a week and a day on the island of Lindisfarne, where the Wardlaw family have just arrived, so that Ed Wardlaw, a lecturer in Medieval History, can finish his PhD. With him are his Norweigian wife Runa and their seven-year-old son Erik. Ed and Erik aren’t getting on — Ed snaps orders at this son and calls him ‘the original mixed-up kid’, while his son wilfully ignores everything he says. Runa is mostly left trying to ‘prevent her champions coming to blows’. On their first day, they meet Professor Mervyn MacDougall, who has recently uncovered what he believes to be an important find: a fragment of a local chronicle which claims the first Viking landing on Great Britain was in 793AD, when a Viking king, Guthorm, sacked Lindisfarne, then was killed at nearby Bamburgh.

But this isn’t just a minor historical detail to the Wardlaws. Unknown to them, their little family unites the two sides of this conflict, with Ed descended from Sicga, Guthorm’s slayer, while Runa’s ancestors include Guthorm’s son, who vowed revenge on his father’s killer. Blond-haired Erik, of course, takes more after Runa than Ed, and once he’s on the island, supernatural forces begin to play their hand. Both Runa and Erik think they see a mysterious one-eyed man watching them, then Erik discovers Guthorm’s tomb, and begins secretly carting its treasures back to his bedroom — first some golden dragon decorations and a ring, then a shield boss and rim (which he thinks is an ancient bicycle wheel), then some arrow heads and a spear-head. Guthorm’s sword, too big for little Erik to hide, he leaves at the tomb. One night, Ed is out walking in the town square and is nearly killed by a thrown Viking spear. The blade bears the name ‘Guthorm’ in runes; the haft is a mop handle from his own kitchen…

There’s something decidedly Oedipal in Ed and Erik’s relationship. Not only does Erik — or something acting through him — want to kill Ed, but at one point Erik spends the night sleeping in his mother’s arms while Ed is banished to his son’s room. (After which Ed vows, ‘He’s not going to take my place again — ever again. I’ll see to it.’) But Erik isn’t presented as the demon child of horror cliché. When he’s on his own, or with his mother, he’s a slightly wilful, slightly resentful, but nevertheless normal seven-year-old with a bit of a grudge against his father. Ed may think Erik’s possessed (‘Do you think he needs a doctor?’ Runa asks; ‘A witch-doctor, more likely. Or an exorcist,’ Ed says), but Runa thinks it’s more the opposite: ‘The trouble is that he is not possessed. By us.’ But, the truth is, he is possessed. The spirit of Guthorm is on the loose. Or is it one-eyed Odin All-Father?

This is the trouble I had with the book. The characters and relationships are very well drawn, and I liked the fact that the supernatural events were scattered subtly throughout a believable, slowly-advancing story. But the clues as to what was actually happening seemed a bit diverse. Is it Odin, lingering long after his proper time to oversee this final revenge, that’s driving events, or is it the power of the past, and of Ed and Erik’s ancestry? Or is it Erik’s resentment of his father, causing poltergeist activity (a great racket, like a dragon outside the house, is heard by Runa and Ed one night, but by no one else)? Or is it something about human nature itself, as Professor MacDougall says:

‘Take away the gloss of modern living, the aids, the artifice, the outer show, the shackles of convention, and you still have the natural man of instinct and emotion. These things still rule the mind in any struggle for existence… Kill, or be killed. An eye for an eye.’

A comparison that kept coming to mind is Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, another novel in which the past seeks to replay itself through modern characters. But there, I never found myself asking why: the power of pent-up emotion, both in the influence of the past and in the modern character’s current situation was ‘why’ enough. With Dragon Under the Hill, the emotional atmosphere, though tense, never seems super-charged enough to act as a conduit for the supernatural — and I think emotional charge of some sort is the supernatural, in fantasy and horror fiction. (Or at least the sort I like.) Still, it kept me reading to the end, and was rewarding enough in terms of plot and character.

Anything can happen in the next 1,339 words. There will be fist-fights, aliens, explosions, spaceships, laser guns shaped like staple-guns, and cosmic psychedelia, all bookended by what may be the third best SF theme music ever (after, of course, Doctor Who and Star Trek), which, like the show itself, is a mix of somewhat slow profundity (grandiose strings) and sudden bursts of pulpy shock (wah-wah’ed guitar). But is Space: 1999 the third best SF TV show (after, of course, Doctor Who and Star Trek)? Perhaps not to anyone who didn’t grow up with it. Only, Space: 1999 wasn’t really a show I grew up with. I saw it when I was about five or six (perhaps when series 1 came out in 1975, or maybe via later repeats), but then it disappeared, lingering only as a few fragmentary memories, till I watched it again recently on Network’s excellent Blu-Ray box-set. As far as I could remember, it was something like Star Trek (a militaristic journey through the depths of space, with a new planet/alien spacecraft/floating disembodied god-like entity each week), only a little more transatlantic, neither entirely British (no wobbly sets) nor entirely American. The most tellingly British detail: whereas Trek’s Captain Kirk solved the unsolvable Kobayashi Maru training exercise, Space: 1999’s Commander Koenig breaks the five-hour Moonbase Alpha jigsaw puzzle record… No, what Space: 1999 actually was, as I discovered on this re-watch, was a much stranger beast.

Launched a year or more before the game-changing Star Wars, Space: 1999 seems far more rooted in Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey — in fact, it’s more of an odyssey than 2001, due to its never-ending journey from space-island to space-island, meeting god-like cosmic entities, psychic-powered sorcerers, and the constant risk of lotus-eating lures at each new potential home. Whereas a Trek episode would most likely peak in Kirk having a fist-fight with his latest adversary, Space: 1999 usually culminates in a psychedelic sequence that packs the ultimate meaning of the episode. Kirk & co. were on a mission, a sort of UN-like reaching out to the many peoples of the universe; Koenig & co. are scrabbling for survival in a universe that’s not only hostile, but incomprehensible, full of powers much greater, and much stranger, than anything our constantly wonder-struck heroes could ever be prepared for. Even though Trek’s crew met their share of god-like entities, it never caused them to question their fundamental place in the universe. With Space: 1999, a sort of awestruck humility before the vastness and weirdness of space is the whole point. What other SF show would feature lines such as these:

‘Every star is just a cell in the brain of the universe.’

‘The line between science and mysticism is just a line.’

‘Eva, we’re living in deep space. There’s so many things we don’t understand.’

‘We have learned many things. But above all, we have learned that we still have much to learn.’

Whereas in Trek the survival of the crew of the Enterprise always comes down to one of its members’ superior skills (Spock’s logic, McCoy finding a cure, Kirk punching or kissing someone), the people of Moonbase Alpha can only watch in helpless awe as they pass through a black hole, or are toyed with by inhuman ultra-powerful forces, and come through on luck alone.

Or is it luck? ‘Something brought us home,’ is a line from the third episode, ‘Black Sun’, in which our wandering moon passes through the titular (and then-highly-speculative) astronomical entity — a very strange episode, and even stranger as a third episode. In any other series, it would come much later in the run, as it’s the sort of story that shows us a different side to what ought to be long-familiar characters, testing them to helplessness in the face of utter annihilation. It’s odd, then, to have it happen when we’ve hardly got to know these characters.

But that’s another thing about Space: 1999. The characters. Or, the lack of them. With Kirk & co., as with the Doctor and his feisty young TARDIS companion, we’re dealing with charismatic leads, clashing and bonding in the face of alien menaces and science fictional adventure. Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, playing Commander Koenig and Doctor Helena Russell, were the stars of Space: 1999, whose presence made the show US-money-friendly, but they play their roles in such a muted, almost deliberately bland way, it brings to mind another 2001 comparison: Koenig and Russell speak in such hushed, overly-reasonable tones, they remind me of HAL at his most murderous. To be nice, I’d say the people of Moonbase Alpha are meant to be everymen and -women, representatives of humanity itself, trying to survive in the weird, black void of space. But being more honest, I have to say it’s perhaps Space: 1999’s major failing that there’s no real interplay between any of the characters outside of their operative function on the base. They’re not people, but roles. Koenig is the commander: his role is to worry and command. Russell is the medical officer: her role is to worry and deliver medical advice. The others (Ziena Merton as Sandra — the most memorable face, for me — Nick Tate as gung-ho Alan Carter, Clifton Jones as David, the Computer operator, Prentis Hancock as Paul) have no scripted character, and need the actors’ natural charisma to bring them to life.

The exception, for me, is Barry Morse’s Professor Victor Bergman. Described by Morse as ‘a kind of space uncle’, he’s the exact opposite of the emotionally controlled Spock. Bergman is about the only person on Moonbase Alpha to have a personality. He delivers scientific — or, more often, pseudo-scientific, if not outrightly mystical — speculation with a shrug and a smile, even when he’s saying this may be the end of the human race, or that they may be facing forces beyond their comprehension, or that this might be a space-time-ghost so we should hold a scientific exorcism. He’s the source of most (if not all) of those quotes above.

Space: 1999 is a much more thoughtful show than either Trek or Who, but this is hardly the sort of praise to win over the network executives, let alone regular viewers. What is it that brings you back to a show? The characters. With SF or fantasy, it may be the world as well — the wonders, the action, the adventure — but it’s rarely the themes, the thoughtfulness. Those ought to be there, but as the icing on the cake, not the cake itself. With Space: 1999, the things that linger are the look (still good), and the weirdness.

But Space: 1999 wasn’t afraid to try things out. The penultimate episode of the first series — usually when you can expect a 24-episode run to be feeling a little tired — shocked the hell out of me. Suddenly, in a show that had so far been mostly staid and quietly psychedelic, in ‘Dragon’s Domain’ we have outright horror, with a multi-tentacled, single-eyed space-spider sucking in its hypnotised victims and spitting out their smoking, desiccated corpses, not once but three times in a row, in an extended, horrific sequence. In the same episode we get the first substantial flashback to pre-1999 Earth (as well as the first scene of actual emoting from Koenig and Russell — he gets angry at her, then makes up and she gives him a kiss, even if just on the cheek). Only Space: 1999 would make a show featuring so horrific a space-monster mainly about whether it existed in reality or merely in the mind of the man who survived it, but that just makes the episode even more interesting.

Space: 1999 changed in its second series. It lost the title music (why?!), it lost Victor Bergman (why?!!), it changed its set to one a lot less sparse and more seventies-coloured (why?!!). It did gain a shape-changing metamorph (dotty-eyebrowed Maya), but I’ll have to wait till Network release series 2 on Blu-Ray (hopefully later this year) before finding out how (or if) the stories themselves changed.