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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Muriel Spark’s 1970 novel The Driver’s Seat is one of those books I kept coming across intriguing mentions of, giving an air of inevitability to my finally caving in and reading it. (Helped no end by the fact it’s been published in one of those natty little Penguin Archive mini-editions.) And such a term as “inevitability” is apt for a novel about a woman who not only rushes headlong into what she has evidently decided is her certain fate, but takes charge of arranging it at every step. (And is it still fate when you arrange it yourself with such determination? Or is it like taking the diver’s seat on an already one-way road?)

The novel follows the last day in the life of 34-year-old Lise, who has spent the 16 years of her working life in an accountants’, achieving an exactly middling position in the office hierarchy. As we join her, she is off on holiday (to an unnamed southern destination, from an unnamed northern one). Throughout, she acts strangely, and often inconsistently, though some of her actions prove to have an ultimate aim behind them. Early on, for instance, she seems to have settled on a new (garish) dress, only to react suddenly against it when the sales assistant tells her it’s made of a new stain-proof material. Lise acts as though this were an insult—the implication that she’s likely to stain her dress—and storms out of the shop. By the end of the novel, we know that staining the dress is, in a way, part of the plan.

In very Muriel Spark fashion, after having us follow this oddly-behaved woman for a short while, wondering why she’s acting this way and where this is going, Spark breaks the narrative tension in her usual throwaway manner at the start of chapter 3, by telling us Lise will be found the next day, violently stabbed to death. (Any other author would either tell us this straightaway, or leave it to a twist at the end. Spark tells us as though we should have known anyway.) What Spark doesn’t tell us, but which emerges as we follow Lise, is that it is Lise’s intent that this is exactly what should happen. Death is inevitable; Lise has taken over the driver’s seat, and is arranging her own death as she wants it to occur.

Her random, attention-grabbing antics start to make sense as we’re told, while Lise is interacting with a series of hapless bystanders, that these people will recall this strange woman the next day, when they hear of her death, and in many cases report their interaction to the police. If so, Lise is evidently not intending that the police will be able to build up any sort of picture that makes sense. She tells one person she’s a teacher from Iowa and a widow, when she’s neither; to another she says she’s here to meet a certain young man, but it’s evident she doesn’t know who he is or what he looks like, only that he has to be of a certain type. (That type, it turns out, being a murderer of women, which Lise can evidently detect.) It’s as though she wants to create around herself an air of mystery, perhaps (I can’t help thinking) because she detects, within herself, none of that natural core of mystery we know as the self. In the same way that Wolfgang Pauli once declared another scientist’s idea to be “not even wrong”, Lise is, in my opinion, as a character, not even shallow—she is entirely a fictional performance, with no human depth (unless that depth can be found in her desire to be murdered in a very specific way). Try fitting her to EM Forster’s definition of flatness as opposed to three-dimensionality in a fictional character, and she’s neither.

As a novel, it’s full of possible readings. I have a few, but they’re by no means meant to be final. It’s one of those books that grows into multiple interpretations.

For instance, Lise as a feminist statement about taking control of one’s life in a world where women have so few avenues for doing so. Lise seems to have calculated that, as a woman, her fate, as an unmarried early-middle-aged woman, is to be the victim of a violent death at the hands of a man, so she gets in the driver’s seat and sets about arranging it. The death itself is not her choice, but the manner of it is: “Well you won’t have sex with me,” she tells her murderer, then goes on to provide him with the materials to tie her up and stab her, as well as precise instructions on how to do these things. To add to this feminist reading, a lot of the novel is taken up with shopping—another area where women are, culturally, allowed some limited range of self-determination (what to buy, or at least which brand to buy). Lise, then, makes her purchases, or rejects potential purchases, with no seeming sense of reason, this being the maximal way to defy the fate of being a consumer when being a consumer itself can’t be escaped.

Looking at some contemporary reviews for the novel, I wondered if another reading of it is that, here, Spark is goading her critics. A Scotsman review (by Derek Stanford, from 26 Sep 1970) is headed “Back to the Batty Woman”—this referring to a character-type Spark was perceived to have focused on, though it comes with the implication that it’s Spark herself who’s the “Batty Woman”:

“Muriel Spark, in her time, has performed some impressively giddy gyrations, leaving us to wonder, as we watched her cut these capers, just how long she could keep it up. Myself, I thought, from The Mandelbaum Gate, that a downward spiral was setting in… and I am accordingly glad to see that with her latest fiction The Driver’s Seat her capricious levitations have started anew.”

If Spark, then, saw herself as being pigeonholed as “the Batty Woman”, The Driver’s Seat could be seen as her deliberately taking it on. Lise is the batty woman and acts battily, but it’s the batty woman novelist who’s clearly perceptible behind this depthless character: Lise is just a plastic game-piece Spark is pushing around this particular board, so the author must be as batty as her protagonist. The death that this Lise-as-Spark invites isn’t physical death, but a critical writing off as finally being batty beyond the pale. “Do your worst,” Spark seems to be saying to her potential critics, “after all, it’s what I’m goading you into doing.” (She’s certainly taking a gibe at critics when she has Lise describe the paperback she keeps brandishing—and hasn’t read—as “a whydunnit in q-sharp minor”, knowing they—like me—will surely try and fail to categorise her latest novel as being in some sort of genre. My own categorisation is coming up, not in the next paragraph but the one after that. But, no—Sparkian flash-forward—it’s an absurdist comedy.)

Stanford, in that Scotsman review, suggests that, in The Driver’s Seat, “Mrs Spark almost gives the impression of seeking to nail down—and destroy—her batty woman once and for all.” So here’s another reading still, in which Spark takes a clear character type from her fiction and drives it to the limit, just to see what it wants, what it does. Like laying a ghost by keeping on telling it that it isn’t yet frightening enough.

I’ve seen The Driver’s Seat described as a psychological thriller. If so, it’s one without either psychology (Lise is clearly a literary character, not an attempt at a human being), or thrills (we know what’s going to happen, we never find out why). Both Stanford and Alexander Walker (in another review I’ll be coming to soon) mention the book’s humour, and I’d say, if it’s anything, The Driver’s Seat is a comedy, but an absurdist one, a comedy of extremes, and of unease. Lise acts strangely, but with a squirm-inducing in-your-faceness—that face being both of the characters she interacts with, and the reader’s.

Stanford, in his review, says, “The humour in the book is the humour of the Void, and back of the giggles and sniggers, one detects the acrid presence of near-nihilism and deep misanthropy.” Alexander Walker, writing in The Birmingham Daily Post (also 26 Sep 1970), tells us that he read the book in 82 minutes, “but it takes a lot longer to puzzle out the undeclared intentions” of the author. He continues:

“Beneath the narrative comedy—and it is often a very funny story—lurks the equivocal sense of religious convictions being worked out…”

(Is it “very funny”? Are there ”giggles and sniggers”? What book are they reading?)

The key, for Walker, is how Lise will recognise the man of her “type” that she says she’s looking for. She’ll know him because she’ll detect “Not really a presence,” but more “The lack of an absence…” Is this, then, the quest for, not the presence of God in a seemingly Godless world, but at least the lack of Godlessness…? I’m not so convinced the novel is dealing with such questions, but perhaps it takes more knowledge of Spark’s work as a whole to see it. But perhaps Lise is trying to create, through seeding her final day with moments meant to be memorable (because bizarre, and ending in her death), an element of mystery in a world that has no mystery—and a world that has no mystery is a world that has no God. But the mystery Lise injects is random, scattered, disjointed; it’s a Dada-ist reality, with Cubist leanings.

Before it was published in hardback (in September 1970), The Driver’s Seat appeared, in its entirety, in a special issue of The New Yorker (only the second time this had ever been done, apparently). It was also filmed, in 1974 (sometimes known as Identikit), starring Elizabeth Taylor. The film reveals the cinematic nature of the book: we only know the characters through what they say and do, the book’s narrative jumps-forward translate easily into filmic flash-forwards, and if you read as fast as Alexander Walker, it takes about the same time to read as to watch. The major difference is that, like Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash, actors can’t help bring a different slant to every moment, simply by the empathy a human face evokes in the viewer. (Though the redubbing customary to Italian films of the time—and this is an Italian production—does add an element of dehumanisation, in my opinion. Particularly to the male actors, so many of whom look the same. Plus, there’s Andy Warhol, who makes two appearances, and has a natural coating of whatever the emotional equivalent of teflon is.) Novels can get by presenting us with absurdist non-characters like Lise, but as soon as Lise is portrayed by a human being (and late-career Elizabeth Taylor can’t help but come with a certain faded-superstar, on-her-fifth-divorce, not-quite-right-for-arthouse fragility), the necessary distance of absurdism is lost, and it all becomes much more uncomfortable and tragic. (But wait—a film in which Elizabeth Taylor steals a car, all the while heading towards her own violent death… Get JG Ballard on the line!)

The Driver’s Seat was, apparently, Spark’s favourite of her own novels. Of the three of hers I’ve read, I think I still prefer The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which is much more the portrait of a believable, even recognisable, personality type, but this one certainly comes close, with its thought-provoking worrying quality you just know is going to keep you returning to ponder it.

Having by now spent ten years publishing blockbuster novels that mix horror and fantasy on an often Biblical scale, Sacrament (first published in 1996) saw Barker taking a step back from the multiple worlds and earth-shaking events of Imajica, The Great and Secret Show and Everville to something less chock-full of entire carnivals of the fantastique. Here, he addresses some issues of concern in the real world around him. And though, this being Barker, there are still moments when it all strays into the metaphysical, fantastic and luridly horrific, it does, at times, even get a little autobiographical.

The protagonist of Sacrament is Will Rabjohns, a world-renowned wildlife photographer known for his images of animals brought up hard against humankind’s impact on their home environments. The novel opens as he’s finishing his latest project, on polar bears hunting through the rubbish tips of Balthazar in northern Canada. But a bear attack puts him into a four-month coma, during which he revisits the events of thirty years ago when, as a thirteen year old, he encountered a strange and beautiful pair of vagabonds, Jacob and Rosa.

Back then, Will’s parents had just moved from Manchester to the Yorkshire village of Burnt Yarley following the death of Will’s older brother, who had always been his parents’ favourite. Still left very much in the shadows of his parents’ affections, when he meets this strange pair, and finds Jacob taking a keen interest him, Will decides to run away with them.

Jacob has a strange avocation as “the Killer of Last Things”: he seeks out the final mating pairs of dying species, documents them thoroughly in his journal, then kills them, thus making what he sees as an irreversible impact on the world. Something passes between Jacob and Will, and the boy experiences some of the older man’s memories, including one of a dead painter, Thomas Simeon, from two centuries ago (Jacob and Rosa are, it seems, immortal, and have a Cenobitish air of ennui’d repletion about them), whose body, left in the wilds, was partially eaten by a fox. (In his coma, Will sees that fox once more and speaks to it—Lord Fox, it calls itself.) In the end, events transpired to prevent Will from joining this dangerous but alluring couple, but he left the town and his parents as soon as he’d grown up: a gay man, he knows his parents—and, indeed, most of society at the time—couldn’t accept what he was. He left England for America, settling in San Francisco.

Recovering from the coma, Will says he’s finished with photography, but has no plans for what he’s going to do instead. He returns to San Francisco, only to find himself in a community ravaged by AIDS. And Lord Fox, stirred into wakefulness inside him, starts visiting, enlivening his senses with a fresh acuity, and driving him to Barkerian excesses in the city’s gay nightclubs. Will realises he has to rid himself of this troublesome animal spirit just as Jacob, elsewhere in the world, decides he needs to rid himself of the connection he still feels to Will. To this end, Jacob and Rosa return to Burnt Yarley and assault Will’s father, putting him into hospital, thus sending the message that they want Will back for a confrontation.

As ever with Barker’s fiction, that confrontation doesn’t go according to anyone’s plan, and turns into a quest that heads further north to the Isle of Tiree, where Jacob and Rosa’s former master—perhaps, even, creator—the magician Rukenau, dwells in the magical structure known as the Domus Mundi, the House of the World.

Barker has said this is a novel infused with autobiographical elements (his biographer Douglas E Winter says “Sacrament is arguably the best of Clive Barker’s novels, and one of the most directly and profoundly autobiographical of his fictions”). It’s broad strokes stuff, though, as this is a novel about a creative gay man who has moved from the north of England to the West Coast of the USA. And Will’s critics say, of his art, what Barker must have heard many times himself: “Why did he have to seek out images that evoked despair and death when there was so much beauty in the natural world?”

The main fantastical element centres on Jacob and Rosa. (Winter writes: “The bloodthirsty scourge known as Jacob Steep is only the most recent of the light-bearing zealots who burn their way through the pages of [Barker’s] fiction,” which is a wonderful description.) Both have some power, most explicitly in Rosa’s case, as she has an animated string of rosary beads that does her bidding (usually murder). Like so many Barker figures, the couple exist in a twilight world, or perhaps an elevated version of this one, their concerns philosophical and aesthetic rather than the mundane ones of daily survival, blessed visionaries and cursed wanderers in one.

As so often in Barker’s fiction these are figures on a quest for deeper, or higher, knowledge. Like The Great and Secret Show’s Jaff or Weaveworld’s Shadwell the Salesman, their power derives from an awareness of another world, but one they are not the masters of. Jacob and Rosa, in fact, do not really understand what they are. They know they’re immortal; they’re haunted by certain memories (an ice palace they visited many years ago reminded them of something, though they can’t recall what). Jacob in particular is troubled and inconsistent. Despite his extinction-killings, he seeks forgiveness somehow, and a clear view of God—who is drowned out, in this world, he believes, by the “smothering, deafening fecundity” of its animal life, hence his need to kill it off—but, at the same time, he’s contemptuous of the deity, saying “God’s a coward and a show-off, Will… He hides behind a gaudy show of forms, boasting how fine His workings are…” Zealot he may be, but his faith blows hot and cold.

Jacob and Rosa know they owe their existence to the magician Rukenau, who dwells in the Domus Mundi—which they, somehow, helped build—and it’s when they, and Will, start to learn more about both Rukenau and the painter Simeon (who was, for a while, Rukenau’s partner in magical endeavours) that the novel really starts engaging with its ideas, and became much more fulfilling, for me.

Simeon’s is the clearer, more positive, vision, as he (in one of the memories Will has experienced) holds up a flower petal to Jacob and provides the novel with its title: this petal is “the true sacrament”, “the Holy of Holies… the Ark of the Covenant, the Sangraal, the Great Mystery itself”, as is all of the natural world. He has something of Algernon Blackwood’s panpsychism about him as he says: “God knows the world through us, Jacob. He adores it with our voices. He makes our hands do it service…”

But Simeon died centuries ago, and we only get to meet Rukenau here, living a squalid existence in the out-of-this-world structure known as the Domus Mundi. Whatever it is or was meant to be, this structure (I don’t recall it getting a full explanation) is a shining thing that seems to contain the essence of the world’s animal and plant life, a light full of “hints of living things”—or would do, but because Rukenau is unable to face its constant light, he has covered the interior walls in “mud and excrement”—the main image that lingered from my first reading of the book, making me wonder at the time just what Barker was saying. (I’m still not entirely sure. Perhaps it’s more by way of a complaint, that we live in such a wondrous world, but insist on polluting it in every way we can?)

One notable shift in Barker’s fiction that comes through in this novel is its attitude to death. In his previous fiction, death has only ever been a transformation, a change of state rather than an ending, and one it’s possible to return from (however painfully—think of all those half-made Uncle Frank-like “walking anatomy lessons” throughout the novels). In Imajica, a man who died from AIDS became a voice that spoke from the afterlife, an “angel” to one of that novel’s characters; here, when a man dies from AIDS, it’s the end. Resurrection has been a key theme of Barker’s fiction from the start, but “This is not a world of resurrections.” Rather, it’s a world of “early and unexpected goodbyes”, where “Life was not a reversible commodity. Things passed away, never to return: species, hopes, years.”

Jacob and Rosa, though, belong “to a race or condition which was in some unfathomable fashion beyond the frailties of disease, or even death.” In the end, though, they are revealed to be not human at all. They form part of another theme in Barker’s novels, of created beings, like the homunculus of his play The Magician, or the magical doppelgängers of Zacharias and Judith in Imajica.

What humanity they have, in particular their characters as a man and a woman, was acquired by “learning the cruel assumptions of their gender from what they saw about them”. Jacob, then, is death (“It was one of this appetites as a man; to love the hunt, the blood-letting and the kill”); Rosa is a combination of lust and a constantly-frustrated desire to have babies.

Overlapping with this Barker theme of the created being is another that’s closely allied to it, the relationship between fathers and sons. Here, it’s dealt with in entirely non-fantastic terms in Will’s relationship with his monstrously unemotional father, a philosopher whose response when his son says they should try to talk his mother out of her mournful depression, is to go on about the inadequacy of words to express any sort of meaning. “Nobody can ever feel what somebody else feels,” Hugh tells the boy, which is basically his excuse for doing nothing. His mockery of the idea of human emotion reaches its nadir when, pushing the question to its absurd extreme, he asks Will to imagine “a portion of excrement which may be dubbed loving”, and thinks that this disproves love, when it in fact only invalidates his methods of enquiry. Will finds a far better father-figure in the murderous Jacob, who at least, for a while, is interested in the lad (even if he later wants to kill him).

Sacrament received some friction at the time for centring on a gay character, both from critics and its first (soon-replaced) editor (who apparently asked Barker if he couldn’t swap Will’s boyfriend for a girlfriend, scared it would hurt sales). Surprisingly, for a book that depicts the gay community as Barker knew it, and so which presumably could have provided it with a de-stigmatising voice at the time, the sequences in San Francisco are a little bleak, and not just because of the presence of AIDS. (Douglas E Winter writes: “its take on gay lifestyles is by no means a gentle or encouraging one”.)

Kirkus Reviews, though, gave the book a mostly-thumbs up critique:

“By turns suspenseful, intellectually exciting, wildly melodramatic, turgid, and bombastic, Barker’s novel is charged—in its complex development and surprising resolution—with very real, very human emotion. A weirdly absorbing and entertaining tale that offers more disturbing delights from one of our most inventive and risk-taking writers.”

I certainly enjoyed it, perhaps more than the first time around, as I can maybe appreciate its maturity and depth a bit more. The first half felt a little unsatisfying, perhaps because of the lack of Barker’s usual profusion of fantastic images and ideas suddenly leaving his characters with nothing to be beguiled by, but as the themes kicked in, in the second half of the novel, it certainly grew on me.

Some questions seemed unanswered, particularly about Rukenau (just what was he up to when he had the Domus Mundi built?), but ultimately it’s a book that retains Barker’s usual visionary concerns, just versed in slightly less fantastic terms. Inclusionist that he is, Barker sees the wonders of creation at all levels of existence, in all aspects of being human, and in the natural world:

“The creators of the world had not retreated to the heights. They were everywhere. They were stones, they were trees, they were shafts of light and burgeoning seeds. They were broken things, they were dying things, and they were all that sprang up from things dying and broken. And where they were, [Will] was too. Fox and God and the creature between.”