Clive Barker, page 1 of 5

Conceived of while writing his previous novel, Barker’s children’s fantasy The Thief of Always came out in 1992, a postprandial belch after the massive banquet that was Imajica. As this was in the days before the Potter-powered YA boom, and Barker was very much considered an adult author, he licensed the book to HarperCollins for a dollar (a silver dollar in one telling, half a sovereign in another); it not only sold well, but has been widely translated, and has several times been touted for a film adaptation, either animated or live action.

It starts with ten year old Harvey Swick bored in his bedroom, wishing away the dull month of February, when the grinning Rictus (with a smile “wide enough to shame a shark”) flies in through the window Peter Pan-style. He offers to take Harvey to the Holiday House, “where the days are always sunny… and the nights are full of wonders”. This House, hidden behind a magical wall of fog, offers its guests the best of each season every day: spring-like mornings, sunny summer afternoons, Halloween each evening, and Christmas every night, complete with the perfect gift (on his first night, Harvey gets the wooden toy ark his father made for him years ago, which was at some point lost). There are two other children there: Wendell, with whom Harvey spends his days making a treehouse, and the more retiring Lulu who, after she shows Harvey her dolls’ house populated with tiny lizards, seems to spend most of her time hanging around the gloomy lake at the back of the House, with its strange, darkness-dwelling fish.

There are a few hints that everything is not so perfect. The man behind all this, Mr Hood, is never seen, though Rictus and his colleagues (the jittery Jive, and the sluggish Marr), and the cook Mrs Griffin, often refer to him, making it clear he not only knows everything that goes on in the House, but “every dream in your head” too. And Mrs Griffin warns Harvey that Hood “doesn’t like inquisitive guests”. Rictus, on first flying through Harvey’s bedroom window, invited him to ask all the questions he wanted, but as soon as he did, accused him of being “too inquisitive for your own good”. “Questions rot the mind!”, he warned—a telling echo of The Prisoner’s “Questions are a burden on others.” Harvey, though, quite naturally wants to know all there is about this evidently magical place.

After Wendell plays a Halloween trick on him, Harvey is determined to get his own back, and with the help of Marr, who can change people’s shape, allows himself to be turned into a bat-winged vampire monster, to swoop down on Wendell and give him a real scare. Rictus and Marr egg him on, to turn it into a real attack; Harvey fights the temptation, but genuinely frightens the boy. The next day, Wendell tries to leave, but finds he can’t get through the wall of fog. Meanwhile, Lulu, who has been hiding away for some time, calls goodbye to Harvey from behind a tree, saying she doesn’t want him to look at her. He realises she has slowly been transforming into one of the fish that haunt that gloomy lake, and has now gone to join them. Is this the fate awaiting all of them—those, that is, who aren’t claimed by the fourth of Rictus’s colleagues, Carna, who seems to be quite capable of killing children who try too hard to leave the House?

The basic idea, of being in a place that seems like paradise but is in fact not just a trap, but a downhill slope to losing one’s humanity, is as old as the Lotos Eaters episode in The Odyssey—and is quite often paired, as here, with something of the Circe episode, too, as for instance when Pinocchio starts turning into a donkey on Pleasure Island, or Chihiro’s parents transform into pigs in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. It has always felt a familiar plot-line, but when I come to list examples, I usually can’t find as many as I’d expect. There’s elements of it in Ramsey Campbell’s Incarnate, and it’s the plot of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, but I always feel there’s some major examples out there I’m not thinking of. (And it would be quite instructive to compare Gaiman and Barker, though I’d consistently come out on the Barker side as a deeper and more artistically authentic creator.)

The uber-example, for me, though, is David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, and there are a few resonances between Lindsay’s Crystalman and Barker’s Mr Hood. Both, for example, are explicitly called thieves (Krag calls Crystalman “a common thief”, while Hood is the most obvious subject of the novel’s title), and both are seen at least once as enormous faces (Crystalman under one of his many aliases, Faceny, who is “all face”, Hood in the House’s attic), with an implication that this is because, like Hood, there is “a terrible emptiness inside” them, and the face is, ultimately, all there is. And Hood accuses Harvey of having “brought pain into my paradise”, just as the one fly in Crystalman’s ointment is the presence of pain, as embodied by Krag—the one reminder that pleasure is only a part of human experience, not the whole of it, and so anything that excludes pain must be a lie. Barker has expressed his admiration for A Voyage to Arcturus (calling it “a masterpiece… an extraordinary work, if deeply, deeply flawed”), and I was pleased to hear a perhaps unintentional Lindsay quote from him in an interview, where he says “The most important part of me [is] the part which dreams with his eyes open”—echoing the “I dream with open eyes” line from Arcturus.

The Thief of Always wasn’t Barker’s first foray into children’s literature. He’d actually made a couple of unpublished attempts before The Books of Blood (something called The Candle in the Cloud in 1971, and The Adventures of Mr Maximillian Bacchus and His Travelling Circus with some friends a few years later), and he’d written some plays for a youth theatre. Two of his inspirations were Peter Pan (which Barker has called “the book of my childhood”), and CS Lewis, but I was pleased to find that, unlike Lewis or, say, Roald Dahl, Barker doesn’t pick on one of his kids to be a moral lesson for the others, as with Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or the many sticky ends met with in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Wendell, who is evidently a little more greedy, gullible and cowardly than Harvey—though all within acceptable child limits—seems the perfect set-up for this, but Harvey and he turn out to be genuine friends, and there was no feeling from Barker of an adult tut-tutting when Wendell couldn’t quite see things through in the ultimate confrontation with Hood.

The Barkerian touch, here, is that Harvey wins in the end thanks not to his moral goodness, but because he’s found a little of Hood’s darkness within himself, and learns how to turn it on this “Vampire Lord” and his deceptive House. There are echoes of other Barker works here too, such as the overall feeling of a Faustian pact; the quartet of Rictus, Jive, Marr and Carna feeling a little like the four Cenobites (both are sets of unnaturally altered humans with supernatural powers, both are three men and a woman, and both feature one member with a ridiculously fixed grin); Rictus, in addition, has the salesman-like patter of Shadwell from Weaveworld; and Mr Hood is first met in a dusty attic, giving it the feel of the lurking supernatural presence of the resurrected Frank in Hellraiser. Barker himself has said that The Thief of Always has some of the same themes as Imajica: “The concerns about the darkness, the secret self; the ideas about some ultimate enemy who is in fact quite close to one’s self.” There’s no sense at all that, in writing for children, Barker is being less Barker.

(He was often, at this time, saying in interviews from Weaveworld on that he’d moved on from horror to fantasy, but there’s a lot of darkness in The Thief of Always, and I have to say it’s in the darker fantastic that his power as an imaginative writer lies.)

The risk with a children’s fantasy about the dangers of escapism is that it might turn into a critique of the genre it’s written in, but Barker, very much a pro-imagination writer—and also, as already said, not of the finger-wagging type—here presents a much more holistic view: “if we embrace Neverland too strongly, we are forever sucking our thumbs, but if we die without knowing Neverland, we’ve lost our power to dream…”, as he’s said in an interview. Harvey is an imaginative lad, and ultimately his imagination is part of the solution, not the problem. Being lured in by the apparent pleasures of the Holiday House is more like a refusal to grow up than a retreat into one’s inner world, and the best children’s literature is usually about learning to open up to the wider adult world. And Barker, a self-confessed “inclusionist” in all his writing, sees imagination, and darkness, as part of the wider, adult world, too.

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?

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.