Clive Barker, page 1 of 5

I thought I’d take a side-step from re-reading Barker’s novels to look at some of his plays, written in the days prior to the publication of (but in some cases alongside the writing of) the first Books of Blood stories and The Damnation Game. A good selection are currently published in individual editions from the Clive Barker Archive, complete with Barker cover art, photos, and informative afterwords.

Barker had been creating plays since his days as a teenager at Quarry Bank School in Liverpool, which from the start were both horrific and fantastic in nature. According to Douglas E Winter in his Barker biography The Dark Fantastic, Voodoo (1967) was “a living horror film”, Inferno (1967) a “weird reinvention of Dante” complete with “Hell and Nazis and God knows”, and the title of Neongonebony (1968) refers to our current neon-lit age descending into a bone-choked post-apocalypse. The Holly and the Ivy (1970, when Barker would have been eighteen), was a three-hour take on the King Arthur story, ending with the revelation of a homosexual relationship between two of its main characters, which caused some consternation among the school staff—not for the first time, with Barker. These early works were collaborative and partly improvised (an approach Barker would encourage even in his later works, as he says in his introductions to the published editions: “These plays are not finished things, they’re invitations to collective work.”). Nevertheless, he was the one who assigned parts and determined the purpose of each scene within an overall narrative. Playwriting, acting and production continued for Barker throughout his time at university (where he switched from philosophy to English Literature), in first the Hydra Theatre Company, then the Theatre of the Imagination, and for a short while the Mute Pantomime Theatre. These all seem to have been small groups, mostly of the same people (Pinhead actor Doug Bradley, and Hellraiser II scriptwriter Pete Atkins, for instance). They all moved to London around 1977, and formed the Dog Company, where Barker, now out of university, concentrated entirely on the stage. He continued to act in his own plays for a while, but gave that up in 1980 to concentrate on writing and directing, and in 1982 gave up directing too.

The three plays I chose to read (and I’ve seen none of these performed, so I’m sure I’m missing a lot of how they’d actually be experienced) all had the more obviously fantastical titles. First among them was The Magician: A Farce in the Style of the Commedia dell’Arte, which was first performed from November to December 1978. As the title says, this is a take on the traditional comedy form the Harlequinade, with its set character-types (Pantalone, Columbine, Pierrot, and so on). Here, Pantalone is the governor of an unnamed European city-state, where rumours arrive that the great magician Cagliostro is on his way. But is he a real magician or “all reputation, no power”? It turns out he did perform one genuine act of magic many years ago, the creation of an homunculus, which he proceeded to drown, in horror at what he’d made. But the creature survived, and was raised in ignorance of what it really was, to become the governor of this city-state. The play ends with a reconciliation between the father/creator Cagliostro and his fantastical “son”.

The History of the Devil was first performed in September 1980, and went on to have a run at the Edinburgh Fringe, where it was listed among the twelve best plays of the festival. It would be the Dog Company’s most performed play. In it, the Devil has himself put on trial in the hope that, if found innocent, he’ll be allowed back into Heaven. Witnesses (most of them summoned from the grave) appear, and their testimonies turn into on-stage enactments, including the story of the Devil’s first arrival on Earth (in what seems to be medieval Russia), his encounter with Christ in the desert, his attempt to get a Renaissance architect to build him a palace (if not on Earth, then in Hell), and his freeing some women accused of being witches in Puritan America. For me, although these episodes provide plenty of variety, they don’t really add up to an argument for or against the Devil as a source of evil, and it’s the court scenes that are the best parts of the play. The Devil’s ultimate justification is that none of this would be any different if he weren’t here:

“Is there a moral sky over me? No. Does this dirt suffer morality? No. In all the natural world there’s no moral thing. You ask why you are unhappy. Why, why? Morality. You go against nature.”

Frankenstein in Love was first performed from April to May 1982, after which it was taken to Holland, Belgium, and again to the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s set in an unnamed South American country at the point where its current dictator, Perez, is being overthrown by the revolutionary forces led by El Coco. Perez’s chief executioner, it turns out, is Doctor Frankenstein (who has been allowed to experiment to his heart’s content on the regime’s political criminals), while El Coco is actually his first creation, the famed “monster”. After the revolution, El Coco is assassinated, but, being dead already, cannot die, and returns to revenge himself on Doctor Frankenstein, arriving on his wedding day (where the doctor is marrying one of his experimental subjects). Of the three plays, this is the most out-and-out horrific, dripping in gore, death, shock and transgression, including a man’s heart being ripped out on stage, another having his head trapped in a box of knives, and another having a new face sewn on, all wrapped up in an air of political oppression, medical experimentation, plague, cannibalism, and the misuse of corpses (“hardly the standard ingredients of British theatre” as the reviewer for The Scotsman put it).

Despite the political background, Frankenstein in Love doesn’t feel like a political statement (unless it’s in the overall tone of misused power and constant backstabbing), but rather presents a vision of a world in which all is merely flesh and death, but in which flesh is not ended by, but transformed by, death. As Veronique, one of Frankenstein’s experiments, says:

“Yes, I’ve learned that lesson. Flesh is trash. Its natural state is meat. Everybody is just meat. The rest is the will to be more than meat.”

Or, Frankenstein himself:

“We look at our bodies and we see them putrefying around our living minds and we know, finally, that the enemy is our flesh. The body is a prison and must be escaped by metaphysics, or changed by wit and knife and courage.”

Far more relentlessly grim than anything Barker put into his fiction—perhaps doubly so because it was being put on live, on stage, where the horror is unrelenting—it was actually written shortly after the most powerful of Barker’s initial Books of Blood stories, “In the Hills, the Cities”.

Aside from the general air of horror, these plays are speckled with hints of what was to come in Barker’s more well-known works. For instance Christ, in The History of the Devil, when planning his means of martyrdom, asks “Isn’t there something they do in the East with hooks in the skin?”, which recalls the hooks in the skin in Hellraiser. In Frankenstein in Love, after El Coco’s assassination (by fire), he becomes a skinless walking corpse, “A walking anatomy lesson”—which recalls Frank from Hellraiser, as well as the “anatomy lesson, raw and wet” of Gentle’s homunculus in Imajica.

More generally, I think it’s possible to see how Barker’s approach to writing fiction has been informed by his background as a playwright. All three of these plays feature a narrator who speaks to the audience and interacts with the characters, and who talks knowingly of the events being played out as a drama (somewhat like Puck when he addresses the audience at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, only in this case throughout the play), and there’s certainly a similar tone in Barker’s fiction, where he’s always highlighting archetypal aspects like character roles and story-types (it’s so ingrained in Barker’s prose style it’s hard to isolate in a good quote, but here he’s describing Gentle and Judith’s love affair in Imajica: “one death short of tragedy, and one marriage short of farce”). In addition, I think his penchant for making his monsters such eloquent, often philosophical beasts, is rooted in writing them as characters for the stage.

The theme that kept standing out for me, even if it wasn’t the main one of each play, was that of monstrous sons and their fathers/creators. I’ve already mention the reunion of the homunculus and his creator in The Magician, but there’s also the Devil seeking reconciliation with his father/creator God in The History of the Devil, and El Coco/Frankenstein’s monster seeking revenge on his father/creator (he calls him his father, but it’s pointed out a couple of times that, no, he’s his creator) in Frankenstein in Love. In the latter two plays, these attempts at reconciliation (if the last one can even be called that) end in failure, if not tragedy. This is a theme I thought popped up in some of the early Books of Blood stories, too, such as “Skins of the Fathers” and “Rawhead Rex”, and now I think about it can also be found in The Damnation Game (most explicitly in the character Breer, who’s resurrected by Mamoulian, and so in a sense becomes his “monster”, though the Faustian pact-that-isn’t-a-pact between Whitehead and Mamoulian perhaps makes more sense if read as a father/creator-son relationship) and in Gentle’s created double in Imajica.

The end of the Dog Company came, ironically, not through failure but success. As well as Frankenstein in Love (the first of Barker’s plays to be directed by someone else, which was partly done to ensure the Arts Council took the company more seriously), they put on another Barker play at the Edinburgh Fringe, The Secret Life of Cartoons. This was enough of a hit that the troupe recognised they’d need to bring in other people to give it its full due if they were to take it further (which they did), and this meant leaving the days of a six-actor, one-playwright fringe group behind. Barker continued to write plays (for the Cockpit Youth Theatre), but was already working on The Books of Blood and The Damnation Game, with Hellraiser and international bestsellerdom looming fast.

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?