Subterranean
Press 2014 Deluxe Edition, illustrations by Jon Foster; originally published
1997
I’ve been circling in on really reading Clive Barker for years
now. I’ve up to this point still only managed to read a few novellas (‘In
the Hills, the Cities’, collected in The New Weird edited by Ann and
Jeff Vandermeer, and ‘Rawhead Rex’, collected in the The Mammoth Book of
Monsters edited by Stephen Jones). I saw Chiliad, a very slim
volume and with illustrations to boot, at my local library and thought I’d give
it a go as well. I’m glad I did.
I’ve been picking
up a notion here and there that Barker, like his co-master of modern horror
Stephen King, is a surprisingly spiritual
writer, one not afraid to tackle faith as much as monsters and who seemingly
goes so far as to profess to be some kind idiosyncratic religious believer.
Yes, I’m talking about the guy who gave us the Hellraiser
franchise of movies and associated publications, the guy whose fiction has
graphic content that can make even the aforementioned Stephen King blush.
If you doubt me about Barker’s spirituality, Chiliad would be a
good place to start testing that doubt. In addition to containing brief
moments in the story that are violently and sexually explicit, the tale is also
explicitly spiritual, a search for and from faith it seems.
And it is a tale about doubt too and the bout between
life-giving meaning and despair-dealing pointlessness, not just for individuals
but for the world. Chiliad relates gruesome and harrowing cycles
of violence and vengeance that reach back to mankind’s beginning. In so
doing it faces head-on the question of whether we are utterly alone in an
indifferent universe or whether the universe, even filled with gratuitous and
awful evil and suffering, might yet contain some kind of credible hope in
genuine metaphysical goodness. Its narrative touches on theodicy too in showing
individual human responsibility for choices made to pursue paths of evil and
all the collateral damage that spins out from those individual choices to do
evil. (Indeed, part one of the book is entitled ‘Men and Sin’.)
The metaphysics
here is of both varieties: the pop misnomer that has connotations of
psychics and paranormal phenomena (which feature as central plot aspects in the
tale) as well as the technically proper use of the term, which denotes the area
of analytic philosophy that studies things like time, existence, identity and
troublesome pairs of concepts like universals and particulars, substances and
properties, freewill and determinism. Barker’s little book is a genuine
meditation on the nature of time as well as the nature of persons and meaning.
In fact, he adopts and adapts the well-worn trope of figuring time as a
river and part two of the book is significantly titled ‘A Moment at the River’s
Heart’.
But for all this philosophical weightiness, the book is
far from ‘heavy going’. It is very much a need-to-know-what-happens-next
page-turner with some good twists and turns. And that is a feat. To
write something so overtly abstract and meditative that yet spins several
engrossing yarns is some pretty kick-ass artistry and hats off to Mr. Barker
for that alone. Indeed, the book is also an overt meditation on
storytellers and their craft as much as it is on finding meaning in the middle
of life. The author several times breaks the spell of the story to address
the reader directly and talk about their cooperative relationship in the
narration of the story. But it all flows very smoothly and you still
somehow feel like you’re in the fictional dream throughout. The
meta-fictional asides do not cloy or bore. Barker is good.
Each of the two main narratives that make up the book
(each about a man living by a river in England, their respective lives
separated by a thousand years) is introduced by a gorgeously weird and
mysterious apocalyptic vision. The first is ingenious in creating a
yearning that existence would somehow climax in true meaning and joy, but it
does so obliquely and really only opens the question and incites the longing.
The vision has to do with digging old people out of graves and watching
them grow backwards into infanthood. The second vision is ingenious in
setting up a scenario that shows the absurdity of a world that contains zero
doubt and thus zero faith. It describes a sort of ‘second-coming’, not of
Jesus, but of every god that was ever worshipped as well as myriads that
weren’t, a world where someone would actually desire to hide themselves away
from all this open and crystal clear divinity so that they might experience
some divine
obscurity and the opportunity for spiritual longing and a
wilfully given belief. These visions are enthralling for their depth and
resonance. As I say, though, the main tales of the book are actual plots
about developed characters and these are riveting. (I finished the book
in no time.) The net effect is thus both meditative as well as
entertaining.
Mr. Barker now has
my full attention and I look forward to really digging into his body of work
(and would welcome suggestions for which books to prioritise reading).
I’ll leave you with his own closing words to the book, which give some
indication of the tone and tension in which it’s written. The narrator
has decided to commit himself at last to the ‘river’ he has been only
observing:
…I wade in.
I cannot tell you if John of the Desert, dressed in his
coat of goatskins, awaits me there, his hands spilling baptismal water; or if
Christopher the Giant will come to set me on his shoulders, calling me Chylde;
or if Christ may come, trout leaping at His heavy hem, eager to strew their
rainbows before His pierced feet.
Or if I will be only carried away,
looking through the plain glass of my eyes, hoping to see before I drown sun,
moon, and stars hanging in the same firmament.
(Inner illustration by Jon Foster)
No comments:
Post a Comment