With his seventh novel, published in hardcover in 1996, Eighties horror icon Clive Barker outdoes even himself. Sacrament (1997 Harper Books mass market, cover by Phil Heffernan) in this story of Will Rabjohns, a gay British wildlife photographer. After a wild animal attack puts him in a coma, he dreams/remembers/revisits a strange couple he knew as a boy. Once he is well again, Will travels back to England, to confront the mystery of his past, his estranged father, and his boyhood friends. What we have here is a metaphysical mystery tale, as a man confronts the past and the present, his art and the world, and the strange powers that seem to drive them all.
As with much of Barker's fiction, it is this
confrontation that drives his characters. What transformation awaits at
the heart of this mystery? Who are Jacob and Rosa Steep? They live
fictions, through decades. There is a dark, violent power that lies in
their fingers, in their seductive charms. In Will's photography of the
world's wildlife, they see a "conduit"—he brings to Jacob an unwelcome
vision of a 19th century artist named Thomas Simeon. (It's my guess
that Simeon is a stand-in for William Blake; it's no secret that Barker has long considered the English poet one of his literary icons, and with good reason). There is a lineage
from Simeon's art and writings to Will's photography: life is hidden
and waiting for apocalypse in Simeon's work; its aftermath and
extinction in Will's.
This is a novel about a longing for transcendence, for transformation, to confront
the mystery, to find out, "Why have I lived?" Barker writes that
perhaps, at the end, "There'd be understanding, there'd be revelation,
there'd be an end to the ache in him." The final scenes in the living
heart of the world—the Mundus Domini—are terrific; Barker's prose is
masterful, pure, poised. Here is his Thomas Simeon, in one of the
book's most wonderful passages:
"It seems to me, we must invent
religion every moment, as the world invents itself, for the only
constant is inconsistency.... It seems to me the purpose of religion is
to say: All things are so. An invented thing and a thing we call true; a
living thing and a thing we call dead; a visible thing and a thing
that is yet to be: All Are So."
How about that? Barker is simply an
excellent, lyrical writer, whose works reflect upon the spiritual
mysteries of our lives. Sacrament is, in a word, magnificent. I'm
appalled upon learning of some readers' distaste for its erotic homosexual depictions—they have no business reading Clive Barker. I
found this aspect to be incredibly well-done and insightful, these scenes with Will and his lover. Will has an ache for
transcendence (as do so many of Barker's men and women: see Gentle and
Jude in Imajica, Cal Mooney in Weaveworld, or Fletcher and the Jaff
in The Great and Secret Show), as does Jacob Steep. One man who creates to get
closer to God, one man who destroys.
That sometimes spirituality is a dark and
violent—and sexy!—thing in no way diminishes its importance in Clive Barker's art; in fact, this quality powers its engine. Sacrament may not have the "horror cachet" of the author's more famous, more graphic stories and novels and movies, but I think it is an essential work for those who appreciate his sui generis approach to horror fiction.
(Note: I wrote this review in the unbelievable year of 1998, for a new bookselling website called Amazon)
