Weird Tales #313 (Summer 1998). Darrell Schweitzer
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House of the World; but its interior is a grey darkness, lit with pale flames that disclose walls and floors made of filth and clogged with rotting trash, a sad mirror of the dying psyche of the world.
High atop an elaborate web of knotted rope and filthy woodwork waits the throne of Gerard Rukenau. Despite his serpentine looks, the mystic and messiah Rukenau is no satanic majesty, just a mundane man whose arrogance and pride have engineered his own prison and Hell. A step outside of the Domus Mundi would forfeit its gift of immortality; embittered and lonely, he has covered its glory with dirt and excrement, rigging the elaborate ropework to assure that he never has to set foot upon the House of the World again.
Rukenau was the bastard child of a church-builder. Rejected by his father, he determined to build a cathedral that God would so desire to visit that all of his father’s churches would be left empty. He studied architecture and magic, learned the sacred geometries, and finally enlisted the aid of the Nilotic, an angel who could construct a temple so profound that “a priest might see the Creator’s labors at a single glance.” But a glance was not enough for Rukenau; he needed an artist’s vision—the vision of a Thomas Simeon—to comprehend the glory of his labors.
When the outcast Steep, who had failed to return Simeon to the Domus Mundi, re-enters its halls, he greets his former master with the killing blade; but Rosa follows, scouring the filth from the walls and exposing the glories hidden beneath: a vast temple of life whose essence is “the throb and shimmer of living things,” the “glorious…madness” that is the glory of creation.
As Rukenau dies, he offers a final revelation: Steep and Rosa are one. They are the angel known as the Nilotic, divided by his necromancy. Each half, male and female, has adapted to the world of humanity through their experience of gender, embracing the most superficial impulses of man and woman: to terminate and to procreate. “Living in the world with stolen names, learning the cruel assumptions of their gender from what they saw about them, unable to live apart, although it was a torment to be so close to the other, yet never close enough.” Now, in the House of the World, a mere touch reunites them, Rosa’s bleeding brightness merging with Steep, marrying him, becoming whole…becoming one.
The Nilotic moves into the heart of the House, intent on undoing it, and Will follows. “The deeper they ventured the more it seemed he was treading not among the echoes of the world, but in the world itself, his soul a thread of bliss passing into its mysteries.…He did not grieve, knowing his life was a day long, or an hour. He did not wonder who made him. He did not wish to be other. He did not pray. He did not hope. He only was, and was, and was, and that was the joy of it.”
The journey takes him home again, to Burnt Yarley, where he walks the cold slopes of his youth, the forgotten places and faces that live inside him still, seeing them with sublime wisdom: “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, he was too. Fox and God and the creature between.” Finally his footsteps lead to the place where the birds had fallen and, in time, to San Francisco and Patrick’s house, where Will fulfills his promise to attend his friend’s final moments. But when Patrick goes gently into the night, Will feels an unaccustomed discomfort. For the first time in his life, the man who watched and chronicled the dying of so many breeds feels like a voyeur. “Maybe it would be better just to go, he thought; leave the living to their grief, and the dead to their ease. He belonged in neither tribe, it seemed, and that unfixedness, which had been a pleasure to him as he went through the world, was now no pleasure at all. It only made him lonely.”
At last, it seems, Will Rabjohns has awoken. He is no longer content to stand idly by, watching, waiting, for death to come. “The season of visions was at an end, at least for now, and its inciter had departed, leaving Will to take his wisdom back to the tribe. To tell what he’d seen and felt in the heart of the Domus Mundi. To celebrate what he knew, and turn it to its healing purpose.” There is only one place for him: “his only true and certain home, the world.”
It is a lesson for both the artist and the man. The act of creation, like that of existence, must be defined on our own terms, not those of others—certainly not those of parents or teachers, critics or readers, and certainly not those of politics, whether social or sexual—and in terms of sacrament. Creating and living, Barker reminds us, are acts as sacred as those of communion, signifying or at least striving to signify a spiritual reality; if not, they are as purposeless and as vile as murder.
* * * *
Sacrament is not simply the best of Clive Barker’s novels, but also the most directly and profoundly autobiographical of his fictions. It is his first novel with an openly gay protagonist (which, even in these “enlightened” times, hindered its commercial prospects); and it is one of a handful of contemporary novels in which the sexuality of the protagonist, whether gay or straight, is absolutely essential to its plot. There is, however, no sense of polemic. Just as the novel cannot be read as a p‘an to animal rights, its take on gay lifestyles is by no means a gentle, let alone an encouraging, one. In the very real world of Sacrament, gay and straight relationships are equally difficult, and troubled; Barker argues convincingly against gender stereotypes and roles, as well as warning of the dangers of defining oneself through them.
The plot is deceptive in its simplicity, a characteristic puzzle box of secret histories whose telling and retelling are the key to revelation. In these pages Barker revisits themes—notably, the urge for unity and transformation—that have been crucial to earlier works. It is no accident that Sacrament echoes another autobiographical novel, Weaveworld, at essential moments, but here Barker strips away the veneer of fantasy (which plays a minor role in the proceedings), finding the courage to create a metaphoric wonderland that cannot be ignored or dismissed as the stuff of escapism. Sacrament is remarkable, for Barker the fantasist, in its retreat from the elaborate mythologies of Imajica and the novels of “The Art” in favor of a subdued unreality whose most chimerical qualities are biblical in character. It is equally remarkable in its refusal to concede that unreality, to suggest that its tropes have anything but direct and vital meaning for the reader—and the writer.
Will Rabjohn’s profession as a photographer of dying species is an elegant and, indeed, inspired metaphor for the writer, the filmmaker, the artist of the dark fantastic—in other words, for Clive Barker himself. The truth is underscored in a telling aside about reviews: “The critical response to both the books and exhibitions had often been antagonistic. Few reviewers had questioned Will’s skills—he had the temperament, the vision, and the technical grasp to be a great photographer. But why, they complained, did he have to be so relentlessly grim? Why did he have to seek out images that evoked despair and death when there was so much beauty in the natural world?”
* * * *
Why, indeed? Darkness, Barker counsels, is very much in the eye of the beholder. 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. Steep fears the dark, and desires more than anything to hold it at bay; but Will Rabjohns, like Clive Barker, wants to know the dark, to embrace its mysteries, to rid us of the fear of the unknown and all that is done in its name. Sacrament is a testament to the explorers of that darkness, and a challenge to those who would write in its name.
At one juncture, Will offers a brief riposte, discussing a New Age spiritualist who comforts Patrick: “Oh, there’s light in my pictures…light aplenty. It just wasn’t the kind of illumination [she] would want to meditate upon.” [p. 306] Before the Domus Mundi, Will considered his photographs as a kind of bleak magic, one that, like his childhood killing of the birds, might work change in the world, but through negation and despair. But the light Will offers after entering the House of the World shines brightly: “Take pleasure not because it’s fleeting, but because it exists at all.” The light is one that his photographs, like Barker’s own work in so many media, cannot capture, but which, with wisdom and conscience, can suggest and, indeed, exalt: “This presence of all things, seen and unseen, around and about, remember. There will be days in your life when you’ll need to have this feeling again, to know that