Book Review | Chiliad: A Meditation by Clive Barker

Welcome to the world of Chiliad, an astonishing two-part novella by the incomparable Clive Barker. A brilliantly composed narrative filled with unforgettable images, this visionary meditation on time, history, and human suffering is surely one of Barker's most distinctive — and distinguished — creations.

Chiliad consists of two interrelated stories, stories filtered through the melancholy imagination of a narrator perched on the banks of a river that flows backward and forward through time. The first movement, 'Men and Sin,' takes place in the millennial year of 1000 AD. The second, 'A Moment at the River s Heart,' occurs exactly one thousand years — the length of a 'chiliad' — later, as the new millennium approaches. At the heart of these stories are two savage, seemingly inexplicable atrocities, each of which reaches across the centuries to reflect and connect with the other. As the narratives unfold and time becomes increasingly permeable, Barker creates a dark, sorrowful portrait of the ancient human capacity for cruelty and destruction. Writing always with lucidity and grace, he addresses a host of universal concerns, among them the power of guilt and grief, and the need to find signs of meaning in the chaos that surrounds us. In the process, he examines the endless chain of consequences that inevitably proceed from a single act of violence.

At once hugely expansive and deeply personal, Chiliad is a compact masterpiece, a resonant reminder of Barker's ability to create fictional worlds that enrich and illuminate our own.

***

For more than twenty years, Clive Barker was terrifically prolific. During that period, a year without a new novel by the author seemed—to me at least—incomplete. Sadly, when Barker started work on the Abarat, that was that. Since the first part of the series was released in 2002 we've seen, for various reasons, just two sequels and one short novel in the form of Mister B. Gone. 

That may change in 2015 with the belated publication of The Scarlet Gospels: a return to Barker's beginnings by many measures. A sequel, indeed, to one of his very earliest novellas—no less than The Hellbound Heart, which found fame later when it became the basis of the film Hellraiser. Before that, though... this: an amoral meditation on humanity's spiralling history of violence which certainly whet my appetite for more from the man who helped define dark fantasy.

Chiliad, to be sure, is neither a novel nor new. Rather, it is an arrangement of two tales intertwined with a maudlin metatext about an author who has lost his voice, and though its relevance today remains great, both 'Men and Sin' and 'A Moment at the River's Heart' were previously published in Revelations, the Douglas E. Winter-edited anthology of short stories intended to celebrate the millennium.

That said, the overarching narrative seems particularly prescient here, at this point in Barker's career. We find our unnamed narrator mid mid-life crisis, having forsaken all his old haunts and habits because of a bone-deep despair; a hateful malaise that says, to paraphrase: all he had in his life, and all he had sought to make, was worthless.

But at the river, things are different.

Guest Post | "Giants, Gods and Deep Time" by A. J. Smith

I had my problems with The Black Guard — see Monday's review for more on those — but at its best it struck me as the beginning of an "ambitious, engrossing and positively action-packed" fantasy saga reminiscent of the work of Brent Weeks and Brandon Sanderson.

What I didn't get to talk about in the review I wrote, because I'm careful not to give too much of any tale away, was how very different the latter part of the inaugural volume of The Long War is from the former. I rather not get into it here either, but suffice it to say the sinister subjects of the guest post below are indicative of what so sets The Black Guard apart.

Here, then, is the owner of 24 goblins — evidently one too many — on "Giants, Gods and Deep Time."

***

Geological time is a mind-numbingly difficult thing to understand; the time scale in which tectonic plates move, mountains rise, coastlines erode and continents form. Alternatively called deep time, it’s a scale measured in millennia, ages, strata and other things I struggle to comprehend. 

In our own world it’s the province of the hardcore geologist. In a fantasy world it’s the province of a writer obsessed with myth and legend, for anything can happen in the endless obscurity of deep time. Cultures and entire civilisations could have had their moment in the sun and died out. Unknowable beasts and monsters could have been dominant and then non-existent. With no scientific tools or sophisticated dating techniques, you are left only with legend and this, my dear readers, is what I do comprehend. 

What whispers yet remain? What corners of the world still harbour remnants of a bygone age? What can the endless past teach the present in the blink of an eye it occupies? The events I write about take place as a mere cough in deep time, a momentary point where vast forces converge. The protagonists may feel differently, they may think they are at some kind of nexus point where their actions do have meaning. To know and understand the reality – that individual endeavour means nothing in the grand scheme of things – is too nihilistic a concept for most fantasy heroes to accept. 

The few beings that bridge the gap – Giants in my world – are as unknowable as the timescale they occupy. And yet their influence and motivations echo throughout time. They guide actions, start and end wars, reach across boundless millennia to twist the short-lived protagonists into their own schemes. For this reason the Giants are seen as gods, when, in fact, they are merely older, wiser and more alien than the beings that worship them. The Giants don’t care about kings, countries and politics – it’s doubtful they even understand them – they have lived in and beyond the world since before these concepts emerged, since before humans appeared, since before the continents moved into their current positions. Why should they care about a few sentient apes that choose to build temples and invoke their names? 

Put simply: they care because they are playing their own game, fighting their own war with their own rules and their own conditions of victory. The Giants and their chief servants call it The Long War, the Dokkalfar call it The Slow Pain. The humans have no name for it and huddle in the shadow of their gods, hoping that they matter, all the time oblivious to the dance of birth and extinction that they are a part of. When you have a life-expectancy of seventy or eighty years (hopefully without accident or injury hastening the inevitable), you can’t be expected to grasp the infinite or appreciate your own insignificance; you look at the world around you – the towns, cities, churches, structures – both social and literal – and you hope that they matter, all the time fearing that they might not. 

And the ultimate curse of deep time? The war can never be won, for geological time never stops, never stands still, has no mercy or personality and exists only as a force of change. It’s scary, humbling, nihilistic, but, in my opinion, deeply fascinating. Civilizations, seemingly as strong as mountains, will eventually crumble to dust. Others will be built on their ruins, using the legends of a bygone age to structure their own society, until, once again, the inevitable roll of the ages crushes them.

***

Many thanks, A. J., for what must be the most epic guest post I've had to pleasure to publish here on TSS.

Now I don't believe he blogs — you what?! — but for more information, you can find A. J. Smith on Twitter, and he's a user of Goodreads too.

Now then: has anyone read The Black Guard yet? Share your thoughts in the comments.