The Lazarus Muse: Nights Of Magic, Days Of Gore

The Ninth Revelatory Interview By Phil & Sarah Stokes, 2nd June 2005 Clive Barker : "Hey guys, how are you?" Revelations : "Hi Clive, we're well, how are you?" Clive Barker : "Good, thank you, good. Under an amazing, not a cloud of work, but inner turmoil of work - unbelievable amounts of projects all happening." Revelations : "Well, for you to say that it must be really something." Clive Barker : "Yeah, no, it really is; it's like, 'OK now, which of the seven things shall I do today?' It's good, though, it's good.." Revelations : "Well thank you for finding some time for us." Clive Barker : "Yeah - you're very welcome, and thank you so much for thinking of me with Doctor Who." Revelations : How are you enjoying it?" Clive Barker : "I'm enjoying it a lot. I'm having a little trouble with Ecclestone's performance. It seems a bit broad to me, a bit larger than you really want him to be, a bit larger than you really want him to be - is that just me?" Revelations : "I'm struggling with how often he mugs to the camera." Clive Barker : "That's exactly what I mean. And I was hoping that what he would bring was - keeping the Northern accent, I thought that was great - then I thought well, he's going to be a down-to-earth, I'm going to see a Doctor Who who's really a Doctor Who for the new century; you know, a practical time traveller, and it's a tad stylized - the performance - it plays like panto, and like he feels he has to get to the back of the theatre somehow - you want to say, 'Hey, the camera's four inches from your face now, you really don't need to make that expression'. On the other hand, the special effects are startlingly better than they were!" Revelations : "Isn't it extraordinary?" Clive Barker : "Yes - you know, every now and then I check out a DVD of the older episodes and I gasp at what used to frighten me..! And I hear the Daleks are pretty impressive in their revisitation - is that right?" Revelations : "Yes - I'm not going to ruin anything for you, but there's a special effect in the Dalek episode which is better than anything else in the series so far. Conversely, I expected to dislike Billie Piper and actually, I think she's pretty good." Clive Barker : "I'm in exactly the same place. This stuff is, I think, very witty - I mean, I saw the creature that had basically become a piece of skin with eyes and a mouth - that was fantastic - witty and funny and bitchy and campy. " Revelations : "And they've rolled out a really good cast list - that was Zoë Wanamaker, wasn't it." Clive Barker : "Yes, absolutely, and every line of it was beautifully turned. So, right now I'm watching, I've watched each one you've sent me twice and have eagerly watched the post for - I'm like a little kid here, because we're not getting these. There's no sign we're getting these at all, so far. Revelations : "Is that right?" Clive Barker : "Yeah - I don't know why, there just isn't the same, I mean there are pockets of Doctor Who fanatics here, obviously expats like myself, but I think Americans were brought up with, as children, Lost in Space and, I don't know, Gilligan's Island and stuff - things which strike us as pretty darn bad and I think that probably we have transferred a lot of a young person's affection on to Dr Who which, from an adult's point of view is incomprehensible!" Revelations : "I'll tell you what's extraordinary is they've really caught the kids in Britain with this - running around shouting, 'Exterminate!'" Clive Barker : "That's so cool." Revelations : "Our eight-year-old - we took him out for a birthday trip about three weeks ago with two or three of his friends, and there'd just been an episode where there's an invasion of London and they smash into Big Ben, and we went on a tour round London and they were saying, 'Ooh - I wonder if they've rebuilt Big Ben yet?' and the whole thing was totally real for them." Clive Barker : "Oh cool, cool. I remember those days. Fridays (because we had Art on Fridays) and so from Friday noon to Sunday night was pure joy. Because Friday noon meant that I had Art all afternoon and then I was off and then I woke up on Saturday morning and Doctor Who was waiting for me and then on Sunday it was 'I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again' and 'Round The Horne' on the radio, you know? And then unfortunately 'Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In' would come on at like nine o'clock on a Sunday evening - the signal of the fact that the weekend was over. So for me 'Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In' has always carried the doom drum of returning to school. "Shall I give you a run-down of where we are this end, because there's a lot of stuff. Let's start with the books stuff. We won a prize, a French prize, the Prix Imaginales, for the second Abarat book, which was really great - I don't think we were favourites by any manner of means but we won the best children's book which was great." Revelations : "They brought out the French edition very quickly, whereas everyone else is playing catch-up." Clive Barker : "They did, didn't they, I wasn't sure of even why that was - it's been interesting, just as a side note to that, there's been a lot of... I'm painting like crazy right now because I now have 270 paintings in readiness for books two, three and four which is obviously, actually in some senses, more than I need but I actually want to have more than I need because I want to almost cherry-pick the best things for the final two books and obviously also the books are going to be bigger so they're going to have more pictures in. The books have steadily been getting bigger." Revelations : "Harry Potter style." Clive Barker : "Yeah exactly right, there's just more story to tell and so I've been painting like crazy. It's been wonderful to get the response from around the world - we're in thirty-two languages now, which is great, and I'm beginning to get editions - I haven't yet had the Chinese edition - but I have the Chinese cover which is beautiful. They are fascinating, there are so many subtle differences sometimes and then sometimes some very large differences." Revelations : "The Indonesian version of the map of Abarat's just great." Clive Barker : "Isn't it? Isn't that just so fun? It really takes it to another level of strangeness, you know. So now I am shaping up Abarat 3 and 4 while writing Scarlet Gospels during the day and polishing the script of The Midnight Meat Train which goes into production this year in New York along with a movie called The Plague." Revelations : "When you say you're shaping Abarat 3 and 4, is that in paintings or are you actually putting words on a piece of paper now?" Clive Barker : "I'm actually putting words on a piece of paper and it's because I'm beginning to see, in a way that I didn't with Books 1 and 2 really, the shape, the feeling of what these books are going to be as they reach their apocalyptic and transformative end and you know the narrative is going to explode into a huge scale in the third book. I did a painting of the destruction of something well-known in the Abarat and David came in and was aghast, he said, 'You can't destroy that!' and I said 'I just did!' It will be destroyed in Book 3. Book 3, as the title Absolute Midnight suggests, is a pretty dark book but the darkest hours are not actually in Book 3, the darkest hours are in Book 4, so in a way that is new to me in this Abarat process I am feeling a sense of the shape of these things as I paint. And I'm making copious notes and writing paragraphs and literally have two files full of notes now. It will be interesting to see how much of it actually finds its way into the final books." Revelations : "When you're coming up with ideas are you mentally shuffling some ideas into Book 4 because you want them to wait to the end? How clear is the division between Books 3 and 4?" Clive Barker : "Well, it's pretty clear now, it's simply a length issue now, Phil. I'm aware that I've begun a pretty huge narrative with a lot of characters already and even though there was a night of the long knives in the second book and a bunch of characters bit the dust, there's a bunch of new characters waiting in the third book. To give you an example, we have a glyph in Book 4 which is created by 7,000 people and the painting of the glyph is three canvasses long! It's in a style which I have never painted in before because I wanted this thing to look utterly... I just didn't want it to look like a machine or even necessarily a vehicle of conveyance. In a curious way I wanted it to look like something that had been summoned by 7,000 people - actually 7,001 because Malingo leads this joint creation - summoned by 7,001 imaginations and so, yes, I'm pretty clearly sensing what the shape of Book 3 will be. I'm not quite so clear about what Book 4 will be yet because there are some things in play that I have to work through which are actually about the metaphysics of it all; actually they are about what happens when you get into the 25th hour and you know, given the fact that it is a time out of time, what revelations, what horrors, what wonders are you going to see when you meet yourself as a baby or as an old person or whatever, so there's a lot of interesting stuff happening there." Revelations : "You've just filled me with dread as talk of needing to work through the metaphysical meaning for everything is what's been holding up the third book of The Art..." Clive Barker : "Well, yes, but you shouldn't be too worried because the hunger from the world, I almost want to say the pressure from the worldwide audience is fairly insistent and I've got to get it right - remember, I already trashed one book because it didn't work, so I'm determined to work it out first. But it's a point well made, I take your point about The Art but I think this is a slightly different issue in someways. The Art is an even more thorough-going metaphysic than the Abarat in that hopefully the third book will bring this whole Blakean image of what this is, what the nuncio is, what evolution is, what the connection between magic and Christianity is, a lot of big issues interplay. Those issues aren't touching Abarat. What's touching Abarat are actually much more emotional pieces of metaphysics; I mean what happens when you find you are not the person you thought you were, but in fact two people in one, how you separate yourself off, is it possible to separate yourself off from someone that you have lived with for sixteen years, particularly if that person doesn't necessarily - and I'm giving a hint here - doesn't necessarily mean you good. So it's thoroughly engaging and interesting. And during the day, I am shedding blood like nobody's business in The Scarlet Gospels, which is quite an interesting return to a voice that I thought I'd lost and I'm happy to discover had simply gone into hiding for a while." Revelations : "How easily do you switch between the two? Do you have to go away and chill out for a while?" Clive Barker : "Well, yes, I sort of do. I put down the pen about five o'clock on The Scarlet Gospels and then I'll mull around for perhaps an hour, tidying up or doing any bits of business that I haven't addressed during the day, you know, phone calls that I haven't answered and so on. And then about six o'clock I head into the studio and the nights are light here, as they are with you, so it's really pleasurable to work until nine o'clock, nine-thirty - I get three and a half hours of solid painting most nights and they are sort of complementary, Sarah. You know, the tone of Scarlet Gospels is going to remind you I think, in its taking-no-prisoners way, of some of the harsher stories in the Books of Blood and that was a bit of a test for me - did I still have that voice? Was I still, at 52, willing to be that harsh, that cruel?" Revelations : "I'm interested here, Clive, because you have said that you couldn't write the Books of Blood now. When you went to the Scarlet Gospels, did you intend it to be as hard as it is?" Clive Barker : "No, not at all, and that's why I'm speaking in slightly surprised tones here and actually it's generally encouraging because I had also said goodbye in an introduction to Weaveworld to that voice as well and it it encourages me to think that perhaps I was premature in my saying farewell to these other voices. I sort of thought that I'd lost them and as I say, I think they needed time to go to ground perhaps and revivify themselves. When I got Pinhead on stage with D'Amour - and I've actually got him onstage with D'Amour as a boy, he meets D'Amour at a Catholic school as a twelve year-old / thirteen year-old, a fully mixed-up, fucked-up thirteen year-old is the first time he encounters this creature - it suddenly, suddenly I realised that this hard-hearted Barker that really liked the imagery, the almost nihilistic imagery that was a part of the Books of Blood, I was really happy to revisit it; I felt there was validity in it. It's interesting to me and I've written seventeen hand-written pages this morning which is very, very unlike me, to get seventeen pages out in a morning - normally I am really pushing by five o'clock to get my twenty and I'm having a good time is part of it. Part of it is, 'Oh, hello Clive, I'm Clive,' you know? So many of the journeys that I've taken in the last few years have taken me to such diverse places, and sometimes very sad places; Sacrament has such sadness in it, certainly, and I think the stuff I did for Chiliad, you know, that was pretty melancholy stuff. Abarat has brightened me and painting brightens me, and when I'm bright, I can go into the dark places more comfortably. It's only when you're actually in a really, really dark place that the idea of getting up in the morning and going into these dark places yourself is really overwhelming." Revelations : "Yes it's a real threat if it's..." Clive Barker : "Absolutely right. Absolutely right. You said it in one. It becomes almost beyond me. It had become beyond me, particularly after my father's passing, to go into those very dark places. It's one of the reasons I'm having such a good time with Abarat; the lighter tone of Abarat, the brightness of Abarat, it was a wilful stepping away from the subdued tones and the cruelty and the violence and the almost arbitrary death that were part of my earlier horror fiction and now it's very much back on the page in not a short novel, it'll be certainly 150,000 words." Revelations : "30,000 more than the last time we spoke..." Clive Barker : "I know, it's true." Revelations : "And we're in June now, when the plan was to deliver this 'in the Summer'..." Clive Barker : "I think it will be early Autumn, but it won't be hopelessly late, I think." Revelations : "And it will now be early Autumn but published standalone, is that right?" Clive Barker : "I would guess so - I'm not making any statements about that, I mean they need to see the text and work out whether they want to add some of the short fiction as well. I think it would be an immense book." Revelations : "And if they did decide to add the short fiction, is the currently unpublished stuff fully polished or would that need more time?" Clive Barker : "No, they're fully polished." Click here for Part Two 2005 Interviews | Interviews Index | Home page This page has been created for information and entertainment purposes only. All quotes remain the copyright of the original owners.