I dreamed I spoke in another's language, I dreamed I lived in another's skin, I dreamed I was my own beloved, I dreamed I was a tiger's kin. I dreamed that Eden lived inside me, And when I breathed a garden came, I dreamed I knew of all Creation, I dreamed I knew the Creator's name. I dreamed - and this dream was the finest - That all I dreamed was real and true, And we would live in joy forever, You in me, and me in you. C.B. Clive's painting for Book 3 of Christopher Carrion's grandmother, Mater Motley. After the publication of the first two volumes of Abarat, Clive returned his attention to other writing projects for adults. But he also continued to paint and by mid 2006 had accumulated a large number of the paintings needed for volumes three and four. With pretty much all the paintings for Volume Three completed, Clive is currently writing the text of that third book - Absolute Midninght. He hopes to immediately follow that by writing Volume Four. It is likely that he will then take a short break before writing the fifth and final volume, which he promises will be huge! What's Going To Happen In The Final Three Books Of Abarat? We know that two of the next three books are called Absolute Midnight and The Eternal - or at least that was Clive's plan when there were only going to be two more books, not three! The clues to the meaning of Absolute Midnight are sprinkled throughout Books 1 and 2, but also in these notes that Clive wrote before Book 1 was published... "As the books progress, Candy assembles a circle of allies, uncovering a plot to blot out the Sun, Moon and Stars, and acheive a condition of permanent Midnight. Were this to happen, then a great number of creatures that would never dare to venture into the land in the light, would be free to emerge from the Sea of Izabella and would wreak havoc on the islands." Around the same time as he wrote those notes, he told us that: "It's pretty closely plotted through to the final book because there are things that are happening in the first book that will not get paid off until the final book. I pretty much know exactly what's going to happen. You get a sense even from the first book that everything is sort of laid out and there are mysteries and puzzles which are enigmas which are going to be solved..." Later, after Book 2 had been published - but, again, before Clive decided he needed five books to tell the whole story, not four, he told a magazine called Realms of Fantasy: "I have plot outlines for part three and some notions for four, based on the 270 paintings that I haven't used so far, but I may develop some new paintings as well. Now that I'm into the third book and starting to think about the climax of this narrative, I have to take charge of it a little bit. It can't be the unruly stallion any longer. I've really got to break it, otherwise I'm not going to get the climax that my audience deserves. "I want Book Three to build to something fairly dramatic, and Book Four to be on a whole new level of excitement, so I'm not quite as passive - in the sense that, with the first book I was letting the paintings tell me what was going on. The same was true to an extent with the second book, although I started to become more of a shaper of the world. The third one is very shaped, very predestined, because I pretty much know where this narrative is heading. At the end of four books there are going to be half-a-million words and 500 oil paintings, and I want that four-book world to read like one enormous, incredibly colourful, surrealistic journey." More Details Please! Speaking at the Los Angeles Festival of Books back in 2004, Clive began to drop more specific hints... "The third book is called Absolute Midnight – which suggests it won’t be a happy book! But the idea is that we are aiming for something which is going to be apocalyptic, but it’s going to be a private apocalypse - it’s going to be played out on a grand scale but also played out on a very localised, very intimate scale... "Lots happens to John Mischief; John Mischief is this character who has all his brothers living on horns on his head, and they’re all called John: John Serpent, John Drowze and whatever, and - if any of you have siblings, imagine the consequence of living in constant proximity to the other seven siblings in your life and no possible chance of getting away from them - yeah, nightmare! What’s going to be very interesting, and I’ll give this not as a spoiler away for Book Three, we are going to meet their wives. And their wives are also arranged on two horns... the idea of the brothers Mischief speaking to the sisters whatever they’re going to be called, is going to be quite fun. They’re all going to be called Joyce or Jane or Joan, so it’s going to be Jane or Joan and John..." He told us later that... "Just a couple of teasers: Bill Quackenbush finding Wolfswinkel’s hats… where the water recedes from Chickentown there’s a load of stuff which has been washed into the town and when the waters recede, dumped there, left there like the stuff you would find at a high water mark and a lot of that stuff is related to Abarat. "There are forces within the town which arise pretty much out of nowhere just to make sure this stuff is burned. Whereas Mister Quackenbush, Daddy Quackenbush, who you know has always been a little sad character sitting in a smoke-filled world drinking beer, finds Wolfswinkel’s hats, finds them washed up and left as garbage and he puts them on and he feels this flow of power he has never felt before. So that’s sort of fun. What does a man as unpleasant as Bill Quackenbush do with the power he now has, now taken from a dead wizard? - not that he knows it’s a dead wizard’s; he knows nothing about these hats, it’s just that when he puts them on, man, he feels amazing and because they are old felt hats he has them made up into a check shirt - he doesn’t wear hats, but can wear this patchwork shirt - and carrying the power around with him. "He is not a man by any manner of means who is one-dimensional, though so far I’ve written him, I think, in a fairly one-dimensional way, the third book is going to give me the chance to enrich his character immensely. The shirt of Wolfswinkel’s hats and the power that is bestowed on him and what he does with it, that power is, I hope, going to be interesting because there's a bunch of very, very frightened townspeople - and they’re right where he wants them: they’re looking for a messianic voice that will tell them everything’s gonna be OK and so here comes Bill with his very peculiar shirt talking in a way that they’ve never heard Bill talk before and sounding decidedly confident that, if needs be - this is his phrase: ‘We will take the war to them...’ He says, 'If anybody wants to get in my way, there will be trouble' and what’s fun about that is I had not seen how important Bill was going to be." "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... "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." We also know what the title page of the third book is going to look like... "He is the embodiment of Midnight - I don’t mean literally, I mean this will be the title page of the third book. I wanted something to announce: alright, we’re going into another gear, we’re going up a gear, you know? And he is somebody, almost like the guy at a circus, the ringmaster as it were, saying, ‘OK, get ready, here it comes, now you’re getting into the really dark stuff.’ And at the same time I wanted him to have an Abaratian strangeness to him; in his tail, with the faces in the light coming up from the branch he’s holding." Right, But Absolute Midnight Sounds A Bit Scary? Apocalypse! War! Despair! Heroes and Villains! What else? "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..." "You know there are these massive world-shaking events that are about to unfold... I’m dealing with some dark times here. I don’t think the writing can avoid that issue, even though I’m painting and writing a book that’s for all ages, I don’t think you can avoid the issues - maybe I could avoid it but I don’t want to because that wouldn’t feel right." Why Five Books Not Four? How Did That Happen? Ahhh... Good question! "I had two weeks over Christmas [2005] where I sat down with myself and examined what I knew I wanted the narrative journey, the shamanistic journey, that Candy Quackenbush takes from being an errant schoolgirl in Chickentown to being what she will become at the end of what will now be the fifth and final book of the Abarat series. And I realised I couldn't get it in four books; I couldn't get the characters in four books...! "I have grown to love this world, probably more than any other that I've created and I want to serve the rising scale of this drama and the conflict and the revelation of what Candy is, of what Abarat is, of what it is to us, as human beings, what we are to it... That was what the conclusion of that fourteen days was; it was, 'You know what, Barker? You can't do this in four books - own up...!' "[It's] a huge step, a huge step, but you know what it did? It was like I had a toy train engine going and behind it in the dust, lost, was the engine of the Titanic. And, by simply saying, 'Five', the dust was blown away and this huge engine moved into motion, and I realised how the mechanism of the smaller engine that I'd been playing with served its place absolutely in the larger one. And that my subconcious had been at work in a very generous way, but you're right, Phil, it's a moment when you say 'oh...' because you know what each of these books is... "For the final book - it'll be a hundred and fifty, a hundred and sixty paintings and it'll be a year and a half of writing; it's a huge book. And yet, what am I going to do? I'm not going to undercut this thing which is so important to me... "[It was] a huge relief, because I saw the bigger engine, and there must have been a part of me that knew the bigger engine was there all along. And when I talk about 'engine' I actually mean a narrative engine; I mean a huge narrative machine that was waiting in the shadows to fold it's great cogs and pick up this smaller machine I'd been dealing with and fold its mechanisms into the greater machine and plough forward and take Candy places I simply couldn't have got her in four books." How Long Is It Going To Take To Write All Five Abarat Books? Whew, that's a tough one... Each one takes about a year to write and then it's a case of where the Abarat books come in the list of all Clive's projects. He's stopped writing a big adult book in order to write Book 3 and he's told us that he's likely to roll straight into writing Abarat 4 as soon as number 3 is done. That probably means publication dates in 2009 and 2010 on those two (probably!), but as he's told Kidscreen and us, there's no definite timing on Book 5 and there's that adult book still to go back to... "I think my best job is to be the imaginer here and to simply continue to enrich this world. It took C. S. Lewis about 10 years to get through the seven books of the Narnia series. And of course, Baum was writing the Oz books almost until he died. I pretty much think I'm going to be in Abarat, in some form or another, for a very long time - and that's where I want to be." "Part of the point of this is to let my imagination percolate on this material and resolve the narrative in all its complexities - there's a lot of stories that need to be resolved at the end of these five books. I want to do that properly. I will never write about Abarat again after these five books, I think I can very certainly say that will be the case, so I really want to make sure that these five books really do the job. That may mean it's best for me to take a little break between 4 and 5." OK, But What About Abarat 3 Then, When Will That One Be Out? Clive told us In December 2007: "I’m glad to be actually writing Abarat Three, which is what I’m doing right now... Everything’s been going beautifully, and you can let everyone know that I am halfway through the penultimate draft." And in February 2008 he actually sat us down and read us Chapter Thirteen of the final draft which he'd written that very morning! (It was set on Gorgossium and yes, it was fantastic!) Here's Clive with that handwritten chapter in hand... Is The Artwork For Book 3 Already Painted? Most of it, yes, and a number of paintings have already been done for Books 4 and 5 as well! You can see some of the artwork which has been done and might well find its way into those three books here on our artwork from future Abarat books page, or by clicking on the link below. The Beautiful Moment - Home page | Abarat This page has been created for information and entertainment purposes only. All quotes remain the copyright of the original owners.