Clive Barker : Revelations - Barker on Galilee

"Maddox Barbarosa is the narrator of the book and Galilee's half brother. I chose for the first time in my novel writing career to write from the first person. I'd never had a narrator before. I feel it allows me, the author, to speak. I'm speaking in the persona of Maddox Barbarosa, of course, but it was just immense fun to be able to write in this persona and to almost make the book conversational. [There's] something stylistically very different about this book from other books. It's almost chatty.
"Maddox's voice is the voice of someone who might look at you bleerily across a bar at 11pm at night, pass you a whisky bottle and tell you a story."
Chats From The Past
Transcript of on-line Hollywood Spotlight appearance, 23 June 1998

"I deliver the first book the end of November. It's one of two books that are called Galilee. They are connected in the sense that they have many of the same characters and the narrative. It's not like the paperbacks of Imajica where the novel just sort of stopped and started in the second volume. This is very much two books in which I'm exploring a mythology. It's huge! So I am a social bore. I get up in the morning and I go to my desk and write, I paint in the evenings, I go to sleep. I get up in the morning and I go to my desk. I am completely obsessed with the Galilee books. When you have narrative structures as large as this, you hold inside of you a huge amount of information. And if I don't hold it all, I have a fear that I will not be fully aware of the way that one piece of the narrative affects another piece. When you are dealing with dozens and dozens of character , in this case two family blood lines, I feel that my head is stuffed with all of these facts of Galilee. When I get done, I let it go and it all comes pouring out my ears. It's all there on the page and all I can do is hope that I have done my best. Until that time, the information accrues and it becomes more complex. That's where I am right now. My head is filled!

"I expect two seven hundred page books, back to back. It's set in New York, Hawaii, Japan, Hollywood, Charleston and Bentonville North Carolina. It's also set in South Carolina and the Caspian Sea in central Asia. Galilee spans the times of long before human kind even raised their noses, the time of the Civil War and in contemporary times . It's incredibly complicated and complex structure. I hope it's very emotionally rich as well. I am about three quarters of the way through the final draft of the first book. The other drafts of the second book are already written but I still have the final draft to do of that book. It's exciting as hell. I am having a wonderful time. It's not an invented world book like Imajica or Weaveworld but it has elements of dark fantasy and magic as well. It's set in worlds that which require a lot of research. Some of it was very easy to research, like the Civil War stuff. But discovering how people fished on the shores of the Caspian Sea at the time that Christ was born is really hard to find out . It's sort of fun trying to search the libraries and bookshelves to find the little pieces of the facts that add up to an end result. It's like a jigsaw puzzle. What I did was write the whole thing first. There are things which are seeded in the first book which do not come into full bloom until the second book. I needed to know how those blossoms where going to look so I need to make sure the narrative elements were in place in the first book to resolve themselves in the second book. . I don't want there to be a big gap between books. It will be a huge reading experience. What I'm trying for is an epic reading experience of the scale I haven't attempted since Imajica. This will actually end up larger than Imajica. Just as Imajica moves through Dominions, Galilee moves through time. It's been a complicated writing experience but it's also been a very emotionally rewarding writing experience. What I tried to do is take what I learned about writing about the real world in Sacrament and marrying it to what I learned about writing a sort of poetic, almost religious fantasy in Imajica. I wanted those to be put side by side. Famous last word (laughs)..."
Confessions
By [ ], Lost Souls, Issue 9, November 1997

"Galilee is definitely a departure from previous books, both stylistically -- it's written in the first person -- and in terms of its content. I've been very pleasantly entertained by the number of other authors that have been cited by reviewers as they've covered Galilee. A brief list of these authors include William Faulkner, Anne Rice, Jackie Collins and Barbara Cartland! Actually another important name on that list is the South American magic realist Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
"You're right that the theme of family is hugely important in Galilee. I think as I get older, I see more and more how I have been formed, both negatively and positively, by the dramas, conflicts, and the love of my family.
"I wanted to write about how I create. I wanted to tell the story from the point of view of the storyteller. Galilee contains innumerable confessions as to my state of mind while I write. Confident one moment, uneasy the next. Filled with visions on a Monday morning. Drained and frustrated by lunchtime."
People Online Appearance
Transcript of on-line appearance, 30 July 1998

"I feel like some books, when they leave my desk, I have had some anxiety about them. I feel really positive and great about Galilee. I feel as though it's ambitious in the story line and the structure. It's equal of what I had intended when I started. I always said that it was going to be a big old family saga, and that's what it's turned out to be. There's room for a subsequent book about these characters, but this book is complete and satisfying unto itself. That was important to me. I think they've done a great job on the cover. I feel good about the book. The next phase is to go out there and talk about it. This is a complete departure for me: I've never written a novel, I have short stories, in the first person. The invented first person of this book, Maddox, is somebody I fell in love with. I enjoyed writing in his voice. That is definitely something I would like to revisit just from the pleasure of being in his company again.
"There are times during writing a novel, a few months ago for example, when I feel 'I'm never going to find my way out of here. I got myself into this swamp and I'll just hide my bones somewhere in this book.' I always feel that and I sort of got used to it. The fact that I know that it's going to happen doesn't make it any more pleasurable. I really don't like that feeling and it always last for a month or two. Interestingly enough, in Galilee, I had the chance to speak from the writers point of view because Maddox is writing this book before our very eyes. I have sort of confessed, in Maddox's voice, where I was feeling these things. The reader, through this interview if you like, is aware of this and will be able to find in Galilee the place where Clive Barker felt lost. (Laughs). Which is sort of fun. It's an interesting process to use the voice of the novel as a way to speak about how you speak as a writer. It is a sustained act of faith in writing a large book. Faith in yourself, I suppose. Nobody can consistently sustain faith, at least I can't, for 14 months. Sometimes your faith falters and when it does you go 'Gulp. Help'.
"I have the first draft of both books. The difference between my drafts can be the difference between night and day. If you where to read the first draft of Galilee, there where three total, it resembles about twenty or maybe fifteen percent of the final draft. Characters change names, characters change motifs, locations change and complications change. It's a part of the writing process. Exploration."
Confessions
By [ ], Lost Souls, Issue 10, June 1998

"I'd wanted for a long time to do a dynastic saga, something with a broad geographical and chronological scope that would go through generations and tell a pretty complex story, something that would straddle fantasy, horror, family saga and, in this case, also romance. It felt like it was time to do it...My confidence in my readership was such that I felt they would come with me on this adventure.
"It's a real departure for me. And in terms of the way the story is structured, it's very different. It's anything but a linear narrative. I did [a draft without the first-person narrator], and what I discovered was that there was simply so much going on in the book that there was no voice that coaxed you through, that made you feel comfortable with the complexities of the story. I thought, 'this time the audience is going to rebel. There's just too much going on.' I needed a central figure, a central viewpoint through which all this narrative could be funneled. I needed a single voice."
Lord of New Illusions
By W.C.Stroby, Fangoria, No 175, August 1998

"In a way, you have to go with your creative instincts and see where they lead you. The elements of fantasy in the novel are woven very tightly with the realism. So even though there are characters who live a lot longer than any human span, it's all described in a very rooted way. So it's not like Weaveworld, for instance, which is much more of a phantasmagoria, where characters who are like you and I are entering another world -- and which is completely unlike our own. Or like Imajica, which postulates an entirely different set of worlds. Galilee is happening in our world.
"The older I get, the more interested I am in the subtleties of how fantasy works. My commitment to fantastique is as immovable as ever; I believe that writers and artists and filmmakers of the fantastic have a chance to describe reality in a much more complex and interesting way than so-called realistic writers. For example, the power that dreams have in our lives. The way our lives are constantly affected by and nuanced by things which are not strictly real. Our fantastic lives -- that is, our dream lives, the lives of our idling minds -- they change, enrich, and develop the so-called realistic part of our lives, and make us much more interesting and complex human beings.
"So when I write a book like Galilee, where the fantasy elements are tied incredibly closely to the realism, I find myself studying how I can put just a half-twist on reality -- and suddenly something very strange is happening. It's not the wild fantasy of Imajica or the wild fantasy of Weaveworld. But sometimes just a little half-twist on something can be every bit as potent as something 'wild'. My guess is that with Galilee, the audience is going to get a different kind of pleasure, versus what they would get in my previous works. For one thing, it's much easier to relate to some of the chief characters, because there they are, living in our world. And when strange things happen -- and a lot of still very bizarre things happen in the book! -- hopefully the journeys taken by these characters will still be all that much more accessible."
Clive Barker: Master of the Fantastique
By Stanley Wiater, Amazon.com 1999

'Whoever you are...' Rachel said softly, '...come and show me your face.'
The man stepped into the doorway. She couldn't see his face, as she'd requested, but she could see his form, and it was, as she'd guessed, a fine form: tall and broad.
'Who are you?' she said. Then, when he didn't reply: 'Did you make the fire?'
'Yes.' His voice was soft.
'The smoke...'
'...followed you.'
'Yes.'
'I asked it to.'
'You asked the smoke,' she said. It made an unlikely kind of sense to her.
'I wanted it to introduce you to me,' he said. There was a hint of humour in his voice, as though he only half-expected her to believe this. But the half that did believe it believed it utterly.

"Though its ghoul and demon quotient is comparatively low, this lavishly campy creeper has a legitimate claim to the title of Wierdest Book Yet by the accomplished author of such genre classics as The Books of Blood and The Damnation Game. John O'Hara, William Faulkner and Barbara Cartland might have spent a lost weekend collaborating on this feverish tale."
Galilee Review By [ ], Kirkus Reviews, 15th May 1998

"While this book is closer to Barker's supernatural roots than was Sacrament, it is also a meandering, self-indulgent novel that comes to no conclusions and never has a clear conflict."
Galilee Review By Jodi L. Israel, Library Journal, [ ]

"The novel's scale is smaller than that of previous Barker efforts: missing are the titanic battles of form vs. chaos, good vs. evil, the riot of wonders and terrors. But it's less cluttered too, despite abundant inspiration and invention and satisfying smatterings of Barker-brand sex, scatology and violence. Above all, there is a new richness of character, of its warpings and transfigurations by hatred and love, blood legacy and death."
Galilee Review By [ ], Publisher's Weekly, [ ]

On Galilee...(continued)

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