Nightmarish visions

Press, 5 March 1988, Page 23

Nightmarish visions

Weaveworld: An Epic Adventure of The imagination. By Clive Barker. Collins. 720 pp. $34.95. (Reviewed by Sharon Hunter) *|Weaveworld” is an epic adventure of !the imagination. That’s what the dustjacket says, although Clive Barker’s imagination is just a little more! strange and a little more sick than most would care to admit to.

begins pleasantly enough with a carpet in which a world of rapture and enchantment is hiding, a world which comes back to life and which a varied assortment | of characters would like to either! destroy, possess or explore. Among themj are Cal Mooney and Suzanna Pajrish, two young people who have; no knowledge of what they are about to live through. [ ; | j For the final conflict between good and evil is just about to take place in the! A'orld of the carpet. All of which sounds rather like a jolly E. Nesbit adventure or a C. S. Lewis trip into ( the wardrobe for grown-ups. A few pages into [ the book one rather quickly realises that Edmund’s encounters with [The White Queen have nothing oh this little tale and that dinner should realljy have been postponed. | I. Among the characters who wish to destroy the inhabitants of the- carpet, the[ [ Seerkind, are a pleasant little triumvirate composed of Immacolata the[ [lncantatrix and the two sisters whom she strangled in the womb. Magdalene, especially, really does

rate a mention: “Her body was a column of grey gas, laced with strands of bloody tissue and from this flux fragments of finished anatomy emerged, a seeping breast,! a ibelly swollen as if by a pregnancy months beyond its term, a smeared face! in which the eyes were swollen up slits.” Dear Magdalene has rather a 1 taste for the rape of living men, and: from such perversions bears forth things which Barker terms “by-blows”: “No perversion of anatomy had been overlooked amongst them; Bodies turned inside out to parade the: bowel and stomach, organs whose function seemed simply to seep and wheeze, the lining of the belly of one:like teats and mounted like a coxcomb [ on another’s head.”

And there is worse to come.: Much, much worse. The smooth-faced young man smiling innocuously out [ of! the dustcover photograph courtesy! of Linda McCartney seems to [possess some rather unpleasant demons which have found their way on to piapetr to torment those morbid enough [to ' want to read past the initial descriptions of Immacolata and her motley c[rew. Yet, amongst the nightmarish visions which Barker constantly tosses up at the reader, the adventure itself is detailed, well told, and exciting. Hopefully Barker has rid himself of his psychoses in this fetid novel I and any subsequent books will have less of the torment and more of the tastej and talent that he so obviously possesses.