Clive Barker’s Imajica

An article by Brad    3 Comments

Clive Barker is one of my favorite authors, right up there with Stephen King and Neil Gaiman.  I haven’t read everything he has written, but most of his works.  Weaveworld and The Damnation Game rank up there with Gaiman’s American Gods and King’s It as some of my favorite books.

nd I have read Barker’s Books of blood volumes 1-3, as well as volumes 4-6, which were released under other names (In the Flesh, The Inhuman Condition, and Cabal).  I have read the Great and Secret Show and its sequel, Everville.  I have read the Hellbound Heart, the basis for the Hellraiser movies, and a Thief of Always, a book geared towards young adults.  I have read his two newest offerings for adults, Coldheart Canyon and Mister B. Gone.

I have not read the Abarat series, which is also geared towards young adults, and I have no desire to at this point.

And that leaves us with, what I call, the Big 3.

Big, because they are massive volumes.  And an 800 page Barker novel would be akin to a 1500 page by most other authors.  I mean, have you ever looked at the type in one of Barker’s books?  They are dense pages.  If you were to take the newest 350-page offering by Koontz and condense his words to be the same size as Barker’s, the Koontz novel would be a paltry 200 pages.

But I digress… I never bought either of these Big 3, Imajica, Galilee or Sacrament because I didn’t want to involve myself in a novel that would take me six months to read.  Between the children, TV, comic books, video games and MLB, my reading time is limited, and there is so much I want to read.  So I purposely eschewed these three novels.

But, of course, I was at a used book store one day, and Imajica was sitting on a stack of $1 books, an old wonderful hardcover copy with a little stain.  The clerk notcied me looking at it and told me it was his favorite Barker book.  And I, being the sucker I am, turned over my $1 and took the book home.

Where it sat on a bookcase for over a year

I finally picked it up three weeks ago, after finishing Lincoln Child’s Terminal Freeze and Simon Greene’s Daemons Are Forever and left with nothing else to read.

I cracked that baby open and…

Here I am, three weeks later, only 230 pages in.

I eat 230 pages for breakfast.  At least I do when there are 33 lines per page and a measly 9 words per line.  And a good amount of the story is dialogue.

I hate to say it, but reading Barker can be a chore sometimes.  He oftentimes takes two pages to describe what most authors would spend a sentence or two describing.  And while the images he paints are compelling and complete, he can often go into overkill mode, describing everything and not leaving enough to the imagination.

His paragraphs are so dense, and his language, while almost akin to poetry, can be stilted at times.  But he is British, so what can you expect?  So many sentences are multiple lines in length that I oftentimes find myself re-reading full paragraphs to fully appreciate the words on the page.  Other times I re-read a line or paragraph to fully appreciate the picture Barker is painting with his words.  Other times I have to re-read a paragraph because I accidentally skipped a line and got lost, as if stumbling through a hedge maze.

All of these reasons, combined with the actual hefty word-count, has made Imajica a chore.  Not an unwieldy chore, and not a chore I am going to cast aside and ask someone else to do.  But its tough.  Its tough to dedicate so much time to a single volume.

I am a man of instant gratification- that is why I sometimes have a hard time working on my own writing.  I enjoy writing, but there is absolutely no guarantee that anyone else will read it, or that I will eventually earn some monetary reimbursement from it.  So many times I eschew writing for those activities which will give me instant gratification: reading comics, playing video games, watching TV, or reading books.

With Imajica, there is no immediate gratification.  It is an enjoyable read, and while the trip is as important as the destination, looking at the tome and realizing anew each time I pick it up how much is left, reminds me of how much more I have to go.  And it is daunting.  Because I know that in the same time I am reading this I could be completing a half a dozen other books from beginning to end and have the enjoyment of the trip as well as the conclusions.

But I am not a quitter and I will continue with the trip as long as it takes me for as long as it takes.  And just hope it is all worth it in July when i eventually put the book down for good.

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