Krishna
With apologies to the legions of Clive Barker fans in advance, I did not enjoy this book at all. Let me start with the story, and tell you why.
Charlie Estabrook won Judith over vs her flame John Zacharias (aka Gentle) but when she leaves him, hires an agent Chant to take her to a contract killer to ask him to kill Judith. The man looks very different from a killer he expected but he finds himself telling the full story to this strange man.
Gentle goes to meet his old acquaintance Klein to whom he sells superb forgeries (paintings). (A disjointed next scene, I know). A woman he was having an affair with, and who married into a wealthy family, still pines for him.
Chant is pursued by killers from another dimension who unleash a flea that burrows into his body through the hand and starts rotting it from the fingertips. He flees them just in time in a taxi and goes to Gamut Street for help. Pursuers hot at his heels, he breaks glass and enters into former Satori’s residence and goes up, while his body simply withers away.
Esterbrook has a regret and wants to call off the killing but cannot, now that Chant is dead and he does not remember how to get to the baby faced killer. He asks Gentle to help. Meanwhile a secret society finds that Chant may not be of this Dominion and they are perturbed – enough to call Dowd, the assistant of a missing member Gondolphin (Dowd himself, unbeknownst to them is from another dominion) to their ultra secret meeting.
Gentle goes to rescue Julie who is followed by a supernatural being intent, we all assume, on killing her. He chases the person away, who seems to be perplexed and bewildered to see Gentle of all people giving chase but nevertheless manages to escape. When Pie comes as Julie to couple with Gentle, Gentle is extremely surprised.
Meanwhile Dowd updates Gondolphin about the furore in the Society and we learn during their conversation that it was he who had Chant killed. When Gandolphin is cornered by the society he escapes by killing Dowd and showing the rest that he is an alien ‘who had come to cheat him and replace the real Dowd’.
Gentle goes to see Pie as his van is blown up by an otherworldly assassin killing his wife and, perhaps, his child. He meets Pie later who takes him out of the world to another Dominion by teleportation. Judy in the meanwhile gets a necklace from Easterbrook’s safe that has magic powers and we learn that Easterbrook is actually the elder brother of Oscal Gandolphin. Juse also sees Gentle and Pie go into another world.
Then follows some fairly meaningless scenes of people trying to kill Pie and Gentle and how they escape, but not before Gentle kills a monster like person with magic that he did not know he possessed.
He releases the bodies of the people dead long time ago and is rewarded with access to a portal to the Third Dominion when they were about to freeze to death. Then they have some pointless adventures and Gentle drowns in a deadly lake but survives. Barely.
Julie in the meanwhile beds Oscar and wants him to take her to other Dominions. He stalls her so she goes to the Tower (the building which is a portal for the other worlds) and meets Cynthia who was one of the Tabula Rasa originals who now is a rebel. She is caught by Dowd right in the middle of the conversation.
We long ago conclude that both Julie and Gentle are replicas of the Queen and the Autarch in the new world. (What a stupid idea, really.) So when the Mystif goes in search of the Autarch to destroy him, Gentle follows and is surprised when the guards let him through right away with no resistance. He does not know why.
Here is the other thing. Everyone who can go to these magical worlds, even the Autarch who rules them all, pine for “good ol’ England”. They want tea, they draw murals of everything British (Oxford Street included) on the walls of the new world. Really?
The story gets interesting when Quosair, the queen, goes in search for “Jesus” who has chosen to visit that dimension, and is blinded by hooligans and mistakes Dowd for Jesus. No, I am not kidding nor have I gone mad, I am really relating what the author chose to write. He tries to kill her using a mite from his mouth but when Dowd later threatens to kill Judith, after making her recall that she is a shadow from the ‘original Judith’ or Qusoir, the original, even blinded, kills him.
Gentle meets his duplicate Autarch and finds that he was cloned when he was drunk and cloning Judith (don’t ask) he slept in the circle and created a copy of himself by accident, which is the Autarch. In fact Gentle is the ‘true maestro’. Weird stuff. When Pie finds both together and is highly confused, Autarch wounds him grievously and escapes. Gentle takes pie to the border of First Dimension to heal there and meets Esterbrook who is convalescing there too.
Pie goes into Erasure (death) voluntarily and Esterbrook is killed in a subsequent tornado. Pie warns Gentle (when he momentarily comes back) to go see “his other” because “he knows” and having said that, disappears back into the void.
Juli and Gentle meet and go back to London to confront the Autarch once and for all. Then the whole story descends (further I mean – it is already in a very low position to start with) into absurdity. Judith finds that she is duped into pregnancy; she finds that the gem she has “smells of her sex” and so her lover keeps it with her; the real Gentle and the autarch (his duplicate) have endless conversations, weird confrontations; Celestine, imprisoned for ‘thousands of years’ is released and well; she sprouts ribbons of tentacles when needed; she is indeed the mother of Gentle and conceived him due to being raped by the Unbeheld (a kind of a monster) – what the hell is this? Not even a coherent plot. It just wanders around aimlessly.
Don’t even get me started on the street urchin joining Gentle ‘with a box of coloured chalks’ to provide protection.
Talk about weirdness. Dowd is found alive yet again but he is this time “really” dying. Hm. But not before he warns Judith that the reconciliation could be a mistake. Alarmed, Judith travels to Yzodderex to find out and gets mugged while Gentle astrally (out of his body) meets the Maestros to affect the next reconciliation, unaware of these developments.
And the pomposity! Apparently Christos (or Jesu, take your pick as both are used interchangeably) was also a Maestro. Who tried reconciliation among all the seen and unseen worlds and failed and was crucified for his pains. You look at Gentle, who is a drunkard, smoker, womanizer and a forger to boot, and imagine the ‘Christos’ being his equal and you go ‘What? Are you even serious?”
Not had enough? Try this for size. Finally Gentle, as he lies dying, reaches the City of God which is the location of the supreme being (Unbeheld or Hapexamendios). What does he find there? Houses, people going about their work, colours of the stones the houses are made. Really? The ultimate city of God is no better where people live in cities and cook and toil etc? The imagination sucks.
There are twists. Gentle is wounded mortally by Sartori and lies dying while Celestine goes to argue with Sartori. Judith keeps loving and hating everybody but still ‘is a goddess’ while wanting to copulate with anything resembling a man. I never figured out what motivates anybody in this story, let alone be sympathetic to them.
When he finally meets the evil God who is weirdly also a city and what is more destroys him, the story is still not done. They go on a chase with Judith and Hoi Polloi, her female companion (don’t laugh) all across the dominions. Gets more stupid in description when you realize that in all of the reconciled domains, England is the most fascinating thing, apparently.
It just descends into total nonsense all the way through to the end, and I will not bore you with the details.
2/10
– – Krishna