Clive Barker's "Abarat"

I just finished reading this little gem for the second time. It's such an enchanting tale that I couldn't resist a second deviation into the grim shadows and deep waters of The Abarat. I wanted to see what makes it tick. Masterful fiction isn't an accident: it is not some happy coincidence of verbs crashing into nouns. It is a very deliberate thing--a series of purposeful images compiled to create one beautiful image. Modern fiction is often shunned for… well, for being modern--but I am a strict adherent to the belief that Classics are something that everyone wants to have read, but that no one wants to sit down and read.

Beyond this point, I am talking about the meat of the book--its blood, bones and bile. If you haven't read it, don't go any further down, because I'll likely ruin the whole thing for you. Just take my word for it. The book is delicious: an absolute embodiment of Yum.

"The storm came up out of the southwest like a fiend, stalking its prey on legs of lightning."

That's the first sentence. It breaks every arbitrary rule of thumb I've seen about fiction. It's in a prologue (a thing generally shunned by writers) and it is describing the weather. But the weather is not a passive entity here--it is a fiend and it stalks and it has legs of lightning. The line is magic, and it sets up the very premise of the prologue--that certain characters on a certain ship are having a rough time at sea. We're shown that the storm is a hostile living thing, and it becomes the antagonist of the scene.

Beyond that, though, The Abarat is an odd place. The opening region--a dull slice of hell called Chickentown, which I more or less relate to, living in Kansas--is described to us in grim detail, not through visuals of the place itself, but of the characters. Candy's father is an abusive drunkard, her mother a passive, beaten wife, and Candy herself is at the very bottom of the town's social order. We're given a dreadfully clear view of this town, but at the exact same time, we know that something wondrous and fearful is skulking just at the edge of the shadows. There is the ever present mystery of the hotel-room suicide, and the strange tower lurking at the far side of town. And seashells. How on earth did those get there?

Barker presents a brilliant sepia photograph of small town America, and then, without taking a breath, thrusts the reader across a full color ocean into a world of that can only be described as queer. It's not the world itself, though; it's how he describes it. Never, at any one point, does he sit down and describe the world. His main character is always rushing through it, taking in sights as she goes. And without the reader realizing why, he has a picture perfect view of the Abarat and the Great Head and the Midnight Isle. "Less is more:" it's an old cliché, but a true one.

Barker builds his world with characters. Even the most miniscule of people in The Abarat is full of life and color. Officer Branx, for instance, who gives the Johns chase. His flustered way of speaking builds his image in our minds immediately. And it doesn't just build him--it builds the entire dockside area. Subconsciously, seeing the infuriated police officer screaming, trying to remember John Mischief's name(s), we also are given an idea as to why he is so frustrated. The captain of the fishing boat that refuses to let his ship be commandeered; the mob of people milling to the dock to see what's wrong--Officer Branx's world is one of irritations and setbacks, and Barker shows this to us with a handful of well chosen, active sentences, and delicately crafted dialogue.

For every detail we're given, our mind creates a thousand more. But if we get caught up in reading details, we get bored quick. World building is an art. The sky above the Abarat is shown to us in vivid detail with a few quick words. Candy looks up and notices that it has a different night-sky than the one she's grown up seeing. That’s all it takes for each individual reader to generate their own sky for the Abarat. A great glowing cosmos appears before the minds eye, and all Barker did was show the significance of the detail, and relate it, subconsciously, to his reader.

Candy notices that the sky is different. That's something you and I would likely notice, and we don't have to be told how it's different in any detail. Our brain does it for us. We explore this sky through Candy's emotions in relation to it, not a description of stars and constellations. We're shown a new world with a handful of simple sentences.

Clive Barker would be a good author to study. He's full of tricks--and they aren't cheap ones. When Shape is reading the strange little nursery rhyme from one of Carrion's books, the rhyme seems a natural progression. Most poetry in novels falls flat, but not here. They're simple poems with a pulse that jumps out at you, and the one Shape is reading in Carrion's study is a decidedly grim one.

We're reminded that life does not wait for the end of poems, though. When Carrion interrupts the rhyme, clearing his throat, it jars Shape from the nostalgia of his childhood back to the present moment, and it jars the reader from the almost lulling rhythm of the poem, to a nightmare reality where the cold calculations of Christopher Carrion are law.

I don't have enough good things to say about this book, but I do have one complaint. However creatively Barker used it, the word "Fat" appeared as a descriptive word for how things looked or felt once too often.

If you don't go read Abarat--at least the first one--you're truly missing out.