I first read Clive Barker's The Great and Secret Show about 30 years ago. It always stuck with me. Not so much specific plot points or even all the major characters, but certain ideas, scenes, and turns of phrase. I'm glad I decided to read this again. I loved it every bit as much, if not more, than I did the first time.
Like much of Barker's work, this might properly be called dark fantasy rather than horror, per se, although there are plenty of horror elements.
It's also, as the introduction to this edition informs us, a result of Barker's engagements with philosophy. As an academic philosopher, I was amused by Barker's distain for "philosophical equations" encountered in university philosophy courses (a fair criticism of much of what we in the biz call analytic philosophy). Instead, Barker has been intrigued by Big Questions about belief, imagination, and mind--a point which makes a lot of sense of his work, especially when you combine it with some Lovecraftian sensibilities and Barker's own gnarly imagination.
And when it comes to The Great and Secret Show in particular, Barker tells us that Carl Jung was a major inspiration. The idea of a collective unconscious is too fertile for artists and storytellers like Barker to pass up, and I can see why, especially when Barker creates something as interesting as the concept of the dream-sea of Quiddity as his own riff on Jungian ideas.
But maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. What about the plot?
We meet a man named Jaffe who works in a dead letter office in Omaha, Nebraska in 1969. He begins reading letters about something called the Art, a secret, more real world beyond our own, and a sea of imagination and dreams called Quiddity. He embarks on a quest to control this other realm for himself (first step: murder his boss). This part of the novel goes a bit quickly, but somehow Barker makes it work as Jaffe goes from miserable postal employee to megalomaniacal murderer in a few dozen pages.
But the real story picks up a few years later in town of Palomo Grove, California. Jaffe and an antagonist of sorts called Fletcher become something more than human, and draw the town into their machinations, which result, in complicated Barker dark fantasy fashion, in the birth of several babies with both human and nonhuman fathers.
Okay, the story really picks up 18 years later with the babies now young adults. And Jaffe and Fletcher are still around, but also not exactly human.
Things get, um, complicated from there. But every twist and turn along the way is worth the journey. We meet a washed-up Hollywood comedian. A journalist and his friend named Tesla, both of whom become vital to the story later, as are some of those 18 year olds (Tesla in particular is an awesome character). There's also an ape-human hybrid, a wizard residing in a pocket dimension, and a character from other Barker stories who shows up briefly in this one and (if I remember correctly) much more in the sequel, Everville (which I also plan to re-read). And eventually there are horrors from beyond...
And yes, this is Clive Barker, so there's plenty of gnarly violence and kinky sex (and plenty of gnarly sex and kinky violence).
I don't know if I could summarize the whole plot here if I wanted to, which gets complicated and involves a lot of surprises, but my recommendation is to enjoy floating on the currents in Barker's dream-sea.
But what about Quiddity? It's a beautiful and deep idea. Definitely one I remembered for the last few decades. It's Barker's riff on Jungian ideas, with his own special touches. Particularly beautiful is the idea that all humans swim in the dream-seas of Quiddity three times in their lives: once at birth, once when they sleep next to the love of their life, and again before death. It's the source of love and life and creation for human beings (and not just human beings).
It's also dangerous, at least in the hands of those who want to control it rather than be shaped and invigorated by it. I love this way of thinking through the deep mystery of the human creative process: what are we doing when we create art and stories? How is creativity tied to love and hope and meaning? Are there worlds beyond that which we can see and hear and touch? Are those worlds more real than we know? How would we know?
Reading this again makes me wonder if Barker was one of the authors that made me think the kinds of thoughts that led me to study philosophy. I'm glad he turned away from academia and became, well, Clive Barker. But I'm also grateful that he's still enough of a philosopher to write beautiful, deep, and complicated works like The Great and Secret Show. Barker may also have explored a form of philosophical idealism somewhat similar to Kashmiri Shaivism in classical Indian philosophy (all is mind, and mind is a type of creativity).
Like Quiddity itself, however, The Great and Secret Show is vaster than I can summarize here. My advice: take the plunge for yourself.
