A review by themuffinjoke
Imajica by Clive Barker

1.0


Edit: 1 star, because the more I think about this book the angrier I get.

I’d half made up my mind not to bother writing a review for this, because I didn’t feel like wasting more mental energy on this book than I already have. But then I thought about it and it took me like 3 months to get through this shit, so I feel like I owe it to myself to vent a little before I evict it from my brain forever.

I’ve been slowly branching more into the New Weird subgenre of SFF over the years, and Clive Barker seemed like a more horror-focused China Miéville in vibe, which gave my squeamish ass more incentive to try him out. (Perdido Street Station made it onto my favorites list, and I’ll generally read anything Miéville writes.) But I didn’t know Barker had a standalone adult epic fantasy novel until I happened across this video on a YouTube channel I subscribe to, Tale Foundry: https://youtu.be/wrwRcVlz9o4. I only got a few minutes into the video before I stopped watching to avoid spoilers, because I’d decided I had to read Imajica. I was sold on “dimension-hopping shape-shifting Black/Black-coded nonbinary protagonist in a queer relationship.” Say less, fam, say less.

More generally, I was also interested in the idea of an epic fantasy novel that explores the complexities of gender, sexuality, and eroticism—not for the sake of titillation, but as a serious thematic consideration which is incorporated into the sociopolitical aspects of the worldbuilding. The only other epic/second-world SFF novels I personally know of that treat these themes seriously as part of their worldbuilding and character development are some of the novels of Samuel Delany and the Kushiel books by Jacqueline Carey, the latter of which I haven’t read yet. For the most part, setting aside romantic subplots and banal/cringe sex scenes usually written by cishet male authors with dubious ideas of what is sexy – many of whom have a penchant for throwing in a bunch of non-con for the sake of “realism” – the mainstream adult SFF genre in general is conspicuously un-erotic, un-sensual, and largely unconcerned with queer experiences of intimacy (the latter is becoming less true in recent years as more queer SFF authors put out fantastic work, but it’s still definitely a thing). Plenty of film critics have pointed out the sexless quality of superhero blockbusters, but I think that trend may well have its roots in SFF literature (comics and graphic novels included) traditionally being very conservative, paradoxically prudish genres, for all they’re chock-full of the boring, off-putting sexual fantasies of straight white dudes. So though I went into this with my guard up – Clive Barker is queer and appeared to have at least a nominally progressive ideological bent, but is still a white author who was writing this in the 90’s – I nevertheless had high hopes for Imajica.

So that’s a big L for me.

The one good thing I can say is that the writing is beautiful. Like, really, really good. Clive Barker can write his ass off. I might even prefer his prose to China Miéville’s. But the plot? A meandering, snail-paced shambles. The characters? Dull, unlikeable, one-note, or pointlessly wasted. (The contentious exception being a gay couple who end up
Spoiler sharing a body, at which point they are referred to by the other characters as “the angels” – a shout-out to Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America, perhaps, which premiered a few years before Imajica was published?
But those characters exist primarily to assist the protagonists, so I don’t know if they really count.) Speaking of the protagonists, Gentle (what a stupidass name i s2g) and Judith, the main POVs, were so fucking annoying—a self-absorbed wannabe Jesus and an insufferable beauty queen, neither with any other interesting qualities. Even when their flaws get them into shit, the narrative ultimately still elevates them as being somehow of a different caliber than everyone else, and everyone just accepts this. The big reveal that
Spoiler Gentle has an evil doppelgänger and Judith is a doppelgänger, and Gentle is also the son of a murderous misogynistic city-sized god because why not
failed to make these characters any more compelling. If anything, it made them even less compelling. We spend over 800 pages with these people and still fail to learn anything meaningful about them or see them do more than bumble, bluster, and fuck their way to their intended conclusions. The side characters, despite many of them being at least more interesting, suffer from a similar issue of feeling weirdly context-less, more like hodgepodge collections of traits and archetypes masquerading as developed characters. The world of Imajica is extremely populous, yet somehow still feels unrealized. On that note, it boggles my mind how Barker’s worldbuilding manages to be simultaneously prodigious and uninteresting. Like, for all the rich details and loads of place names and races and magical elements, it’s just … boring? Another reviewer said it best when they said that Barker’s worlds may have been fascinating to him, but he failed to make them fascinating for readers. There are supposed to be four dimensions aside from Earth and even having finished the book recently, I couldn’t tell you a single interesting thing about any of them, except maybe the most important city, which still felt extremely generic. The best settings feel like characters in their own right – China Miéville does this excellently – but Barker’s settings just felt overstuffed while lacking real personality and ambience. I adore second-world fantasy when it’s done well, but when it’s not, it feels uncomfortably like being forced to sit through an author’s random little bits of dreams, biases, and obsessions, cobbled together to create a sense of place.

And the potential for a thematic exploration of sexuality/sensuality, gender, and eroticism that drew me to the book in the first place? Disappointing. And, often, off-putting as hell. I’ll allow that the revelations the characters have about these concepts may have been groundbreaking when the book was written, but that feels like a poor excuse for the very conventional places the novel goes in regards to these topics. At best, we get some uncomfortable, abstracted, woo-woo sex scenes, the majority of them occurring between Jude and objectively awful men, and almost all of them including some non-consensual element. A big part of Jude’s character arc is supposed to be her owning her own sexuality, but as far as I could tell, that never actually happens. Judith almost never has a sexual interaction wherein she knows exactly who she’s fucking and why she’s fucking them. How the hell that counts as her owning her sexuality or developing agency is beyond me. Her moment of claiming herself as her own person only happens after she
Spoiler gives birth to a baby by a genocidal ex-dictator who tricked her into believing he was someone else, and then tried to kill her. But she’s a mother now, and this constitutes her brand-new identity, so it’s fine?
Give me a fucking break.

The other big exploration of these themes involves the third protagonist, if you can call them that: Pie’oh’pah (also a stupid fucking name), the dimension-hopping shape-shifting Black/Black-coded nonbinary protagonist I was most excited to read about. In fact, Pie’oh’pah is the main vessel, so to speak, through which Barker allows himself to wax poetic on these themes. But Pie was by far my biggest issue and biggest disappointment with this book.

First of all, and I cannot stress this enough, why the fuck did Barker choose to make Pie Black? There are so few other Black characters in the book and it's extremely jarring. Over the course of an 800-page novel, there are only six named that I can recall: Pie, three of Pie’s countryfolk, a homeless man, and a “Negress” (yeah. seriously. in 1991) goddess who is the epitome of a bitter angry black woman. So Pie being Black is an extra conspicuous choice, since they’re one of the main characters. I was reassured in the beginning of the novel when an explicitly anti-imperialist sentiment is expressed by the narrator, and an unsavory character is called out as a racist, but it just goes downhill from there as soon as Pie is introduced. For context, Pie’oh’pah is a “mystif,” a rare and coveted shape-shifting genderless/genderfluid being born into a race of people who once held a revered status in the Imajica before they were wiped out. It’s never clearly stated what a mystif’s original form is; the shape a mystif takes depends on the desires of those who behold them. Only Gentle and a few rare observers are able to see Pie in this original shape. At one point while they’re having sex (because of course Gentle gets to fuck the literal embodiment of a wish fulfillment character), Gentle sees Pie as himself, which was a laughable moment of narcissism played as some kind of romantic, otherworldly union. Not only does Pie’s very existence entail being literally shaped by the desires of other people, but it’s revealed through backstory that Pie was once a subservient “familiar” to Gentle, and of course is also in love with him, for no reason I could readily discern, except that everyone for some reason is fucking in love with Gentle even though he sucks. In this backstory, for reasons I don’t feel like summarizing, Gentle releases Pie from his service and flippantly tells them to go be a “whore or assassin, I don't care.” Even though this was supposed to be a throwaway line, Pie of course has no choice but to take Gentle’s words literally and actually spends centuries of a miserable existence as a whore and assassin on Earth. Because somehow even with worldbuilding this complex and original, we still get the Literal Genie trope (see TV Tropes), even though Pie is a) not a jinni, and b) not fucking stupid. The text doesn’t even necessarily imply that there is a magical reason why Pie must do exactly what Gentle says—the actual explanation we get is this: “Was it a slave’s duty to distinguish between a command made for the humor of it and one to be followed absolutely? No, it was a slave’s duty to obey, especially if the dictate came, as did this, from a beloved mouth.”

Bitch, what the fuck? I ask again: if the truth of Pie’s backstory is that they were essentially a willing slave to Gentle all along, why the fuck are they Black? Why is the only significant Black character in this book a literal slave? Are you out of your fucking mind, sir?

This was the second point where I nearly DNF’d the book, the first point being
Spoilerthe graphic murder of a child
which occurs about halfway through. The only reason I kept reading, on both occasions, was to see if Barker would somehow remedy or do justice to either of those characters. Re: the first situation, the ending implies that
Spoiler the murdered child is reborn
which didn’t actually make it better, of course. But Pie never gets the moment of discovering their own identity or agency the way Judith does. They are Gentle’s creature to the very end. It’s hard for me to read the character choices Barker makes for Pie as anything but racist and fetishizing. Pie being agender/genderfluid/nonbinary is not subversive. Nothing interesting about the spectrum and experience of gender and sexuality is revealed through their character or their experiences. Not only is the fetishizing of Pie as a mystif treated as perfectly normal by all the characters, but Pie themself passively accepts this as their role. I kept reading in the hopes that Pie would go apeshit and free themself from this endless cycle of being used and objectified, since Gentle and Judith get their liberatory character arcs, but no. Pie begins and ends the story as nothing more than a Magical Negro, whose Blackness is only relevant insofar as it further Others and exotifies them and renders them subaltern in the perceptions of the other characters. What an absolute fucking disappointment.

There is a lesson to be learned here, I guess. While I was reading Imajica I was reminded of Dhalgren by Samuel Delany and 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. All three of these authors are critically acclaimed or have cult followings. Two of them are queer, and all three include at least one problematic or upsetting depiction of queerness in their books. All three of these books are self-indulgently long, genre-busting, and pseudo-intellectual, with hazy incoherent plots, ~philosophical~ themes, and pretentious, insufferable male protagonists nursing their little sexual perversions, around whom the plot and supporting characters inexplicably revolve—despite the fact that these men are, even by their own admissions, absolute fucking losers whose relationships with the women and youths in their lives almost invariably come to bad ends.

So clearly I just need to avoid this kind of book from now on, because it’s always been a fucking nightmare.