Imajica

Phantasmagorical, as a confused dream plays out; that's what this is. Barker's "Imajica" takes a meandering and recursive trip through linked realities similar to Zelazny's Amber-Chaos multiverse with all the opium-powered hallucinations of Coleridge's Xanadu, yet still manages to pull off a mature if self-indulgent morality play. The density of the imagery, the overly fraught relationships between main characters, and sometimes-heavy-handed intimacies slow the reading pace down; this book took a great deal longer for me to read than I'd anticipated.

Altogether pretty satisfying, at the end of the day, but by its very nature this is not likely to appeal equally to all readers.

Started this several times and just could not muster the strength to continue past the first 100 pages or so. The premise is intriguing, and the multi-world universe is compelling. But the characters are utterly uninteresting, unappealing, unsympathetic, empty, and two-dimensional. It's perplexing that the author gets so much right, and yet can't complete the vision. I am dumbfounded that this novel is as popular as it is.

“Her voice was raw with the dust, and bitter. He liked the sound of it. Women who had anger in them were always so much more interesting than their contented sisters.”

Three months. 824 pages. Incalculable beers. One wife. I wish I’d gotten my new pair of Red Wings before starting this book. I’ve been spending my reading sessions with them laced up over thick winter socks, pacing the kitchen amongst pan and cutlery clatter, over the whirring of the oven range fan, the howling liquefication from the food processer, and all the while the skin on my feet silently screaming under that unforgiving oxblood leather. These boots would’ve been broken in by now.

Do I regret the time spent on this tumescent fantasy/horror/erotic tale? Of show more course not. I got to read to the wife, and it offered moments of originality. But did it need to be so long? Well, maybe. Somehow, though, after all those pages, over five dominions and the In Ovo as glue between them, the world Barker created seems smaller than the sum of its parts. Sometimes more is less. Sometimes less is more. Sometimes more is just . . . more. I felt the terrain, the miles of the journey, the aching heel on my left foot as it desperately tried to heal itself between crushing sessions within the Spanish boot. I don’t feel the passage of time, however. No weathering, no wrinkles, no grand wisdom gained from all that trudging. Sometimes a long book is just a long book whether you feel it in the muscles or not.

The book was heavy, though. The hardback version, switching arms between pages, recto and verso, really tested my bicep and trapezius muscles. Oh, the concepts . . . I guess there was some depth, some interesting creatures, magic and whoop-dee-doo and nearly unpronounceable place names. Holy Hapexamendios! But what was it all about? All that flexion of muscle, both back and tongue, and barely enough food for the lobes of the cerebrum, desperately reaching across their own dominions to touch, ignite fire, burst imagination both vital and vibrant. Mass does not equal breadth.

Am I being reductive? You bet I am. It’s my specialty. The distillation of concepts into a weird, pithy, vibrating whole. You know, like those creepy gelatin molds from the Sixties. The more complicated the ideas, the more pages of notes, the greater the research will always serve as more vegetable matter to blend into a potable soup. Whirring. Liquefaction. Unrelenting shoe leather squeezing feet on their restless paces between opposite ends of the kitchen.

Whether more is more or more is less, I still enjoyed the read. The explicit sex told in exhaustive, laughable detail . . . the mountain of characters who largely will go unremembered, buried at the base of that mountain . . . the vistas on other worlds, in other dominions, feeling all too Earthlike, no more unfamiliar than the prairies of Nebraska, populated with beings stretched, ripped, and recombined from Dali’s canvases.

I don’t know, I don’t really want to talk about the details of the book. Anyone can go to Wikipedia for that. Or read the book itself. It’s worth it—just barely. I can’t help, though, feeling what Clive Barker must’ve felt when starting this project, entering the second dominion and taking all those pages to get there and realizing that there were hundreds more to go. Man, that would’ve been enough for me to hit the button to the Cuisinart then and there. Proof, for me, that grand ambition doesn’t always yield great art. I’m being hard, I know, but Jesus my feet hurt. And my brain doesn’t. After all those pneuma-blown pages, maybe that’s the point.

And I do truly, deeply, madly love reading to my wife. Three months of time well spent. Those beers were super tasty. And man, you should see my biceps right now.

“He had visited the studio on and off through his time with Vanessa—he’d even met Martine there on two occasions when her husband had canceled a Luxembourg trip and she’d been too heated to miss a liaison—but it was charmless and cheerless, and he’d returned happily to the house in Wimpole Mews. Now, however, he welcomed the studio’s austerity. He turned on the little electric fire, made himself a cup of fake coffee with fake milk, and, under its influence, thought about deception.” show less

Though the back blurb and intro give Judith a last name, I found it nowhere in the text while multiple names are bestowed on the male characters. For all the anti-toxic-male thread that develops in this work, the gaze is unrelentingly male. Most of the huge size is dribbled away in dialog between characters that only minimally interested me. There are wanderings, but of any wonders encountered, it is mostly the monsters that are reported, though I did like the watery Yzordderrex scenes. I found the blasphemies bland and the debaucheries commonplace and the whole work of more value as fertilizer for what other authors have grown from its substance than for itself.

It is rare for me that you find a book, especially one as epic as this , that you don't want to end. Every story needs a beginning a middle and an end after all and I personally think a good ending makes the book, but the magnificent journey Clive Barker takes you through just wasn't enough for me . Don't get me wrong the ending was everything I'd hoped for and more , but I just needed the story to go on , he had me hooked on the whole Imajica tale and I wasn't prepared to let go. The first time I read it I finished it in 3-4 days ,reading during breakfast , on the train to work , during breaks and lunch, on the way home , after dinner and before bed. From the first few chapters the book just grabs your attention and the characters are show more so well formed you get an instant connection that isn't lost throughout the book.

Having now read the book at least 7-8 times since the first it has never grown dull and couldn't be more highly recommended by me. The only downside to me is that I often muse I'd like to read some of his other recommended books , especially the highly thought of Weaveworld, but unfortunately when I have these thoughts I inevitably pick up my severely battered copy of this and allow myself to be once again drawn into the wonderful and seducing tale of the Imajica. show less

I'm not sure it is wise to start with this book if one is new to Clive Barker's work, but there certainly is something for everybody here. You get dark fantasy and plenty of wacky characters, plus some serious dimension-bending sequences. I found it slightly scattered in places, but the pace was generally appreciated by my riveted eyes. It reads pretty easily, if you don't get hand cramps.
It is truly impressive how disciplined a piece of writing this is. I think pieces of Weaveworld and Abarat might be slightly more mesmeric and parts of Great and Secret Show might be more engaging, but Imajica is a well-rounded book. It is thankfully less formulaic than it might have been, and Gentle is an interesting character to say the least, as is show more Jude and Pie' Oh' Pah. And if you don't like the name Pie' Oh' Pah, you better get used to it because it's going to come up a lot.
Barker writes some of the most adult fantasy out there. I place him a cut above Stephen King, not that there's anything wrong with liking King - I just feel that Barker lays on one extra layer of polish. In both I'd argue that you get inconsequential or atmosphere-building scenes, but Barker has his own brand of surreal absurdity. It is funny that he followed this novel up by Thief of Always, which was a one-sitting read, and not quite so adult. My guess is he exhausted himself after tying together all five-hundred plot threads in this sprawling work. show less

This was a buddy-read with Dustin.

Impressive in its scope and imagining, Clive Barker has created a marathon epic, with sprawling worlds, dozens of wonderfully strange and outlandish characters straight out of our nightmares, incredibly complex confrontations, deep philosophy, high adventure, and staggering tension, all thrown at the reader from the excellent beginning to the satisfying end.

This is not a light read by any means, but the prose is fully developed. There are many unusual words in his writing, yet the story flows perfectly. I listened to the entire book, over 37 hours, and found that losing concentration for just a few minutes caused me to lose the storyline; everything weaves together into a huge web of incredible show more proportions. The book has frequent plot twists and most of the characters are far from what they seem.

Oh, the characters! There are so many characters, on five separate worlds, with sub-plots intertwined between them all. At first, all this may seem intimidating, but Barker does a fantastic job of keeping the story moving forward. It must be noted that the reader MUST pay attention (reading or listening). Failing to do so means the story’s core will be lost.

There are things in this book that might make some readers uncomfortable; some of it is offensive and downright blasphemous. It is, after all, a book in which Barker creates a religion with a rich and full history, then ties that religion with the views and beliefs of “common men” of the Fifth Dominion (Earth) who have no idea that the Imajica even exists.

Ultimately, Barker has crafted a tale that takes the reader on a long, dark fantasy journey that trips the mind and is awesome in its scope. He gracefully paints this epic in all the graphic detail that’s come to be expected, and the reader is thrust from the mundane into an adventure of awful worlds, euphoric desire, horrendous gore, and heart-wrenching love. show less