A Child Across the Sky

A Child Across the Sky
Part of the same fictional universe within which his "Bones of the Moon" and "Sleeping in Flames" occur, Jonathan Carroll's "A Child Across the Sky" is a strange meditation on evil, art and cinema. After director Weber Gregston's best friend commits suicide, he is supernaturally summoned by his friend (via videotape) to complete his friend's slasher movie. Among those aiding him in his task is a little girl who may or may not be an angel.
The more I read of Carroll the more I am torn in two, but in this novel that is not only right, but almost the point of the story. The complexity of life, both physically and morally, is a prime concern for Carroll. He wants a black and white order, and sometimes succumbs to its allure (witness the climax of 'Bones of the Moon'), but he is fully conscious of the falsity of such a perspective. I still feel he is a romantic who ultimately underwrites all his work with this binary division, but he's no fool and his explorations of the theme make for some fascinating writing. Good may be real, and Evil too, but they play a very bewildering game of chess. Everything is compounded of this confusion. The richness he almost fanatically brings to his characters is proof of this.
In creating a rich, fictional world (one with recurring characters and its own consistent history, eg. the great Californian Earthquake), yet one that shares some characteristics of our own world (eg. an airport terrorist attack from the Eighties) he inevitably generates a certain alienation in the reader. The constant references to films never seen (because they were never made) is annoying, for instance. It seems to highlight Carroll's hunger to be on celluloid (according to IMDB he's only participated in the production of one, 'B', movie).
His very real influence on Hollywood is all over this tale. From 'Drop-Dead Fred' to 'In the Mouth of Madness', the seeds of much of common cinema culture is contained (and originates) here. People have been 'borrowing' from his work for ages. (Ironically part of this story is concerned with just that kind of theft.) He does this kind of dark fantasy better than any of them (yes, including you, Mr Carpenter!). But, and this is probably part of the reason for his failure to be realised on screen, his bizarre events often serve as springboards to pungent philosophizing. The rationale for their happening (eg. a bird tattoo coming to life) loses much of its persuasive power (when indeed it is persuasive) once divorced from these ramblings.
Of course, he borrows too and much of this book is plainly inspired by the Freddy, Jason, Candyman and Pinhead movies that haunt the contemporary horror genre. 'Candyman', for instance has a score by that pop minimalist, Philip Glass. Carroll has rival minimalist Steve Reich as the composer for the films of his fictitious monster, Bloodstone. Of course what isn't acknowledged is that Steve Reich just happens to be Carroll's half-brother. Jokes within self-referential jokes is the Carroll way. If there is one common thread in his work though, it is the eruption of the fantastical into the real world and vice versa.
The ending to 'A Child Across the Sky' left me angry. Rightly. Tied up quickly, though ambiguously, it was a typical Carroll ending, but all the more memorable for that. I hated it. I loved it. Damn it, he's good.

Coincidence No. 23

Today after reading a particularly nasty story by Clark Ashton Smith called 'The Seed of the Sepulchre', it struck me that this type of horror is akin to a car crash; we know it's all going to end badly, but we can't look away. Indeed the 'enjoyment' is that almost 'pornographic' voyeurism 'enjoyed' by accident witnesses. Tired of this 'torture porn', but happy at my encapsulation of this subgenre with the term, 'car crash' horror, I picked up Jonathan Carroll's 'Child Across the Sky' and started to read it. To divert myself from Smith. A fifth of the way into the book (five minutes ago), I was reading a fictitious film maker's account of reading a friend's script, a screenplay for a horror film: "I called it car-crash art -- you don't want to look, but you have to...." Okay, my original idea wasn't so original (and neither was Carroll's), but really....

Books and Brain-busting

I've read a few books in the last few weeks: Philip K. Dick's 'Galactic Pot Healer'; Philip Jose Farmers' 'A Feast Unknown'; Jonathan Carroll's 'Bones of the Moon' and tonight 'Sleeping in Flame'; as well as an assortment of short stories and philosophy. I hope to write about each in time, but 'Sleeping in Flame' has left me just a little annoyed(?). It has the feel of something developed as it is written, with all the unpredictability and fun that that implies, but also a lack of discipline and superficiality. There's a great mind at work, but doing what exactly? It's like having Faulkner write a script for 'American Pie'. The ending, the very ending, is so typically Carroll, and is appropriate on one level, but it's one that serves to trivialize everything that has gone before. Although the Magic Realists have been mixing fantasy and reality for ages, Carroll does it in such a 'full on', indiscriminate way, that the very nature of his fiction becomes the subject of his fiction. It's post-modernism on acid. And I've kind of come down rather abruptly. I'll write about it all again when I've gotten my mind back.

Jonathan Carroll and 'Voice of Our Shadow'

A long time ago I had the good fortune to read Jonathan Carroll's 'The Land of Laughs'. A first person narrative told in a deceptively simple style, I found it touching, funny and deeply unnerving. Later I picked up his last novel, 'The Wooden Sea', and though it was again funny, humane and enjoyable, it was also shallow, crowded and ultimately silly. So I wasn't sure what to expect when I picked up his 'Voice of Our Shadow', his second book. I had heard it was frightening and certainly I have seen it referred to as horror as opposed to fantasy, but what constitued horror for Carroll? Certainly after 'The Land of Laughs' I knew it was a far more skewed, unsettling horror than Stephen King, somewhere between Groucho Marx and Shirley Jackson.
Prior to my starting the book I also read a piece by the writer Michael MacDowell on Melville's 'The Confidence Man', a book I can appreciate without in any way liking. He wrote about how Melville's work alerted him to the treacheries of the narrator, even in a third person narrative. This piece was timely as it has often been hinted that Carroll's first book, ostensibly a fantasy, may instead be the ravings of a mad narrator. Whatever view one takes on this, 'Voice of Our Shadow' showed me that sometimes this doesn't really matter. Afterall ravings of a madman or document of a sane person in insane circumstances, it is all just fiction, and, given that we are dealing with the 'subjective' experiences of our first person narrator, one must question the nature of any fiction's 'reality'. What the work of fiction in this case constitutes is an encounter with solipsism and the madman/fantasy dilemma only has value inasmuch as it adds to our enjoyment of the work.
So after all that preamble let me say I enjoyed Carroll's second book. However, though it is a relatively short book, it still took me a week to read because above all it is an uncomfortable read. It almost seems like a sequel to the first novel, though there are none of the same characters nor a continuation of that initial book's storyline. What is similar is the centrality of a young writer with a love/fear relationship with a member of his family, in this case his brother (in the last his father). And it is never just one family that features. In 'Land of Laughs', the daughter of the children's writer being researched, Anna, looms large as does her mostly dead father, Marshall France. In 'Voice of Our Shadow' there is another surrogate family, the Tates, with an alluring female character, and, a threatening, though charismatic, oh, and dead father figure. If ever there was a writer preoccupied with the uncanny aspects of Freud's model of the family, Carroll is that writer. These families give the narrator the opportunity to work out in a very real way the Freudian tensions of his own childhood and Carroll repeatedly implies that Joe is not fully grown. In some ways the whole novel reads like some perverted rites of passage piece. This makes the ending of both books all the more chilling.
I think it's worth noting that his father was a writer too, helping to adapt Walter Tevis's 'The Hustler' for the big screen. His mother too apparently was a Broadway actress, so though there is hardly a direct autobiographical element in these books, I think it's easy to see where some of his fictional family dynamics arise from.
Quite apart from his subject matter, Carroll's easy narration belies a strong style, all the stronger for being almost invisible. Joyce's image (borrowed from Liebnitz) of the watchmaker standing outside his work paring his nails while it ticks on independently is particularly apt here. Unlike Fowles' erudite style which sings out for recognition (and whose 'The Magus' is not dissimlar in some ways to 'Voice of Our Shadow'), Carroll is content to let his narrators do their talking without any apparent prompting from him.
Eh, anyway I like his work. And apparently Jonathan Carroll has a blog.