• Razor Dancing •
By John Clute
Into the night. Jonathan Carroll has now published the first three novels of a projected five-volume sequence, which he has not yet named, but which does have a common concern. All three could be said to be, at heart, novels of negotiation. But negotiating can only succeed if all parties involved are willing to sully themselves with the taste of surrender, and it may be for that reason that some unease has been expressed - I think without much perception - about the moral fabric of the sequence so far, which could well be called, for my money, The Debts Quintet. Or The Intolerable Cost of Skating. Or Razor Dancing. Or Tales of the Vienna Woods.
Bones of the Moon (Century, S9.95, 1987) and Sleeping in Flame (Century/ Legend, $10.95, 1988) share some characters, an intensity of focus on small family groups, references to Vienna (where Carroll has lived for years), a sense of the extremes of bargaining necessary to allay the rage of the worldbeast beneath the surface, and a sangfroid about the shivering razor-edge of the fantastic, along which the protagonists of both novels dance, in and out of the light; but both novels can be read separately, with little loss. About A Child Across the Sky (Century/ Legend, $11.95, 1989) one cannot be so certain. A reckoning seems embedded in this novel of all the costs incurred by the winners of the previous books, winners being at least initially defined as those who have remained alive; and the disruptive darkness of its closing pages rends the frame of a larger world than that contained in the single volume. A Child Across the Sky does not so much end as pause at a syllable of dread. Soon we may learn how much it costs to make a world (soon we may know the cost of art). But the sentence is suspended. We await the tally.
Each volume so far (like Carroll's first two novels, The Land of Laughs (1980) and Voice of our Shadow (1983), which have other features in common with the current sequence) is told (or confessed) in the first person. In her bargaining with life, Cullen James, who narrates Bones of the Moon, seems to have created an island of stability for herself on the slippery meniscus of the world, beneath which the judges wait with their knives, ready to punish a wrong turning, a clumsiness with the skates. Quite properly in early adulthood, she has aborted the child of a bad pairing, and now she and her husband enjoy a loving though inturned life together, first in Europe, then in New York. It is after she becomes pregnant again that her dreams of the magic land of Rondua begin; in these dreams, under an increasing pressure of time (the four provinces of Rondua are called Strokes, as though space were time), she finds she must accompany the son whom she had aborted on a trek to save the integrity of the oneiric kingdom under the skin, which contains the whole meaning of her life in code.
Meanwhile, across the razor's edge into this world, she makes friends with Eliot Kilbertus, who is gay but loves her, and Weber Gregston, a famous film director who is heterosexual, and whose love is harder to deal with. She gives birth to a daughter. Affairs in Rondua near the crisis point, and begin to fashion the external world of New York; Weber begins to dream of Rondua as well. Meanwhile Alvin Williams, the mentally ill youth downstairs who had earlier axed his family to death, has entered into correspondence with Cullen from the state institution; but Cullen terminates the healing relationship when one of his letters distresses her. There will be a comeuppance. Alvin (it turns out) is in fact the dread Jack Chili, evil ruler of Rondua, against whom her unborn son must stake his life. But the contest, which involves the surreal Bones of the Moon, leaks suddenly through the permeable membrane of the world, and Cullen's own daughter is suddenly threatened by Jack Chili, or Alvin, who has escaped from the Home. But in the violence which ends the book, only Eliot Kilbertus dies. Like figurines in a glass paperweight which snows, Cullen and her family continue to grace the curved surface of the world. Bones of the Moon does not address this matter: but surely there is a reckoning due?
In Sleeping in Flame the Jack Chili figure is a midget or small man falsely named Rumpelstiltskin who forces his son - named Walker Easterling in this incarnation, which he narrates - through life after life, vainly attempting to make his child give him breath. Walker lives in Vienna. Like Cullen, who writes down her dreams of Rondua and eventually publishes them as a book called Bones of the Moon, Walker is an artist, a maker, an enforcer. He successfully protects his wife and unborn child from the exigencies of the world, the razor-edges of dread meaning which take on "fantastic" shapes in daylight. Here too friends die around the sacred (perhaps not very wisely, among the various names he takes, Walker's father calls himself on occasion Balthazar, Melchior, and Kaspar) family. Has Walker paid? Has he earned the death of his friends? Is art - he is a screenwriter - enough?
It is Weber Gregston who narrates A Child Across the Sky. His best friend Philip Strayhorn, a movie director who has plagiarized Weber's own brilliant work, kills himself. Cullen James and her husband Danny, also friends of the dead man, give Weber some video cassettes from Strayhorn, who speaks from them to Weber, telling him to keep watching. The cassettes contain a terrible magic: a video tape of the death of Weber's mother vears before, in a plane crash. Weber travels to California, where he decides to finish Strayhorn's last picture, one of a sequence of horror films of decreasing value. Weber's narrative soon develops a suffocating, sulphurous congestedness, as though he were himself losing the capacity to skate the meniscus - to tell the tale or film of his life in a fashion coherent enough to warrant living. It is a message Carroll has promulgated in every book he has so far written: that the good life is a work of art. That art is beyond good and evil. But in A Child Across the Sky he goes further.
The good life (he seems finally to be saying, at this greatest depth and lodepoint of the quintet, which may be the strongest and most punishing morality yet published in the shape of genre fantasy) means nothing, unless it is earned. But it cannot (he seems to conclude) be earned. Human beings cannot earn themselves. Certainly not through the coercions of art. Certainly not by creating miniature worlds for shining selfs, fortresses for the elect bargain hunters who have friends to trade. But learning this cannot save Weber, because he is, after all, a maker. He uses his life, and the lives of others. He makes Strayhorn's film, Midnight Kills, into a work of art. Does love extinguish evil, or feed it? The angel applauds. Weber lives, Cullen lives, Walker lives. Life is precious. In the next volume will the shaman-obsessed architect Harry Radcliffe, or some other character, tell us how he's earned the good things, the live friends, the silver skates? From Jonathan Carroll in his prime, I long to find out.