• Fractured Fairy Tales •
By Howard Hampton
The novels of Jonathan Carroll are the damndest things: as anti-modernist as they are anti-realist, they fuse mysticism with the quotidian, high, moral purpose with pop-flavored cuteness. Carroll wants to make literature that affects you the way the fables you read as a child did - that draw you into a universe of magic and wonder, that make good and evil genuine choices rather than themes. "With sources ranging from C.S. Lewis to E. T., Carroll's tales attempt to provide a sense that below the disposable surface of contemporary life, there waits an eternal world of angels and demons, dream kingdoms, flying shamans and Rumpelstiltskins.
His novels, in other words, are invitations to preciousness. That's a quality he resists better than (given his subjects) you might expect, but not so well (given the level of his imagination and his literary ambitions) as you would hope. His fifth and most recent book, A Child Across the Sky is immensely enjoyable and just about as exasperating. Carroll wants to be a great storyteller, but he's too busy staring into the mysterious distance; riveting one minute and slapdash the next, he's always ready to go off on a spiritual tangent. He tends to invoke the supernatural didactically - his writing goes wooden and wobbly when he starts evangelizing for things that go bump in the night (or in one's head).
Along with A Child Across the Sky the preceding novels, Bones of the Moon (1987) and Sleeping in Flame (1988), have just come out in paperback. Together they make up a loose triptych of shared characters and concerns, taking the shape of a bed of metaphysical coals Carroll single-mindedly strides across. Writing as firewalking is an honorable tradition but not when the author gets lost in how noble and uplifting the feat is. The allegorical overtones grow stifling when Carroll uses the uncanny passively, as special effects; there are times he writes as though just introducing a miracle - visitations from an angel, a sea serpent's appearance in the midst of a movie shoot - is enough to induce grateful awe. There's more than a little Steven Spielberg in
Carroll: he idealizes emotions raptly. Even when his characters are wracked with ambivalence, at the mercy of forces they can't comprehend, they're meant to be winning and down-to-earth. For him, human mystery is an extension of emotionalism - the religion of the heart-tug.
But Carroll has the saving grace of a powerful narrative sense. It carries the reader over the stickyspots and digressions, past scenes simultaneously underwritten and overwrought, holding out a promise of revelation writ in blood and amazement. Which somehow, by the conclusion of each of these novels, Carroll in part makes good on.
The helpless split in Carroll's work is felt most acutely in Sleeping in Flame. It's the story of Walker Easterling (Carroll has a fondness for awful names), an actor who discovers he has the face and soul of a dead man. It also proves to be the soul of the stolen child in the Rumpelstiltskin tale, which has migrated down through the ages along with the vengeful, protective R. himself. As a mordant restaging of the fable, with all the creepy details the Brothers Grimm glossed over, restored and brought to bear on a present that doesn't know what to make of them, Sleeping in Flame is a sly edgy trek. But as Easterling's life is blown apart by an unimaginable past, he and the reader get a tour guide: Max Venasque, all-wise, irascible, a holy man of great powers, addicted to junk food and Miami Vice, with a pet pig in tow - what could be more adorable? Venasque goes from being a creaky conceit to being an abominable one, when in a flashback, Carroll tries to introduce the Holocaust into his fractured fairy-tale universe: in one stupefying moment, he has Venasque levitate some Jewish children to safety from Nazi soldiers.
Later, Sleeping in Flame moves on to more workable marvels, when its irresistible story of modern man versus ancient gnome takes hold. Carroll generates suspense as well as wonder, finally bringing the tale to a lovely, poetically just ending -enclosing the destructive gnome once more in the story he sprang from, even as Carroll hints that once the old world of magic has been brought back to life, it isn't so easily put away. "I realized again," Walker Easterling reflects, "nothing is done without regret."
Bones of the Moon is less convoluted; it's erratic too, but in a more subdued way. A woman named Cullen James begins having dreams of a vast plain called Rondua, a wonderland populated by giant sentient animals, a secret self-contained mythology, and a devil named Jack Chili. As a Boschian bestiary, Bones of the Moon is highly engaging; as a novel. it's never convincing. Which may be just as well, for its subtext is that James takes her dream journeys to atone for aborting the son she meets in Rondua. By the time James' dream life and her Teal one converge, the atmosphere of surprise Carroll instills early on has given way to billowing smoke and cold sweat. Instead of displacement, he settles for melodrama, and Bones of the Moon loses its whispery, lunar sheen.
Filmmaker Weber Gregston briefly shares James' dreams in a subplot of Bones of the Moon, and Carroll places him at the center of A Child Across the Sky. I haven't mentioned one Carroll preoccupation- love. Almost as an aside in A Child Across the Sky, he touchingly recounts and illuminates - the unconsummated mated relationship of Gregston and James from the earlier book. It's like the intervening years have made Carroll realize things he originally missed about his characters.) He also does well by the romantic friendship between Gregston and Sascha, the wife of his best friend, Phil Strayhorn. (It is Strayhorn's suicide which precipitates events in A Child Across the Sky). Love shoulders a steep burden in Carroll's books, as a means for his characters to resist the upheavals they're thrown into, and as a secret agency of that chaos, always dragging people into each other's dissolution.
Carroll's characters keep turning up book after book, lugging the same stories and jokes. They are Carroll's idea of the kind of friends, mentors and lovers everyone would die for - an extended, mildly incestuous nuclear family. Weber Gregston can't just direct films; he has to make cinema that leaves everyone awestruck. It isn't enough for him to be a sensitive guy, he has to be Super-mensch.
It's a good thing A Child Across the Sky has the dead but still lively Phil Strayhorn to keep things moving ominously along. Strayhorn is trouble; while alive, he also made films - horror films. His Midnight series, featuring the suave figure of ultimate evil, Bloodstone (played by Strayhorn himself to suggest a Nietzschean Freddy Krueger), taps straight into all the massive sadism and death-hunger floating around in society. These movies are lightning rods for people's worst impulses, but they overload on them and start sending them back intensified into life - havoc waiting to find a shape. When Strayhorn kills himself before completing the final Midnight project, he sends from the afterlife to his old pal Greston instructions on finishing the picture, or else.
Carroll makes the Midnight pictures and their muse Bloodstone seem more present - more an uneasy fact of life - than the actual -Nightmare on Elm Street films they're patterned after. They have a stature in Carroll's evocative descriptions, and shine with danger. If Greston can't put into the last Midnight installment a missing scene that reverses what die films have set in motion, everyone around him will be consumed by the forces Strayhorn has inadvertently loosed on an eager world. This task proves less than black-and-white: it has a deceptive set of imperatives, chief of which is that of art itself, the impulse to make art is also one of destroying and supplanting the world. What artist could resist the chance to create a perfect moment at the expense of existence? So A Child Across the Sky ends with a short fable:
A scorpion and a turtle were best friends. One day the two of them came to the edge of a very wide and deep river they had to cross. The scorpion looked and shook his head. "I can't do that - it's too wide." The turtle smiled at his friend and said. "Don't worry, just ride on my back. I'll take us both across." So the scorpion got on the turtle's back, and in no time they were safely on the other side.
But once there, the scorpion immediately stung the turtle.
Horrified, the turtle looked at the other and asked with his last breatj "How could you do that to me? We were friends and I just saved your life!'
The scorpion nodded and said sadly, "You're right, but what can I do? I'm a scorpion!"
You could subtitle this novel 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Scorpion," and on those terms, it's quite good- Carroll is on to something: grave images have consequences, though not necessarily foreseeable ones, and both the sacred and profane are things one has to work through on one's own. Beneath that, Carroll harbors a less persuasive idea; it's that rationalism is the source of all evil, or, worse, of indifference to evil.
Yet if you look around, rationalism hardly seems to be carrying the day. There's Pat Robertson on TV asking you to send away for his new book that will explain what the coming of the liberal homesexual Antichrist will do to your property values. Time-Life Books has its Mysteries of the Unknown series. People search for evidence of Satanic child molester cults, subliminal messages on rock records, UFOs - reasons to believe. Some join Greenpeace; stoners wander the suburbs looking for household pets to sacrifice to their favorite Slayer album, gray-suited prognosticators invoke the "animal spirits" of the American economy.
The Enlightenment is a scarecrow that has already been torched. This explosion in magical thinking signals a common appetite, insatiable as it is multifold. It's a wish to be free of consciousness, to be regimented - and to structure the world accordingly - by another order of things. Next to these proliferating, customized visions of a new Middle Ages, Carroll's works seem quaint: the stuff of storybooks, not myth as the lived life of which he speaks so wistfully.