by Theodore Peterson
“Burn this book.” So begins Mister B. Gone, the latest novel from Clive Barker. We find ourselves being addressed by a narrator, who takes a couple of pages to introduce himself as the demon Jakabok Botch. He urges us to stop reading and, what’s more, to destroy the book. We are thus presented with the central conceit of the novel: it addresses itself directly to the reader, and displays an acute self-consciousness regarding its status as text. This sort of post-modern playfulness is nothing new: Calvino did the same thing in ’79. But If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller didn’t have a demonic Archbishop or baths filled with the blood of dead babies, whereas Mister B. Gone has both of these things and more. It seems legitimate to wonder, then, why Mr Barker, whom the dust jacket informs us is “the great master of the macabre”, has decided to spice up his latest gory offering with a meta-textual meditation on the nature of reading.
For Mister B. Gone is really two books. The first of these is a relatively straightforward Bildungsroman concerning the adventures of the eponymous Mr. Botch, and the second is a rather high-minded exploration of the power of words. Grotesque demons and reader-response theory may seem like somewhat uneasy bed-fellows, and there are times in the early sections when Barker struggles to unite his themes in any meaningful way. But the book is given a degree of unity by the figure of Jakabok, at once narrator and actor. The work is cast as his own personal recollections. He himself presents it as such: “This is my memoir, you see. Or if you will, my confessional. A portrait of Jakabok Botch.” We might think we know what to expect: part Tristram Shandy, part Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. But the usual conventions of confessional literature are given a twist by the fact that Jakabok claims to be alive within the book. We are not simply reading his memoirs. He is actively relating them to us, and makes frequent reference to the fact that he is doing so. The book therefore shifts between a narrative of events, and direct addresses from Jakabok, making plenty of remarks about us, the reader.
The story itself is only moderately diverting. We hear how Jakabok was captured from the Ninth Circle of Hell by humans, managed to escape, and set out on a journey through the Upper World. The narrative is undoubtedly lively, filled with murder and intrigue. But it is marked by a certain incoherence. We are given all sorts of grotesque details about the ‘Demonation’ and its diabolical inhabitants, but the world with which we are presented remains somehow fragmentary and difficult to grasp. The novel reaches its climax in Mainz, on the occasion of the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1438. This is presented as an almost apocalyptic event, which prompts vicious fighting between the forces of Heaven and Hell as to who will control this device that is destined to change the world. The end of the book therefore brings together its two themes, the power of demons and the power of words, but it is all almost too bizarre to be convincing.
Ultimately, this is an intriguing book that threatens to collapse under the weight of its ambitions. Its vivid and gory narrative would almost appeal to children rather than adults, if it weren’t so explicit. The most interesting things about the book turn out to be the ideas it raises regarding the process of reading, and the dynamic between author and reader. Jakabok’s existence within the book literalises the concept that a novel is only really realised in the act of reading. His compulsion to reveal is paralleled by the reader’s compulsion to take in these revelations, and the failure of Jakabok’s paradoxical entreaties to us to burn the book, though at times they become wearisome, demonstrate that the only real way to stop someone reading is to stop writing.
