Review: Weaveworld

Weaveworld by Clive Barker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Though it took me a few chapters to buy in, this book kept getting better and better. Each act is more exciting than the last.

Weaveworld is ambitious. Clive Barker is not only creating a fantasy world but then crashing it into modern day England and seeing what happens. I remember my favourite parts of Harry Potter being when magic ran amok in our non-magical world. I found that same pleasure in Stephen King's Dark Tower books, and again in this book.

But even more than Stephen King, this magic can be vicious, nasty, hateful. Barker seems to delight in the revolting, not stopping his imagination from going to it's darkest corners. Some of his monsters are putrid - you can almost smell their reek. At other times it veers towards twee, with magic people serenading one another and dancing and picking fruit in a paradise fairy land. Both of these fit the story though, and of course it's inevitable the two collide.

The cast is large (all the men have names like Gideon, Jericho, Hobart, Shadwell - clearly nobody with magic powers has an ordinary name like Wayne) and while I couldn't always keep everybody straight, some of these characters are vivid. The story floats along like a dream, always on the edge of turning nightmarish. Many scenes are still vivid in my memory, and some of these characters will stay with me for a good while, I expect.

It's long, and while in retrospect I can fit the events into three main acts, the story winds through a lot of places. It could have run as a serial - the story is split into three Books containing 13 Parts and innumerable chapters. It's a journey, but each part serves its purpose, and it already feels as though it's been edited down from something much larger and longer. Clive Barker may have his own Silmarillion up his sleeve somewhere.

Terrific book. I hope there's a movie because I want to relive this story again. I hope there's not a movie because there's no way it could top the thrill of the writing. (I just saw there's a graphic novel. That just might work!)

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