Babylon

Introduction by
KJ.
Bishop

PS Publishing
2006

Babylon

Copyright © 2006 by Richard Calder

Introduction
Copyright © 2006 by K.J. Bishop

Cover

The Course of Empire: Destruction, 1836 (oil on canvas) by Cole, Thomas (1801-48)

© New-York Historical Society, New York, USA

Published in March 2006 by PS Publishing Ltd. by arrangement with the author. All rights reserved by the author.

First Edition

ISBN

Deluxe slipcased hardcover 1-904619-58-4 Trade hardcover 1-904619-57-6

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

Design and layout by Alligator Tree Graphics

PS Publishing Ltd

Grosvenor House 1 New Road Hornsea, HU18 IPG ENGLAND

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[email protected]
Internet:
http://www.pspublishing.co.uk

I met Richard Calder under the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus. I had suggested the statue for our rendezvous partly because it was a London landmark I knew that I as a visitor could find without difficulty, but mostly because if Calder has a patron deity it is surely Eros (with Thanatos riding shotgun).

Having seen a grainy snapshot of Calder on the internet, I recognised the benignly handsome man in the tweed jacket. Some writers look as if they might actually hail from their own fictional worlds; Calder is perhaps more like William Burroughs in his ‘banker’s drag’: someone who knows how strange, and how riddled with fictions, normality is.

In person, Calder is charming, dauntingly well-read, a world traveller, fiendishly intelligent, and informed on a staggering variety of subjects; he is also deeply decent. By that, I mean that he’s one of those mentally industrious people who, when most of us are content to receive at least a few conventional opinions and call them our own, question absolutely everything and go looking, through the midden of fictions we live in, for truth. That day, we went to West End pubs where I soaked up, along with gin and tonics, the bordello-like ambience produced by dark red embossed wallpapers, chandeliers and Victorian etched mirrors; then onto the tube and across to the East End, where he showed me around streets that still retain a Dickensian quality, satisfying my desire for the
romance of the abject after the morning spent enjoying the romance of luxury. This was how I found myself thinking; in Calder s company one starts to become as self-reflective as a character in one of his novels, and as aware of the projections which one’s own imagination throws on the world.

Calder is a creator of beautiful, lavish, surfaces, in imagery and in language. He works with the allied, often playful aesthetics of excess—the rococo, cyberpunk, fin-de-siecle decadence, the postmodern, dark eroticism, pulp sci-fi, Victoriana, and the idea of the exotic. But rather than try to make us believe in his fabulous creations, he deliberately underlines the artificiality of the worlds in which his romantic heroes and heroines—flawed, Byronic/ bionic males and their wanton, fairylike, fille-fatale muses— perform their passionate cabarets. The result is less a collapse of the fantasy, I find, than of the reality I think I am living in. If
that
world is bogus and camp, what about
this
one?

Since his first book,
Dead Girls,
in which the unwitting desires of men interfered with the quantum machinery inside deluxe automata—‘living dolls’ that looked like beautiful women—and created a plague that turned human girls into dolls, Calder has explored the theme of how imagination acts in the world. It doesn’t, of course, require quantum machinery for thoughts to affect reality: it only takes words, actions, a sticky web of social pressures, for we as individuals or groups to start imagining ourselves as others would have us be. Calder is an explorer, particularly, of the deep down desires, the sex and death drives, which in society at large are acknowledged cursorily, if at all, for their roles in public life—in politics, in religion, in war. When some- aspect of the human psyche shames or frightens or confuses us so much that we don’t want to look at it, it of course becomes dangerous, because we can’t see what it’s doing. It is this world of the libido, and the dark libido where sex and death go hand in hand, into which Calder often gives his characters particular insight. More aware of their own fantasies than most real people are, if we look to where their torches point we may see some hitherto unsuspected regions of ourselves usefully illumined.

In Calder’s novels up until
The Twist
(1999) there was a central romantic couple in which the male had the narrator’s role. In a
way
he was one character incarnated many times, a man whose
heart
was really the heart of a Peter Pan in a modernised Never-
Never
Land, playing such roles as cyborg avenger, stouthearted undead warrior, alien executioner—and, always, lover. His relationship with his Wendy—his beloved and muse
—
is best summed
up
by Raul Riviera, the hero of
Impakto
(2001): ‘When I was a
boy,
you see, girls seemed so unattainable, that they might have been almost from another planet. And the more beautiful they
were,
the more alien they seemed.’ To project alienness on another
is, however
conducive to baroque scenarios for the fantasising mind to play with, not the way to lasting love. Calder certainly recognises this. It is typically through magical acts of re-imagination—of the world, and, crucially, of himself—rather than the action-man violence of the stereotypes he resembles, that the hero achieves his victories and achieves a true union, a sacred marriage, with the female. There the story has to end—until, as must happen with artists and muses if creation is to occur, the two separate so that another universe can be born and the Lover search for the Beloved again.

In
The Twist,
we saw a change in the pattern. The romantic couple were still present, but viewed from outside by a third person, a young girl who wanted to become like the glamorous, inhuman woman in the pair. Calder proved uncannily adept at portraying the mind of a girl, and proves so again in
Babylon
, with its complex young female narrator Madeleine Fell, bluestocking schoolgirl in an alternative Victorian London. Through Madeleine, he addresses a problem which is generally consigned to the too-hard basket, namely the problem of girlhood: a girl will become a woman, and as such her place in the patriarchal world will be, to a great extent, a place prepared for her by a male
imagination. What selfhood and what world would she create, if she could? Does she, in fact, have an imagination of her own, or do her thoughts always, in the end, belong to men? Who is
her
muse, and is the paradigm of Lover and Beloved altered at all? I found myself asking these questions as I read
Babylon.

Babylon
is a dark book. In its chief villain—who embodies two
famous villains from real history—readers already familiar with
Calder s work might see a malign incarnation of the boy-man
hero, with his fantasies of violent action, when he leaves the pages
of a comic book and steps into the real world, with his perception
of the female as alien turned from a loving fascination to a hating
one. He is a study in both the power and the failure of imagination.

I will leave you to discover the love story in
Babylon,
and content myself with saying that it is beautiful, valuably unusual and touchingly real. I, for one, am hoping for a sequel.

K J. Bishop

Revelation 18:6 Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double

unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled

fill to her double.

Revelation 18:7 How much she hath glorified herself, and lived

deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her

heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.

Revelation 18:8 Therefore shall her plagues come in one day,

 death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire:

for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.

Revelation 18:9 And the kings of the earth, who have committed

fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and

lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning,

Revelation 18:10 Standing afar off for the fear of her torment,

saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in

one hour is thy judgment come.

—The REVELATION of St. John the Divine, The King James Version

I still don’t really know what made me do it. Whatever people say, I’ve never wanted to die. The pink mist is terrible. And so are the memories, however tinged with wonder and love. But that day I simply had to raise my hand. Die
?
No. I wanted to live.

All that follows is an attempt to understand just how much ...