Guille started reading The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2

Felix is on page 297 of 372 of The Master and Margarita

"There is an interesting story here, but I’m not sure it needed a book like this to tell it. If Kennedy were not the protagonist of this moderately interesting sequence of events, I doubt they would have written a book about it at all. I also can’t shake the feeling that this book is a propaganda piece. There isn’t the coherent characterisation of quality journalism. This is the story of a hero - Kennedy - and his subordinates, who mostly seem to just admire him. What were his weaknesses? What let him down? I don’t know. He is only strengths.

Kennedy encountered some really difficult conditions in the Second World War, but the South Pacific theatre was difficult in general. It was hot and humid, and logistics were not easy. This is a story from roughly the same time that saw Australian soldiers fighting along the Kokoda track, and the great air battles between the USA and Japan over Midway Atoll. There are many more stories, more exciting and more heroic than Kennedy’s. I guess those people didn’t go on to become presidents though, and I suppose if they did, they’d have more books written about them too."

"This is not a horror novel. This is Clive indulging his love of grand fantastic worlds. This is epic fantasy, of the most epic scale and scope. This is about crossing planes of existence, battles between gods and crafting new worlds.

One thing I like about Clive Barker is that the fantasy worlds he builds are very much his own. No-one does this style of fantasy. There’s no dwarves or elves. There’s certainly no goblins in caves. Sometimes Barker is criticised for putting a certain limitation on the scope of his fantasy. This criticism does have some credence. He definitely enjoys portraying ordinary life in his fantasy worlds in a way that can sometimes be jarring - as though the denizens of another realm are really so much like us that it’s uncanny.

Imajica does feature that phenomenon. But it’s more than counteracted by the originality of the driving concept. Barker is always innovating. He may like real life, but it’s urban fantasy he usually deals in (think Cabal, or even The Hellhound Heart), and with urban fantasy a dark mirror of ordinary life works well. In Imajica what we get is a dark mirror of the whole world. And it’s great!

One thing worth noting about this novel is that it is slow (and I mean, SLOW) to get going at the start. I nearly abandoned it before the twenty percent mark (which is over two hundred pages in), because I felt like I was reading a very different novel to the one I intended to read. It was mostly about romance, and set in New York and London, not Yzordderrex. But then suddenly, the novel I was reading entirely changed its nature. When they enter the titular Imajica, the novel really accelerates. It’s clear that Clive was having some serious fun building this dark world, and the passion really oozes out of the page.

The plot is like an onion. It unravels in layer after layer. I suppose in that sense, the novel changes its nature more than once. As the role of the central characters in the plot becomes clearer, the plot changes dramatically, and does so again at least once long before the end.

Needless to say, I would recommend this novel (if you have a ton of time on your hands to actually read the massive thing). It’s a great romp through a dark alternative world. Is it Clive’s greatest novel? Very possibly. But I haven’t read them all. I probably will do eventually, and then I might be able to get back to you on that question. Nevertheless, it’s really good."