​THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN 2020: THE MADONNA

In that, she amongst the earliest examples in his fiction of the ambiguous and distressing -but often hopeful, Utopian- strain of metaphysics that will come to define much of what he creates in the years following. 

The Books of Blood are a veritable treasure trove of non-standard monstrosity and ambiguous horrors. Most of the stories that comprise them involve entities and phenomena that are highly problematic to categorise, belonging to no particular tradition or subgenre familiar to its audience. Likewise, they tend to trespass on thematic territories that horror in the era in which they were published generally did not; transcending mere conditions of dread or shock or grotesquery for flights of transformative or bleakly transcendental metaphysics. 

And nowhere is that more apparent than in the eponymous Madonna. One of the many stories in The Books of Blood that serves as a sincere outlier, punching through any genre-proscribed boundaries of horror, fantasy, science fiction and numerous others to become a thing all of its own. Is it disturbing? Oh yes, despite the fact that there's very little overtly horrific in any part of it. Is it also strangely inspiring, almost Utopian in its implications? Oh, very much so!

This is one of those rare and strange stories in which Barker explores an aspect of his own politics, in this instance, that relating to gender, patriarchy and much more besides. 

As is Barker's wont, far from engaging in such matters with reference to proscribed dynamics or assumptions (which, by the by, the man himself acknowledges always favour the existing status quo, no matter how horrific that might be), he elevates the conversation into realms most readers could not have anticipated: 

Here, we have tacit commentaries on Thatcherite self-interest and acquisitiveness at any cost, the manner in which the most corrupt and brutal of men (in particular) rise within that status to positions of authority and influence, whilst those ground into the dirt by want and poverty are forced to scrabble about, seeking discarded scraps from their overloaded tables. 

More than that, Barker comments upon the state of gender politics in the late 1980s UK, in which women are almost absent from political discourses barring one notable exception (that, ironically, served to reinforce and cement traditional notions of patriarchy for decades later), in which women are generally disregarded as commodities and men are enjoined to identify with their proscribed “maleness” and “masculinity” in a matter that is wholly damaging. 

The eponymous entity is an other-worldly (and yet entirely congruous) element within this state of crumbling, poverty-riddled cities, a cultural wasteland in which all is concrete, plastic and material ownerhsip. The creature's condition is never explicitly explained, neither in terms of anatomy or nature. All we as the reader know is that she is not merely “female,” but the epitome of that concept: a fluid, labial, fecund thing that endlessly births strange and alien children and has no need for any “Father” to conceive them (she is described as being capable of “. . .making children from rain,” if she needs to). In that, she is simultaneously a reference to archetypes of “Mother Goddesses” that appear in numerous traditional mythologies and yet entirely her own creature, an example of Barker subtly lampooning an archetype that exists in male-proscribed and patriarchal tradition but inverting its implications (something we will see repeated again and agan throughout his career). 

This gelatinous, metamorphic entity is tended to by what appears to be a cult of women who seemingly manifest reflections or projections of male desire, but not in the ways that those they snare expect: 

Despite the overt sexuality of these attendants, those who sleep with them experience transcendental visions, in which they are catapulted from the confines of their own skulls and set to explore their anatomies as though they are landscapes in and of themselves; every pore a chasm, every curve a hillock, the visions serving as signals of a state of metamorphosis that will utterly undo everything they have ever known:  

The men who sleep with these women become more of their number, waking to a condition they might have never even dreamed before or been conditioned to actively despise as lesser, as “weak.” This is certainly true of the story's antagonist; a notably small-minded, thuggish Thatcherite who ends up killing himself after being so disgusted by his rebellious anatomy that he takes a knife to it, attempting to sculpt himself back towards some condition of manhood. 

As for the protagonist of the story, she finds herself not appalled or disgusted by the condition, but awakened by it, as though it was always hers, as though she was never comfortable or correct in the anatomy that accidents of biology imposed on her. 

In that, she becomes one of Barker's many, many protagonists that are not merely murdered or driven mad by what they encounter, but come to occupy entirely other conditions of mind, of self, of existence. There is a horror to that, to be certain; a Lovecraftian dread or fear of the unknown, but, whereas Lovecraft leant into the all-too-human horror of his own metaphysics, Barker does not, instead emphasising the hopefulness and potential of such transformations, providing a commentary on the concept of sex, gender and one's identification with such matters that would be ascended and revolutionary now in 2020, let alone in the 1980s. 

This latter may, in fact, be why the story -and its eponymous divinity- are less well-remembered than some of the other, ostensibly simpler offerings within The Books of Blood; unlike most stories, this one provides no iconic or clear visual hook, no cleanly defined concept to visualise or with which to engage. 

Instead, the story reflects the nature of The Madonna itself; despite its ostensible grit and dirt and psychological realism, it is also a fantastical flight of metaphysics, in which all presumptions of identity are upset, where everything that anchors us in the grey waking of our lives is torn away. 

The Madonna -and her changeling children- imply some other existence, some potential other-state, just beneath the grey surface of our assumed realities, one that, if embraced, will hurtle us away from every assumption of what we know and enshrine within ourselves, such that what seemed certain and absolute only moments before reveals itself as little more than a reflection on water. Via her, Barker dares to say to the reader: “set down what you presume to love, what you presume to know, and consider that what you consider alien, strange or disturbing might in fact be a gateway into other states and conditions, better and more potent by far than those you live from day to day.” 

In that, she amongst the earliest examples in his fiction of the ambiguous and distressing -but often hopeful, Utopian- strain of metaphysics that will come to define much of what he creates in the years following.