​THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: CHRISTOPHER CARRION, PRINCE OF THE MIDNIGHT ISLE

Despite this, he is also a creature of incredible cruelty, a sadistic and treacherous individual who utilises his own living nightmares as instruments of torture and weapons against his enemies. He is a creature born to abjection, into a state where fear and negativity are not only normalised, but celebrated. 

The Abarat is Barker's affectionate homage to Lewis Carol's Alice in Wonderland; ostensibly a series of children's books set in a fantastical archipelago in which every hour of the day is represented by a symbolic island, whose nature, ethos and inhabitants reflect certain qualities of that hour. From the carnival island of Babilonium (6:00PM) to the paradoxical wonder of Jibarish (11:00PM), every island is a trove of strange sights and miracles both enchanting and cataclysmic. 


Gorgossium, The Midnight Isle, is the realm of all human nightmares; every horror, dread and neurosis makes its home here, and is represented either by the phenomena of the island itself or a creature that inhabits it. Despite the intended audience of the books, Barker brings his full pedigree to bear when it comes to emphasising the unfathomable horrors of this place, Gorgossium being the place where all human fears manifest, from the most absurd to the most disturbing. As one might expect, his affection for the island and its aspects is plain; he takes extreme relish in describing the myriad monsters and homonculi that infest the shadowy isle, not to mention the strange culture of bleakness and inverted virtue that presides over it: 


Gorgossium is, after all, a condition of elemental negativity; it sustains and thrives when human beings fear the unknown and imbue the shadows with monstrosities of their own imagining. Thus, the island's culture makes a virtue out of negativity: fear, anxiety, neurosis, doubt; all celebrated and encouraged in Gorgossium's strange culture. Affection, empathy, love; all regarded with contempt and disgust, the latter of which cannot even be spoken of without grave consequence, as the subject of today's article learned to his cost. 


The Carrion Family are the hereditary rulers of Gorgossium, and, as you might expect, manifest every evil and wickedness of that condition. Whittled down and withered over the aeons through despair, suicide, hereditary sickness and good, old-fashioned murder, the Carrions now number only two members; the ancient and supremely malevolent Mater Motley, a witch who makes servants from sewn-together sacks of discarded skin and has enormous occult power at the tips of her talons, and her grandson, the Prince of Nightmares, Christopher Carrion. 


From his earliest appearance, Barker makes it plain that Christopher, despite his hideous and mutilated appearance, is far more than a mere monster: 


A fey and yearning creature, he is consumed by his passions and obsessions, still aching for a lost love that spurned him so long ago, the bitterness and bile that Mater Motley has done everything in her power to cultivate not yet having entirely eaten away his soul. He is the classic Barkerian “humanity within the monster,” here presented in the guise of a children's fantasy villain; a wicked prince and sorcerer who, nevertheless, also exhibits passions, confusions and emotions that readers of all ages will recognise and identify with. Contrasted by his entirely monstrous Grandmother, he is almost sympathetic at times; understandable in his motivations, even at his most monstrous. 


Despite this, he is also a creature of incredible cruelty, a sadistic and treacherous individual who utilises his own living nightmares as instruments of torture and weapons against his enemies. He is a creature born to abjection, into a state where fear and negativity are not only normalised, but celebrated. 


As such, his Grandmother, who raised him following his parent's tragic end (it's not an enormous surprise when it is revealed Mater Motley herself had a great deal to do with that particular event), has done everything in her power to make him her instrument; to abuse and traumatise and disappoint him to the point that he is broken, bitter and has only contempt for the world (when he dared speak the word “love” as a young man, the hag punished him by sewing his lips together, rendering him silent for some years after, the scars of which he still bears to this day). 


Under this state of sustained abuse, his nightmares have swollen to such monstrous condition that he can actively manifest them as living entities of fluid light that seep out of the pipe drilled into the back of his skull (yes, this is all explicitly described in this series for children) and swim around in the strange, glass collar that surrounds his head. Christopher Carrion literally inhales his own worst nightmares with every breath he takes. 


The series presents Carrion in various modes, from the embittered yet yearning prince, still consumed by the embers of an old love, to a rampaging, fury-filled demon, whose very gaze brings death and madness. Whilst ostensibly quite a fragile creature, especially when compared to his deceptively powerful Grandmother, when his passions rise, when he is consumed by his own grief and rage and bitterness, he erupts into a state of nightmare-swathed monstrosity, some of the more climactic moments in the series pitting him against Mater Motley herself; two avatars of elemental evil ripping and tearing at one another with every power at their disposal, in which Christopher demonstrates the extent of his power and the unnuterable depths of his despair. 


The latter is where the true hook for Christopher Carrion lies. He could so easily have been nothing more than a monster; a child of Gorgossium, and therefore a living nightmare that requires no further explanation for its cruelty or sadism than the matter of its hereditary and born nature. 


However, Barker takes enormous pains to explain how Gorgossium -and Christopher with it-, despite being the realm of nightmares, is also a place of wonders. There are things to be learned from what makes us afraid and anxious and fills us with dread. There are secrets of self to be unearthed in the darkness. 


Whilst the books don't go into incredible detail, it is known that part of the reason for Mater Motley's infanticide is that she despised what she considered the weakness of her children; that the condition of peace and contentment they fostered throughout the Midnight Isle flew in the face of her own more rampant malevolence, that would see every island in the Abarat swathed in darkness and become a new home for the children of night. 


Christopher Carrion is a child caught between two worlds, as much as the book's protagonist, Candy Quackenbush, who is the Abarat's equivalent of Alice. On the one hand, he is the child of his parents; a more humanised and considered form of nightmare, in which what seems ostensibly negative can become a source of growth, positivity and even a form of enchantment (something that Barker has been explicitly exercising in his adult fiction for decades). On the other, he is also sincerely the child of Mater Motley, the witch-queen of old night, who insists that fear and dread are expansionist, venomous and violent by nature, that all should fear her family and The Midnight Isle as they once did. 


Christopher is constantly at odds within himself over these contradictory tensions; still in love with a woman he helped to murder, in his bitterness at her rejection, and in contempt with himself for what he has been taught to define as that weakness. 


It's also worth noting that, for all their ostensible villainy, neither Christopher Carrion nor Mater Motley are portrayed as the series' most contemptuous antagonists. Far from it; for all of their negativity, they are natural by-products and expressions of The Abarat and the hour of the night they were born to. 


Compared and contrasted to both of them is Rojo Pixler, the de facto master of Pyon (3:00AM) and one of the few entities within The Abarat entirely shorn of magic, visions or anything even remotely miraculous. A thinly-veiled parody of corporate materialism and faux-enchantment, Rojo Pixler is the Walt Disney of The Abarat, who has turned his island into a giant theme park that deals in plastic, synthetic light and merchandise, and whose expansionist intentions shame anything Mater Motley can conceive of, despite his affable and charming facade. 


He is very much comparable to Shadwell from Weaveworld; a grubby little man who, having discovered a realm of miracles, sees only potential for profit and control rather than transcendence; an archetype that recurs throughout Barker's fiction and for which he has nothing but contempt. 


Whilst the murderous, monstrous and unholy Carrion family are rendered with varying degrees of enthusiasm and sympathy, Rojo Pixler is entirely contemptuous; a man who inhabits Wonderland but who wants nothing more than to stamp his corporate logo on it and sell it off, piece by piece. 


In that, Carrion and Pixler together, contrasted to one another within the constraints of the same story, serve as a sincere and trenchant criticism of all that Barker regards as truly evil in the world and the hearts of humanity: 


Carrion and his hordes are the enchantment of darkness; the fascination with ghost stories and nightmares. They are bleak romance and the seduction of the abyss. In that, they have poetry and meaning; a symbolic resonance that Barker regards not only as desirable, but essential. 


Pixler and his synthetic miracles, his corporate aestheticism, his narcissistic materialism, by contrast, is wholly and irredeemably corrosive. His intentions, his -for want of a better- “philosophy,” will see the death of all that makes The Abarat enchanting and miraculous. He is the commodification of magic and dreams, the reduction of imagination to ephemeral, plastic waste and the enslavement of the self to endless cycles of material consumption. 


Carrion and his family might be the manifestation of all nightmares; incarnations of mythological and fairy-tale evil, but Barker proclaims that to be eminently preferable to the very real, corporate corrosion that Rojo Pixler manifests.