Excessive Candour
Babylon Unbound

It takes a long time for the reader to realize that Richard Calder means business in Babylon, but then it takes him a long time to mean business in Babylon. So perhaps I should say immediately that Babylon is not—or is not only—what it seems, the slightly tedious Progress of a Whore in embryo from steampunk/gaslight-romance 1888 London through an "interdimensional gate" to an Anti-Terra dominated by New Babylon, a "world-city consecrated to the goddess of the moon," where it is always night. It is a tale all the more pervy for the lack of any actual whoring.

Instead of any embodiment of the dynamic between Eros and Thanatos, which haunts young Madeleine Fell as utterly as it has haunted every previous protagonist in every previous Calder novel this reviewer has read, it looks as though Babylon is going to reveal itself as an exercise in the transformation of hysteric into farce, leaving nothing to taste in the mouth but fustian. For a while I thought so, that the book was going to amount to little more than a bad joke about the prating awfulness of late 19th-century Decadence as pureed through the minds of late 20th-century urban-fantasists whose visions could be seen as exudating from some Ur Alternate London: Peter Ackroyd, Ian R. MacLeod, China Miéville, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Iain Sinclair, Kim Newman, Brian Stableford, to name some of the good ones. But as I progressed through the camp pages of Babylon, slightly disbelieving how unbeleaguered my senses seemed to be after all this poppy, I realized I'd been thinking of two other books as I read the final chapters: Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream (1972) and Harry Mulisch's Siegfried (2001). Clearly something had happened here, Mr. Jones.

But perhaps we should start where Calder means us to: at the beginning: because Babylon is purely accumulative in its effects, there are no twists, no reversals, no flashbacks (unless Madeleine's whole narrative could be so deemed, though it is unnecessary to think so). We are in a version of London it is easy to recognize, half Warner Brothers, half Difference Engine. Jack the Ripper is preying on the same "fallen women," though this time round it is generally thought that he is a "Minotaur," a minion of (or sterling exemplar of) the Black Order of Men which has been conducting (it seems) a guerrilla campaign against the Shulamites—the whores of Isis who have from time immemorial been unmanning our world with sex stuff and Democracy-gab and an unseemly attention to the sweet and clinging thingness of things. Shulamites had always been with us, we learn, but it was only over the past century—ever since Adam Weishaupt "exposed the truth about Modern Babylon" by unveiling the existence of the other world, and of the portals connecting the two realities—that the interjaculation of our world and the world of Modern Babylon has become explicit, institutionalized, almost mundane. Since Weishaupt, our world has become a world that readers of steampunk exordia to Babylon on the Thames Mark Two will immediately recognize.

So routinized is the marriage of the two worlds—what one might describe as a secular version of the hieros gamos or sacred marriage between Isis and the male principle which Calder threatens to show us in the flesh but (as it turns out for very good reasons) never does—that young Madeleine's twee and costume-obsessed decision to become a Shulamite by proxy, and to travel to New/Modern Babylon for proper training in whoredom, seems to be a kind of career choice. And Babylon reads very much like the Sentimental Education of a teenager. She has trouble with her mom and dad, who want her to take a better job; there are passages depicting savageries among teenage girls that any reader of modern Young Adult novels about teenage girls will find tame enough; Madeleine gets a special friend who is named Cliticia (the erotic charge between them never ends in anything explicit: Calder's ultimately necessary cruelty to his characters is evident from the get-go, though only in hindsight) and who also wants to become a whore of Babylon; they run away together, under the guidance of two exceedingly romantic ("Sadness imbued his features, a sadness that Lord Byron might have known, distilled from all the vast, incomprehensible sorrow of the world" sort of thing) gentlemen, who caress the young girls' tight-laced corsets but penetrate no further; Madeleine's own special "protector" calls himself Lord Azrael (there are, of course, dozens of Azraels—Angels of Death—in the kind of books I've been suggesting Babylon parodies so seemingly without teeth), and he guides her through a privy portal set at the heart of Nicholas Hawksmoor's Christ Church Spitalfields (i.e., the heart of the heart of Iain Sinclair/Peter Ackroyd country), and they debouch in the other world.

A tract against our times

Here a great polished train awaits them, for New Babylon is the size of a continent, and the forcing houses of Isis are thousands of miles south. Babylon itself could have been constructed by Albert Speer, who is indeed cited in the last pages of the book: monumental, sans-serif (except where obscenely decorated by Teutonic penis thrusts, I mean heroic statues of guys), rectilinear, New Crobuzon without the laughs.

Everything suggested the oeuvre of a megalomaniac: piazzas; watchtowers; colossal stone figures petrified as if by the lethality of the moonlight; giddy flights of stars running nowhere; landings, scaffolding, twilit halls; colonnades receding into infinity; massive siegeworks; gaping holes in visionary Bastilles that revealed mighty engines, wheels, cables treadmills, and catapults ...

This is all fun, and so over the top that it sticks in the mind.

Eventually, Madeleine and Clit are delivered through all this architecture to their destination and try to settle down. Throughout their hegira, they have been exposed to an almost unending sequence of harangues from Azrael and lots of others about the true nature of the world. It is, all of it, pure junk; junk about Aryans; racist junk; sexist junk; junk out of theosophy and the lord knows what; Isis junk; sex junk; unutterable war in the sky between the sexes junk. It is all deeply familiar junk, too: Every graphic novel hero spouts it; goodies and baddies spout it in every urban fantasy that thinks it has a thesis and a brain to expound it; it is the Fustian of Decadence, and it fills nostrils of anyone who imbibes the popular literatures of the past century.

Madeleine's problem is that she doesn't get it. Her head is stuffed with mirrors in which she can see nothing but herself in gear. She and Clit betray their fellow (though professionally inactive) whore colleagues to Lord Azrael and his Aryans, and the novel—we are now approaching the end of things—changes utterly. The continuing noise out of the mouth of Azrael increasingly resembles the horrifying ontological nada nada that Harry Mulisch, in the end, gives us as the deepest horror of Adolf Hitler: that he was supernaturally vacant, and that we all wrote what we could on this enabling vacancy, and made the century out of vacancy, and have lived on its dead gets ever since.

As the final pages of Babylon pass through a fetishized rehearsal of Auchwitz into nightmares of nada nada, we begin to realize what Calder has done to us. All of the crap he's fed us in this book is—he is telling us—exactly the crap we've insisted on eating all these years and years. The nonsense we imbibe, either as readers or gauleiters, is the Spiritus Mundi out of which we have created the history and the present tense of the world. It is the stuff that Calder fills Babylon with, in order to tell us what we eat. Eat it and see. Babylon is a tract against our times, the times Richard Calder means us to understand we meant all the time. Babylon is the book Hitler wrote in The Iron Dream.