CR2: Book 20 Weaveworld by Clive Barker

"Nothing ever begins."

Calhoun Mooney has inadvertently allowed one of his family's prize-winning racing pigeons to escape its loft. Even though his father, the recently-widowed Brendan Mooney, has started to neglect the birds, Cal takes off to track it through the city. The pigeons had been a passion of his mother's, and this particular cock, named 33, had won a championship only a year before.

On foot, Cal almost catches the pigeon several times, only to lose it again as 33 heads for an area already teeming with birds, wheeling through the air in an odd display, obviously feeding. When Cal gets closer, he joins a crowd of people watching the spectacle. It's not a gnat-feast. It's not an ant buffet. It is simply and unexpectedly thousands of birds, of various species, swarming the air like a cyclone.

Wait. That's the start of the story, but not the beginning...

Shadwell is a charlatan, and the lowest common denominator of sleazy and greedy. He has a thousand different smiles and none of them are pleasant. Lying on a huge bed, he watches Immacolata at the hotel window, the jacket she had given him with its hypnotic lining thrown over a chair. Her sisters, the eyes-sewn-shut-since-birth Magdelene and the Hag are only flickers of shadows in the corners of the room. The bird-tempest catches Immacolata's attention, she senses the Fugue is near.

Weaveworld is epic, and that has little to do with the over-700 pages it took to tell it. An in-depth synopsis would never touch beyond the surface so I won't really try. Only reading it for yourself will do. It's the story of an entire world, all the magical elements of our histories, tangled up in the knots of a single carpet. Having recently reviewed Piers Anthony's With A Tangled Skein, I bumped up my re-reading of Weaveworld. I wanted to investigate the similar themes, the living threads that they had in common.

Yes, I've read Weaveworld before, twice before if I remember correctly. But taking another look, I was amazed at either how much I had missed or how the story had changed. Because, it Does change.
Barker wonderfully pours out his imagery in a half-light. Whole characterizations that are so odd and beguiling that their particulars are never clear.

I remember the first time I read this book. It was so hefty that I was sure I missed some subtleties trying to get into it, and by the time I realized how encompassing it was, I was too far in to backtrack.
The second time I read it was a few years later and I tried to pace myself and let more through.
This time, due to reviewing it for the Cannonball Read, I tried letting the story dictate its own speed, and I was taken aback at how it carried me along.

The first act is the "most" based in any sort of reality (as far as this tale will allow), and we are intrduced to Cal and his family, Shadwell and his "brood", Suzanna, who's grandmother guarded the carpet up until her death and the events that bring us up to date.

But once our eyes catch the movement of the world in the carpet, once we fall INTO it, the patterns are already lost, and it's already in danger of being undone.
Of course it's no spoiler that the fabric, the Fugue, erupts and that the mystical places boom forth and attach themselves to the lost nooks of the natural world.. Ghosts of time, what can be summed up incorrectly as Angels and Demons, now wander our landscapes and blanket our neighborhoods with their stones and trees and altars...

Immacolata wants control of this domain, while her black sisters rape poor souls, giving birth to foul abortions ready to do her bidding. Shadwell wants his rewards and his comeuppance is satisfied. Suzanna wants her destiny to embrace her, whatever it may be.
And Cal Mooney just wants to understand. His story is, I think, one of Barker's mainstays. That's not to invalidate his experiences. Cal is a character I feel is most like Barker as a man (as is Will Rabjohns in Sacrament and, to a lesser degree, Aaron Boone in Cabal). Cal has enough on his plate, dealing with a grieving father and unsympathetic (or unable to sympathize) fiancee, when suddenly his world is literally turned upside down as he falls off the wall of his own circumstance into the air of the unbelievable.

The breathing thing that catches him doesn't require his belief, only his escort. Whether or not Cal can grasp the importance of this swirling assault is only where his story begins.