Book Five (In the Flesh), Chapter Four
“Babel’s Children”
The least like a horror story in the whole anthology, “Babel’s Children”‘s deadpan handling of a completely absurd and bizarre situation reflects Barker’s roots in magic realism. After all, The Books of Blood are lousy with characters who, perhaps after some initial reticence, leap into acceptance of the extraordinary as easily as hopping across a puddle to keep their feet from getting wet. You can remove the horrific element of the extraordinary and still come up with a story that’s resolutely Barkerian, albeit one that shows Barker’s non-horror roots more clearly than the blood-soaked ones.
Another of those roots is undoubtedly Kafka, as this story is about an absurdity at the heart of human existence on Planet Earth in the time Barker lived there. The notion being explored is that the colossal structures of government, economics, religion, philosophy, military power, and so forth have all been erected on a completely nonsensical foundation. It’s sort of like “Hell’s Event” without the Hell–who needs an infernal opponent in a race to decide arbitrarily the fate of humanity when we can simply race against ourselves?
Is this great political science, even of the satirical variety? I don’t know. They cynics among us usually say that thinking it’s all random and meaningless (and please note I don’t believe the two are synonymous) exculpates the very real people whose very real decisions keep other very real people in penury and misery; the determined laborers for the greater good among us would agree, and further argue that it exculpates us from not taking it upon ourselves to fix things. But horror is about hopelessness, and even a non-horror Barker story like this one must remain true to that spirit; the absurdity cannot be challenged or defeated. The scary part is that what’s true in Barker World might well be true in our own.
One final note: Ever since reading Barker’s description of sex as a means by which he gets characters to do things they normally wouldn’t–a logistical mechanism, in other words, to get the protagonists past the point where the audience of the movie would be yelling “don’t go in there!” at the screen–I’ve been paying special attention to other things he uses in a similar fashion; lately, professional ambitions (usually of the frustrated variety) seem to do the trick. In this story Barker gives himself the most can’t-miss device in this vein imaginable–he simply declares, from the very start of the story, that his main character’s a thrill-seeker, a woman who insists to the point of perversity on taking the road less travelled. The gag is that in an absurd universe, all roads lead to exactly the same place: nowhere. The second gag is that “nowhere” is another word for Utopia, but whether we’ll ever arrive there Barker pointedly refuses to say.