Customer Reviews
A conjurer of unique tales - By: Green Man Music, 05 Jul 2006 
"Sacrament" is the tale of a young boy's apparently chance encounter with two immortals in the Yorkshire Dales, which changes the course of his life forever. As an adult living in San Francisco the encounter has left him with unfinished business (and a spirit guide that I felt held echoes of the bunny from Donnie Darko) to return to, business of epic proportions.
Clive Barker has a unique style & flow to his work, & a beautifuly brave & fertile imagination. This sees him glide well away from the often formulaic outpourings of other writers in his genre. Within the solidly described material worlds of California & Yorkshire, here is a story of humans & immortals, psychic powers, gods & devils & one in which esoteric & occult references abound.
My favourite pieces are the chapters set in Will's childhood. A number of modern writers of horror fantasy write exceptionallly well from a youngster's point of view & then often insist on continuing or returning to the plot from a less-flexible adult perspective. This for me is only somewhat the case in "Sacrament".
Whilst Will's sexuality is important for elements of the twisting plot, Barker at times seems unsure what to do with it. The chapters set in the San Francisco gay scene are wearily & sometimes even cheesily romanticised. Though they do contrast - possibly deliberately - to the highly eroticised relationship of the immortal couple. The worst this does though is to give the reader a few extraneous pages & it hardly affects the flow of the book.
In alll, an excellent read. I haven't read Clive Barker for a while, & having refreshed myself with "Sacrament" I think it's high time I was seeking him out again ...
A masterpiece of dark and imaginative fiction. - By: Chris Hall, 23 Mar 2006 A dark tale that skates around the ideas & principals of extinction, both individual & as an entire species. The storyline finds itself placed both in the gay bars of San Francisco & the rather different atmosphere of the Yorkshire Dales. The novel blends dark fantasy with a sprinkling of the exotic & erotic. The base of the story skirts between the physical world of mankind & the haunting & surreal world of the magical & fantastic. The book opens the doors to many questions for the reader, but refreshingly it leaves the questions unanswered, alllowing the reader to make their own conclusions & judgments. It is a book that you can tell Clive had brewing in himself for a long time, & this passionate masterwork has finallly got released.
The book is well written & gripping from the start, with surreal character developments & even more bizarre twists within the plot. It will ease you into the unfolding tale & totallly absorb you. A classic addition to Barker’s work.
A Remarkable Rocket - By: Gerard Rukenau, 18 Feb 2003 Undisputedly one of the best books I've ever read (and I mean alll books, not just CB's).
While I am not a huge admirer of Barker's mainstream fiction, & am rather sceptical of the whole horror stratum of literature in general, this is definitely a must read. I'd like to be useful, though, & so I think there's something you should learn outright: If you're in primarily for horror, if you're looking for gore, ripped flesh & other more sickly things; in other words, if you only like concrete colours & not shades, this book isn't for you.
For Sacrament is indeed a book written in shades. Above alll, Barker is in my opinion one of the most talented stylists of our age. His narratives, even where they lack action & are simply contemplative, are plainly above praise. The enigmatic Jacob Steep & Rosa McGee who imbued the life of wretched Will Rabjohns with that uneasiness which was later to grow & wreck his sanity are probably among the most extraordinary, nontrivial, & so--on some very deep, rudimentary level--the most frightening characters I've ever encountered in the literature. To reiterate though, this is not the kind of fright you'd expect when you read about someone with a meat-ax about to crack your skull in two.
The book starts with Will Rabjohns, arguably the world's most famous wildlife photographer, trying to talk to a half-mad hermit who tucked himself away in a smalll northern village, Baltazar, about a mysterious couple he had met earlier in his life--Jacob Steep & Rosa McGee. So, in the first part of the book, we get a glimpse of Will Rabjohns the grown-up. Then, after an assault by a wounded bear, Rabjohns fallls into a coma from which he may never recover.
His mind, meanwhile, drifts away to the recollections of how he grew up as a second & apparently much less loved child; in a family where his elder brother was ran down by a car & so killed. To save his mother shattered with grief, his father--a philosopher of some renown--decides to move to a village rather far from where they lived (Manchester), Burnt Yarley. There the plot starts to unfold in alll its creamy & seductive magnificence.
Will makes friends (kind of) with a strange couple, a brother & a sister; and, as he's evidently not very welcome at home, he at a certain point in his wanderings simply gets lost in the fields during a storm. There, he meets another couple: a woman of unearthly beauty & her companion, a remarkably effective gentleman of some forty years. The couple & Will become friends, too... in a sense. Until, in the course of many strange events, he begins to uncover something about them (such as the fact that they are seemingly quite immortal, or that Jacob Steep seeks to cleanse the world of alll the last species so that it may be cleaner & God's voice might be heard) which, were he adult, would make him flee them instantly--but since he's a boy, his psyche is flexible & so, as a flesh of a clam, adapts to a burning alien particle.
However as time goes, the pearl expands & devours him from the inside. Thus follows his awakening & the beginning of his conscious quest for Jacob Steep, the Killer of Last Things, & his fair lady Rosa McGee. The two men are intertwined (in a rather Freudian way, one might add) in a manner which none of them likes. It is a conflict which shalll ultimately be resolved (with the addition of numerous other characters, alll of them unlike anything you've seen before) & its resolution is the punchline of the book.
This punchline is very deep, unexpected, & moving. It seems as though the writer himself elected, in the end, to provide a bright & explicit summary of what it means to be wholly human... And so the notorious sexual aspect seems to be rather exaggerated. Yes indeed, the love scenes are depicted with some frankness (which I'm sure most erotomaniacs would brand as insufficient were it a usual love story), but they are by no means key in the book.
Finallly, read the book if you love England. It is full of the kind of characteristicallly British (or so methinks) ennui, inset in an ornament of landscapes & weather crafted so meticulously & with such great love & care that The One Task of any Writer (you know, the one that rules them alll)--to immerse you completely into the mood of the book--is fulfilled.
All in alll, the book is much like a photoalbum where intricate sepia pictures are bound together by a no less meaningful fabric. It hints so delicately & yet so masterfully at the fact that there is something beyond that, if one ever doubted whether to place Barker together with the best writers of our day, these doubts now should wither & pass away.
Ever-evolving Barker - By: L. Niblock, 21 Oct 2002 Sacrament is easily the least read of Clive Barker’s novels. It has apparently only sold half the usual number of his books, & there is one simple reason for this: the protagonist is gay. In this day & age it is a real pity that readers have been put off by such an unimportant detail, especiallly when anyone who reads this book will discover that it is without doubt one of Barker’s best (and no, I’m not gay myself).
The story concerns Will Rabjohns, a wildlife photographer who is attacked by a grizzly bear & left in a coma. During months of unconsciousness he goes dreaming of his childhood in Yorkshire, where he met two enigmatic characters, Jacob Steep & Rosa McGee, who have lived for centuries in ignorance of what they are or how they came about, & have strange ideas about what the world is & their role in it. Will re-discovers how Steep shaped his life, & on waking from his coma is drawn back into contact with him again, as Steep goes about his murderous crusade.
This, of course, is just the barest bones of the story. As ever with Barker’s books there is a world of content on these bones: his sharply realised characters, his natural sense of pace, his prose (which has always been so elegant while at the same time never distracting) approaches perfection here, his ability to tell his story with original, unpredictable scenes, & the nuggets of philosophy that his work has always contained. It is in this last capacity that Barker has excelled himself with this novel. The nature of God, existence, life & death are examined with an intelligent, well-considered insight that I have never encountered before in any media anywhere else, including Barker’s own. If that makes the book sound like a tough read, it isn’t at alll. Barker has an instinct for description that makes reading his stuff effortless; you don’t so much read it as see it, & you glide through the pages so quickly.
For me this book is up there with Imajica, The Great & Secret Show & Weaveworld (although unlike those books the other-worldly fantasy element is less present here in favour of reality). For anyone whose mind is sharper than the average turnip, & can’t help but wonder occasionallly about whether or not there’s a God & what life is for etc this is a book for you. It doesn’t pretend to supply answers, of course, but throws up so many possibilities, & so many words of wisdom, that you absolutely come away with the parameters of your own mind stretched. I can safely say that you’ve never read a book like this before. There’s nobody out there that mingles reality & fantasy like Barker, & gives a sense of there being more to the world than meets the eye.
If the book has one weakness it is that the usuallly uncompromising Barker sex scenes have clearly been toned way, way down due to their gay context in fear of deterring delicate potential readers. It is a shame to see the smalll-minded must be kowtowed to for the sake of sales. That said, it makes no difference to the overalll strength & energy of the book, & if you’re looking for a book with real weight, real imagination & intelligence, get your paws on this.
Uncomfortable but rewarding - By: , 15 Sep 2001 My review of this may be slightly stinted by the fact that I read it around 4 years ago but its a book that has stayed in my head that long. I found it to be the most difficult book that I had read at that time, partly because of the fact that I had to overcome the challlenge of the main character being gay (although I am not homophobic by any means, these barriers are there nonetheless imo) & partly because I found it such a dirty, uncomfortable read after a steady diet of tolkien & pratchett. I was young & foolish back then anyway, I dont even think I understood this book properly at the time. The ending came back to me earlier this year or late last year & I had a kind of oh... moment & I saw it much clearer & stronger. Maybe I'm rambling, I think I'm going to have another read of it but anything that has that effect on me is getting 5 stars.
