The Geary clan is a powerfull family that mixes its roots with unholy wars, revenge and strange debts with the past. Terrible communions linked them to the Barbarrosas, an obscure and deified family that is full of dark past, of awful secrets of their own. Galilee is a wanderer, a man with a disgusting past that begs to be forgotten,a son of the Barbarrosa family. He must live charged as guilty for his sins, until he falls in love with Rachel, a beautiful woman in the verge of divorce from his husband, Mitchell Geary. So, as they struggle to consumate their love, the new Geary generation ignores the inextricable bounds that link both families and tries to protect the supposed dignity of the family, by declaring war to the Barbarrosas. Adultery, perversion and death must take place in order to allow the hostilities begin; Galilee and Rachel must prevent their own demise, they must gather the past to avoid the destruction of everything around them.

 

   Let me tell you one thing: Barker would never dissapoint his fans. Or so I thought when I read "Imajica". "Galilee", is, at best, an insipid soap opera. Not just has he taken most of the fantasy elements but he has soiled his creativity with this novel. If one remembers the complicated plot of his previous novels, fantasy or not, "Galilee" stands as a pale shade. Even considered as a romance, the first half of the book is extremely boring. I found myself very disgusted reading about properties and richness. I acknowledge that he may have done it on purpose, but it was very distasteful. I think he had never tried narrating in first person. His character is extremely interesting: the paraplegic that doesn't stand a chance against the rest of his life. And he is a semigod. Of course the Barbarrosa family is a character from Barker. But the Gearys are very common. They may have entered in a regular Barker novel, but now the human side of the story is by far heaviest than the divine. One curious thing happened: if in "Imajica" appeared characters that become gods as the novel develops, now is the contrary. Galilee, at the beginning, is portrayed as a god, an inmutable divinity that crosses the seas. But at the end he is very human. His image is weakened thoroughly. He is weak and damagable. No alternative, he has to love Rachel. But Barker wastes too much time explaining the antecedents of their affair. The love scene is prolonged even after the reader knows how the two characters will meet and what will happen to them once they have met each other. Barker gives an interesting twist to the notion of romance: a slight narration that predicts what will happen, a story that mesmerizes Rachel and that Galilee uses as a device for making her fall in love. He recognizes the love in her because she is not a Geary, really. She is a real woman, she still has within her what the high society (the same where his husband Mitchell has lived all of his life) bruises with the time. Galilee of course falls in love with her and Rachel correspond him. But he is indeed afraid. When he escapes, he start becoming a man, not anymore is he a god.

 

   The narrative voice, and its character, Maddox, is interesting but quavering. Barker once wrote that he didn't enjoy writing a story when he knew its end. Now, the writer really doesn't seem to know where his story is going, changing the narrative time. While in the beginning one believes that the author is describing a distant time, after the half of the book, one realizes that the events are almost happening at the time. There's a breaking point where Barker solves clearly the problem, because he doesn't appear to know how will he handle everything uniting past with the ominous present. At the beginning, Barker appears to be unsure where or when the house will be troubled by intruders. He himself appears to ignore the cause of the ruin of the Barbarrosa clan. At the end, is the Geary family, but everything in the story fits wrongly, without motivation. Barker finds easy and cheap explanations to his situations. The murder of George Geary, the rather corny and very common end, the solution behind that strange diary, all is what appears to be, nothing fails to deliver a foreseen cause and effect. The story that describes Samarkand, the city, goes nowhere, results pointless and a vague dead end.

 

   I won't deny that Clive Barker manages to show some strong scenes. The scene where the man sees his dead son on his horse is very powerful. But Barker appears weakened, as his characters. They are empty. I though I was reading "Dallas" or something as nauseating as that. The soap opera scenes are plain and lifeless. Nothing new came out of this master's mind. The exuberance is gone: a vestige of his glamour as a horror and fantasy writer remains, but it's pale and trembling.