I WAS A PORNOGRAPHER FOR HITLER!My name is Banning Jainlight. I write fiction, specially tailored fiction: pulp sex American adventure stories. I write them for a very specific clientele. These clients, these monsters, they come into my life and I enter into theirs. Am I a monster, am I their fellow monster, their comrade-in-arms? My birth was monstrous, and I dealt with my monstrous family as they deserved - monstrously, as their own monster. I fled to New York; I fled to Europe. To Hitler's Europe. And there I found myself in a world of dreams, dark dire dreams that mass alongside a dire, dark concrete reality. I make my own reality! I change this world: I let evil make a nest of it. I reach out to new worlds, better worlds. I live in a lusciously written, extravagantly hypnotic book called Tours of the Black Clock. My fiction creates worlds and my fiction recreates a woman. I punch through time and space to be with this woman; I leave my fluids upon her, a baby within her. She dreams me and I, her. A PHANTOM RAVISHED ME NIGHT AFTER NIGHT!My name is Dania. I lived in Africa, in Austria, on Davenhall Island. I am a dancer! I dance men to their deaths: they die when I fling myself about, spastic and free, they die and die again, they die grappling with each other, hurling themselves through windows. Men burn for me; men die at my feet.I have a special sort of face. Perhaps not a classic beauty - but this face launches its own sort of ships. One glance at me is enough to move men, to transport them to a sentimental past, to force open windows in space and time to be with me. One such monster ravishes me, a phantom, a phantom writer. He comes to me in the night, he comes to me throughout the years, he comes in me and upon me. And sometimes he brings a friend with him: a little tyrant who lurks in the corner of the room, looking at me as if upon his own past, as if looking upon what cannot be, such a longing for me. But I am not his woman. THE BLACK CLOCK TOLLS!But for whom do I toll? For Banning Jainlight? For Dania? For the white-haired boy Marc, that son of phantoms? I toll for none of them and for all of them. This black clock tolls for an entire century! I move my characters in and out of history, I make a personal history a pulp story, I make the world's history a fever dream. A dream of a fever. A fever of love!Hallucinatory prose and a circular narrative; time restarted and time disobeyed; murky motivations and characters as ciphers. A flow of strange words that progress clock-like, ever forward; a flood of words that submerges its banks; a river of words that moves backward, to its source. I am all of these things.This black clock tolls for you, reader! I toll as you project your own desires onto the page, as you project those desires onto the faces and bodies of others. You remake history all the time, do you not? Your personal history, the history of the world with you in it; you remake history to allow yourself to survive within it. You project those dreams and they become your reality. You are both pimp and whore for those dreams. Banning Jainlight, Dania, Marc, even that sad and faithful detective Blaine, all my voices, all of my so-called protagonists... and you! You are all slaves to your dreams. Dream away! Dream it all away. Again.
A twilight trip to an alternative version of the 20th Century Steve Erickson claims kinship with authors Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon, and its easily to see why. Like those authors, he subtly twists the nature of reality and history until it resembles the inner (both philosophical and psychological) landscapes of his characters. This novel is about white-haired Marc and his mother, who live on a small island in the middle of a fog-shrouded river in the Pacific Northwest. They have an estranged relationship with each other, stemming from the fact that Marc doesn't know who his father is, and his mother will not speak to him about her past. One day, he comes home and finds her with a dead man at her feet. The image so disturbs him that he will not set foot on the island for about 20 years. He takes over the ferry that shuttles tourists back and forth. He finally goes back to the hotel where his mother lives, in search of a mysterious girl who has not stepped back onto the return ferry to the mainland, and runs into his mother. The ghost of the dead man is still at her feet, and he tells both mother and son of his strange history. Banning Jainlight was the bastard son of a farmer and his Native American slave mistress in the earlier part of the century. He ends up burning down the farm, killing one of his half-brothers, and crippling both his father and his step-mother for the cruelty they inflicted on him. He runs away to New York City, and several years later, ends up in Vienna, Austria, where he writes pornography for a powerful client in the newly ascendant Nazi Regime. He bases his writings on the strange, surreal sexual encounters he has with a young woman who lives across the street from him. In his writings, he transforms her features and her name to resemble those of the client's -- who is, of course, Hitler -- long lost love. Bear in mind, that this is just a brief description of this novel. Jainlight's story sparks off the no-less compelling story of Marc's mother, that moves from pre-Revolutionary Russia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Post-war New York City. Moving across dreams and reality, fantasy and history, this dense novel weaves together such unlikely themes as relationships between lovers and parents; the nature of good and evil; and the quest for identity. The images and instance in this novel are numerous and unforgettable: a woman who can kill men with the wild beauty of her dancing and menstruates flower petals; a city that's in the middle of a lagoon, and covered by blue tarps; a burial ceremony where the dead are hung upside-down on trees until they can speak their names; a herd of silver buffalo who run through the plains of Africa and North America. The writing is lovely and lyrical.
What do You think about Tours Of The Black Clock (2005)?
Let's be honest: the plot does not satisfy the hunger for a story. Somehow, the language holds you to the viscera of the text, igniting the hope in your mind that on the last page it will all make sense. It doesn't, as it should (rather shouldn't) if one is to read an intriguing and truly historical novel. Truly, meaning not in the least, and the point is just that, there is no point. Not a starting one and certainly not narratively speaking. Read this without an agenda, because it will destroy any you may have.
—Sirama
I never fail to enjoy postmodern history... In the postmodernist’s hands history unavoidably turns into farce – however dark but farce anyhow.“I also knew such a version of the Twentieth Century was utterly counterfeit. That neither the rule of evil nor its collapse could be anything but an aberration in such a century... in which the black clock of the century is stripped of hands and numbers. A time in which there’s no measure of time that God understands: in such a time memories mean nothing but the fever that invents them: before such memories and beyond such clocks, good views evil in the same way as the man on a passing train who stands still to himself but soars to the eyes of the passing countryside.”All the personages of Tours of the Black Clock are refugees and pariahs of time and space... Maybe we all are nothing but refugees and pariahs of time and space.
—Vit Babenco
Steve Erickson should be much more famous than he is, at least as famous as, say, Haruki Murakami, a writer he has a fair amount in common with, in particular Murakami's Wind Up Bird Chronicles or Kafka On The Shore. His stories are always unstuck in time and place, there is this theme that all history is happening at the same time. It's in this one, Zeroville, The Sea Came in At Midnight, Arc D'X... All his books put together in a row feel like a single epic in Erickson world, like the worlds of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or William Faulkner, or even Kurt Vonnegut. And yes, there is even some Pynchon in there. After recently slogging through the Complete Stories Of Kafka, I also appreciated what a page-turner this book is. It even works if you read it like a slightly off-kilter sci-fi alternate history novel a la Man In The High Castle. Sure, let's compare him to Philip K. Dick as well. He's good.
—Carl
