The Philippine Online Chronicles

WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND.

The night before Abarat: Absolute Midnight, third book of Clive Barker’s illustrated novel series the Abarat Quintet, was released in bookstores worldwide, I went on Facebook and tagged my fellow-fan-friends of the series in this status: “Tomorrow, there will be Absolute Midnight.” Later that evening, Typhoon Quiel took out the power lines, plunging my whole neighborhood in darkness for a whole day, and causing me to mutter repeatedly, “I was kidding! The cosmos can’t take a joke now?!”—talk about life imitating art.

Unfortunately, with regard to Absolute Midnight, it’s a matter of art imitating life. Imagine having to wait seven years for the next installment of a riveting series, to devour the thing in less than two days once you have it in your hands, and then come out of the reading experience with more questions than answers—it’s like taking off a blindfold only to find that you’re standing under a midnight sky.

Aside from the interesting prologue starring a conspicuously-named Zephario Carrion aside, Absolute Midnight picks up right where Days of Magic, Nights of War left off—the destruction of Chickentown, Minnesota, the impending war in the Abarat, and Candy’s journey of self-discovery (and self-recovery). The points of view grow more diverse and numerous: Candy and Malingo’s travels are a given, next to the schemes of Mater Motley (who happens to be the ghastly centerpiece of the bloody cover, and you don’t discover why until much later), the doings of Rojo Pixler and his Commexo Kid, Finnegan hunting for more dragons as usual, and—surprise, surprise!—separate chapters for Candy’s abusive father, Bill Quackenbush, the supposedly-dead Christopher Carrion, and the equally-supposedly-dead Princess Boa.

I’m not saying loose ends are a bad thing, since being primarily a horror writer, Barker must know how to thrill his audience; it’s just that at the ratio of what’s been revealed compared to what’s still to come, Barker put more emphasis on what’s still to come. This unbalances the scale. More unnerving is how gigantic a feat it seems to resolve all the loose threads (or skeins, I should say) in a mere two books; not to mention, all the painting Barker has yet to accomplish.

And speaking of paintings, I have to say I was mildly disappointed. It’s understandable that the paintings accompanying the first two books (Abarat and Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War) are dazzling portraits and fantastic landscapes, since Mr. Barker was still trying to establish the world of the Abarat at the time. Both the story and the paintings of Book 3 take a darker turn, however neither felt up to par with the quality of the first two books.

There are definitely missing portraits (particularly that of important new character Gazza, who was introduced about fifty percent of the way into the novel), and the story felt as if one were living a video game: Candy and Malinggo have to travel to so-and-so, meet so-and-so, acquire so-and-so, lose so-and-so, reunite with so-and-so, battle so-and-so—over and over again. And of course there was that big confrontation with Mater Motley and the Nephauree at the end that felt suspiciously like an Epic Boss Battle. It’s no small coincidence that Barker is an advocate of video games as a legitimate art form.

It’s as if Barker put more thought into the paintings and did some writing as an afterthought, not as accompaniment. For example, there were quite a few confusing moments when a plethora of information was laid out in the dialogue, yet there were no indications as to who was doing the talking. There was so much fast-paced action that I felt, as a reader, unable to breathe or take a breather between chapters. It was obvious that certain chapters had been paid more attention to in the editing stages than others. Some threads were taken up or dropped too abruptly. And finally, while I will not deny that Absolute Midnight ended with a bang—a very big one, at that—I was unable to find the justifiable grounding of the ending. (I cannot even begin to guess how Mr. Barker is going to tie up that huge loose end in just two books.)

I enjoyed the first two books of Abarat when I was a child. I have yet to re-read them as an adult, and so, I’m just a little bit unsure as to whether I’ll get the same enjoyment out of them. I’m inclined to think it’s the intensity of the darkness of the subject matter that sways my favoritism no matter what age I am when I read the books of Abarat. But goodness knows, if the child I was and the adult I am were two different people, they just might agree that they didn’t enjoy the third book at all, good points notwithstanding.

Barker said in his website that Book 4 will turn out to be the darkest of them all. If that must be so, then I hope the quality of the writing will be enough to sell me on the darkness the next time around.