Fantastic Metropolis

The ideas of transformation and transcendence pervade much of Calder’s work: books such as Impakto and Malignos have at their heart a complex cosmology, and many of his stories centre on the human longing to escape the quotidian existence and the yearning for contact with the numinous. To what extent do the obsessions of the characters reflect those of their author?

“A person is sometimes born with psychic energies so pressing that they spend their whole life trying to give them sufficient imaginative form. In this regard, I think the characters in my books do reflect my own preoccupations. They too seem imbued with certain kinds of dark, psychic energy that they seek to realise through acts of desire and escape. I might say I lived vicariously through my characters—but characters and author more properly enjoy symbiosis. A magician may evoke a spirit or demon and hope to lend that entity autonomous life, but in the act the magician, in turn, is himself possessed.

“When you have had some success at delineating a character dialogue becomes a matter of listening in, eavesdropping—you do quite literally hear voices inside your head. My fiction seems to contain plenty of characters who are addicted to each other, either through physical necessity—like Ignatz and Primavera—or because they are psychic vampires. Or sometimes, I suppose, because they are both!

“And you might say I’m somewhat addicted to my characters. For me, they hold out the prospect of escape into another world where certain psychic energies are so important that one cannot live, or be whole, without them, and where their realisation represents the realisation of one’s self. In turn, of course, I am quite happy to offer myself up and let my characters feed off me.”

But, stepping outside the role of storyteller, what is Calder’s personal take on matters metaphysical?

“Basically, I’m a rationalist and a sceptic—I find surrender to the irrational rather a terrifying prospect. The life of reason has always seemed humankind’s best and last hope. We live, however, in a very unreasonable society—one that uses the language of reason, albeit in a somewhat debased form, to fabricate justifications for increasingly irrational behaviour. When the metaphysical, or supernatural, element to life is denied—or else atrophies—violence and sex remain as conduits for the divine. If this side to life fails to find expression in fantasy and art then the angels of hell are manifested through the sexual allure of disaster, epidemics, insanity, crime and the constant threat of a sub-human ‘other.’ Today, only things that are pathological seem to express some kind of metaphysic—but I opt for a pathology of art, not of life.”

It’s become a cliché to suggest that fresh and original writing is necessarily driven by a persistent, almost involuntary, preoccupation with a theme or idea. But absorption and fixation seep from every other line of the sumptuous, orgiastic and dazzling prose of books such as Lord Soho and Malignos; so I just have to ask, what obsesses Richard Calder?

“I’m obsessed with language. That’s necessary, if you’re a writer. You feel the overrididng need to put your hands into the sticky mire of language and revel in its sensuality, just as a painter feels the need to play about with paint, a sculptor to carress stone, a musician to immerse themselves in sonic voluptuousness. But an artist should not only be obsessed, but possessed—by some kind of daimonic force. Freud observed (and W.H. Auden wrote a prose poem on the subject) that it is a writer’s wound that bestows creativity. Going to that source, a writer is bound to encounter something that is idiosyncratic and strange. In his Western Canon, Harold Bloom names 26 ‘most significant’ western writers since the middle ages. Bloom says that what links the 26 writers is, above all, strangeness, ‘a mode of originality which either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange.’ Authenticity is all.”

Richard Calder’s stories “Toxine” and “Mosquito” can be read right here at Fantastic Metropolis.