Book Review: The Qliphoth

Sep 21, 2007 – Death Ray

By Dan Whitehead

Secret societies, insane hippies and occult train routes collide in a mind-boggling yarn of hedonistic spiritual ascension.

The Qliphoth, since you ask, is the Qabalistic name given to cosmic evil and the Qabalah, and its attendant beliefs, run through Paul A. Green's debut novel like letters in a stick of rock. This is handy since one of the pivotal locations of his mind-bending stream of consciousness parable is an English seaside town, magically hidden from the world since the Forties and now crumbling into incestuous chaos.

On the surface this tale seems fairly straightforward, though it draws heavily from the tangled fictions of Burroughs and Vonnegut. Lucas Beardsley, a failed student, has a blazing row with his uptight politically correct mother and ventures into the night to visit his father, a 1960s counter-culture casualty incarcerated in the local loony bin. The book then unfolds from all three perspectives - father, mother and son - as these characters search for the truth about each other while the occult forces of the Order of the Brazen Head weave their arcane web around them. From intense narration to first-person hallucination, it's a book that draws you in and leaves you gasping for air. Or clarity. Whichever comes first.

It's clear that Green's history as a poet has followed him into fiction, as each sentence drips with fantastic imagery and the mesmerising rhythm of someone well versed in, well, verse. A telephone becomes "a cold lobster of plastic" emitting "the noise of burning insects". Elsewhere "eyes fly across the blinking darkness like luminous spermatazoa". It's wonderfully, maddeningly inventive stuff, though these relentless verbose tendencies do mean that many characters end up sounding the same. Sadly, like too many small press books, the legibility is marred by weird punctuation errors and spelling mistakes which, given the fractured nature of the story, almost feel deliberate.

Thankfully, Green isn't nearly as deferent to the pretentious world of aetheric magicks as some authors and he approaches the subject with a dry wit which enlivens the more stodgy passages. Such a dense approach to complex spiritual subject matter can backfire horribly (see: Guy Richie, Revolver) but Green's runaway prose is compelling enough to keep things focused.

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