johngo's Full Review: James Blish - Black Easter: The Day After Judgemen...
Of all the great writers of science fiction, James Blish is the one who shouldn't have given up his day job. He used up his ideas with such prodigality that they ran out, and he finished his career hacking formulaic scripts for the most over-rated sci-fi space-opera of all time, Star Trek.
Those who read and cared about such matters distinguished carefully betweeen SF, which is the jazz of fiction, and the lift-music (Whoops, I mean elevator-music) of fiction which is sci-fi. Blish started by writing some of the most brilliant SF. Like A. C. Clarke, Blish could write stories that partake of myth, and like Clarke he made the cross-over, and in the end ground out sci-fi for money. (So there's the clue: If he speaks about sci-fi he has nothing to say that is worth listening to; if she speaks about SF, listen to her because you may hear something interesting.)
One of the most brilliant of Blish's stories was about the mind-sculptors who take an average man, fill up his mind with all the biographical and musicological information known about Richard Strauss, in order to make a counterfeit of the personality of the composer. The counterfeit Strauss is set down in what he regards as a future dystopia where music is mostly synthesised. He is commissioned to write a piece of music, does so, and which, while he is conducting its first performance, he realises is just a pastiche, just a rehash of everything that he, Strauss, has done, better. With this realization he is inspired, by some poems of Ezra Pound, but before he can set them to music, and do something really new, and truly Straussian, the counterfeit personality is extinguished, and he is forced back to his humdrum life. The irony of the story is that the artist who is valued is not the pseudo-Strauss, but the mind-sculptor who has so convincingly revived the personality of a long dead, German composer, and when you finish reading, you have no idea, if the pseudo-Strauss's dissatisfaction with his composition is a genuine Straussian aesthetic judgement, or just a subtlety of the pseudo-Straussian personality devised by the mind-sculptors.*
One of the most telling aspects of the story is the solidity of the drawing, not just of Strauss himself, but of his relationship with his wife, Pauline, his place in 20th century history, the shadow of his collaboration with the Third Reich, and his final days as a rather suspect ex-sympathiser of the Nazis. All of this is evidence of a commitment to verisimilitude. This same commitment to verisimilitude is evident in the novel Black Easter, or Faust Aleph-Null. This
novel is the most fully realized of all the fictions about magic that I have ever read, and being the most fully realized it is also the most unforgettably chilling.
The story is very simple, an arms-manufacturer with effectively infinite wealth seeks out the world's greatest black magician, and after determining that the magician is not an illusionist, commissions him to perform a conjuration. The magician, Theron Ware, is a black magician based in the European tradition. Blish himself writes in the prefatory Author's Note 'All the books mentioned actually exist; there are no "Necronomicons" or other such invented works, and the quotations and symbols are equally authentic....The experimentally minded, however, should be further warned that, although the quotations, diagrams, and rituals in the novel are authentic, they are in no case complete.'
The book begins in monastery on Monte Albano, in the cell of Father F. X. Domenico Bruno Garelli, a white magician of the highest degree, a karcist, who becomes aware of the stench of profound demoniality.
The scene changes: Baines, the infinitely rich arms-manufacturer, and Jack Ginsburg, his personal assistant, are in the consulting rooms of Theron Ware. After the usual fencing---Baines is obviously not a gullible fool, and requires convincing that Ware is indeed a magician---Ware demonstrates real magic. Tears of blood form in Baines's eyes, and on being wiped away turn to what appear to be gold on the handkerchief. Then they get to the real business. Ware determines who it is that Baines wants to have killed. Things begin to become disturbing, because Baines is seeking a demonstration, and requires Ware to kill by magic, the Governor of California, an affable, red-haired, former filmstar, for no good reason other than to test Ware's abilities. Ware is dispassionately and brutally frank about the horror of demonic murder, but Baines is not moved to be merciful.
The seeking out of Ware is not without its portents: such a conjuration as is planned attracts the attention of white magicians, and as it becomes more and more apparent to the monks of Monte Albano that Baines's commission is truly monstrous, they invoke the Covenant. They send Father Garelli to observe the conjuration and to help to abort it, should it become uncontrollable.
The theological validity of the interpretation of the Covenant is somewhat suspect. The Covenant hinges on the revelation of the rainbow, and the interpretation that no man, however tempted, is tempted beyond his ability, under grace, to resist; and this is connected with the idea that to resist evil, the free will has to be unencumbered. The white magicians interpret this as a licence to allow them to observe the conjuration but not to intervene in Ware's actions, without his explicit invitation, lest in doing so they deny him the opportunity to renounce the evil he is mired in, his only hope of redemption.
Baines is soon convinced of Ware's abilities. What might have been an hypnotic hallucination turns out to be smears of metallic gold on his handkerchief. The Governor of California dies, and the scene is set for the great
conjuration. One more character becomes involved, the sceptical scientist, Dr Hess, another of Baines's minions, and the team of magician and assistants, karcist and tanists, is complete for the conjuration, Ware, Ginsburg, Hess, Garelli, and the puppet-master, Baines.
I first read the book in about 1970; thinking about it still makes the hair creep on the back of my neck.
* Blish, James (1979) A Work of Art. In The Best of James Blish
Ed. Robert A.W. Lowndes, Ballantine Books.
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