Back and back we go, searching for reasons; scrutinizing the past in the hope that we'll turn up some fragment of an explanation to help us better understand ourselves and our condition.
For the psychologist, this quest is perhaps at root a pur­suit of primal pain. For the physicist, a sniffing after evi­dence of the First Cause. For the theologian, of course, a hunt for God's fingermarks on Creation.
And for a storyteller-particularly for a fabulist, a writer of fantastiques like myself-it may very well be a search for all three, motivated by the vague suspicion that they are inextricably linked.
Imajica was an attempt to weave these quests into a sin­gle narrative, folding my dilettante's grasp of this trio of disciplines-psychology, physics, and theology-into an interdimensional adventure. The resulting novel sprawls, no doubt of that. The book is simply too cumbersome and too diverse in its concerns for the tastes of some. For others, however, Imajica's absurd ambition is part of its appeal. These readers forgive the inelegance of the novel's struc­ture and allow that while it undoubtedly has its rocky roads and its cul-de-sacs, all in all the journey is worth the shoe-leather.
For my publishers, however, a more practical problem became apparent when the book was prepared for its paperback edition. If the volume was not to be so thick that it would drop off a bookstore shelf, then the type had to be reduced to a size that several people, myself included, thought less than ideal. When I received my author's copies I was put in mind of a pocket-sized Bible my grandmother gave me for my eighth birthday, the words set so densely that the verses swam before my then healthy eyes. It was not-I will admit-an entirely unpleasant association, given that the roots of Imajica's strange blossom lay in the poetry of Ezekiel, Matthew, and Revelations, but I was well aware, as were my editors, that the book was not as reader-friendly as we all wished it was.
From those early misgivings springs this new, two-vol­ume edition. Let me admit, in all honesty, that the book was not conceived to be thus divided. The place we have elected to split the story has no particular significance. It is simply halfway through the text, or thereabouts: a spot where you can put down one volume and-if the story has worked its magic-pick up the next. Other than the larger type, and the addition of these words of explanation, the novel itself remains unaltered.
Personally, I've never much cared about the details of one edition over another. While it's very pleasurable to turn the pages of a beautifully bound book, immaculately printed on acid-free paper, the words are what count. The first copy of Foe's short stories I ever read was a cheap, gaudily covered paperback; my first Moby Dick the same. A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Duchess of Malfi were first encountered in dog-eared school editions. It mat­tered not at all that these enchantments were printed on coarse, stained paper. Their potency was undimmed. I hope the same will prove true for the tale you now hold: that the form it comes in is finally irrelevant.
With that matter addressed, might I delay you a little longer with a few thoughts about the story itself? At signings and conventions I am repeatedly asked a number of questions about the book, and this seems as good a place as any to briefly answer them.
Firstly, the question of pronunciation. Imajica is full of invented names and terms, some of which are puzzlers: Yzorddorex, Patashoqua, Hapexamendios, and so forth. There is no absolute hard and fast rule as to how these should trip, or stumble, off the tongue. After all, I come from a very small country where you can hike over a mod­est range of hills and find that the people you encounter on the far side use language in a completely different way to those whose company you left minutes before. There is no right or wrong in this. Language isn't a fascist regime. It's protean, and effortlessly defies all attempts to regulate or confine it. While it's true that I have my own pronuncia­tions of the words I've turned in the book, even those un­dergo modifications when-as has happened several times-people I meet offer more interesting variations. A book belongs at least as much to its readers as to its author, so please find the way the words sound most inviting to you and take pleasure in them.
The other matter I'd like to address is my motivation for writing the novel. Of course there is no simply encap­sulated answer to that question, but I will offer here what clues I can. To begin with, I have an abiding interest in the notion of parallel dimensions, and the influence they may exercise over the lives we live in this world. I don't doubt that the reality we occupy is but one of many; that a lateral step would deliver us into a place quite other. Perhaps our lives are also going on in these other dimensions, changed in vast or subtle ways. Or perhaps these other places will be unrecognizable to us: they'll be realms of spirit, or wonder­lands, or hells. Perhaps all of the above. Imajica is an at­tempt to create a narrative which explores those possibilities.
It is also a book about Christ. People are constantly sur­prised that the figure of Jesus is of such importance to me. They look at The Hellbound Heart or at some of the stories in The Books of Blood and take me for a pagan who views Christianity as a pretty distraction from the business of suf­fering and dying. There is some truth in this. I certainly find the hypocritical cant and derisive dogmas of organized reli­gion grotesque and oftentimes inhumane. Plainly the Vati­can, for instance, cares more for its own authority than for the planet and the flock that grazes upon it. But the my­thology that is still barely visible beneath the centuries-old encrustation of power plays and rituals-the story of Jesus the crucified and resurrected; the shaman healer who walked on water and raised Lazarus-is as moving to me as any story I have ever heard.
I found Christ as I found Dionysus or Coyote, through art. Blake showed him to me; so did Bellini and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and half a hundred others, each artist of­fering his or her own particular interpretation. And from very early on I wanted to find a way to write about Jesus myself; to fold his presence into a story of my own inven­tion. It proved difficult. Most fantastique fiction has drawn inspiration from a pre-Christian world, retrieving from Faery, or Atlantis, or dreams of a Celtic twilight creatures that never heard of Communion. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but it always left me wondering if these authors weren't willfully denying their Christian roots out of frustration or disappointment. Having had no religious education, 1 harbored no such disappointment: I was drawn to the Christ figure as I was to Pan or Shiva, because the stories and images enlightened and enriched me. Christ is, after all, the central figure of Western mythology. I wanted to feel that my self-created pantheon could accommodate him, that my inventions were not too brittle to bear the weight of his presence.
I was further motivated by a desire to snatch this most complex and contradictory mystery from the clammy hands of the men who have claimed it for their own in re­cent years, especially here in America. The Falwells and the Robertsons, who, mouthing piety and sowing hatred, use the Bible to justify their plots against our self-discov­ery. Jesus does not belong to them. And it pains me that many imaginative people are so persuaded by these claims to possession that they turn their backs on the body of Western mysticism instead of reclaiming Christ for them­selves. 1 said in an interview once (and meant it) that the Pope, or Falwell, or a thousand others, may announce that God talks to them, instructs them, shows them the Grand Plan, but that the Creator talks to me just as loudly, just as cogently, through the images and ideas He, She, or It has seeded in my imagination.
That said, I must tell you that the deeper I got into writ­ing Imajica, the more certain I became that completing it was beyond me. I have never come closer to giving up as I came on this book, never doubted more deeply my skills as a storyteller, was never more lost, never more afraid. But nor was I ever more obsessed. I became so thoroughly im­mersed in the narrative that for a period of several weeks toward the end of the final draft a kind of benign insanity settled upon me. I woke from dreams of the Dominions only to write about them until I crept back to bed to dream them again. My ordinary life-what little I had-came to seem banal and featureless by contrast with what was hap­pening to me-I should say Gentle, but I mean me-as we made our journey toward revelation. It's no accident that the book was finished as I prepared to leave England for America. By the time I came to write the final pages my house in Wimpole Street had been sold, its contents boxed up and sent on to Los Angeles, so that all I had that I took comfort in had gone from around me. It was in some ways a perfect way to finish the novel: like Gentle, I was embark­ing on another kind of life, and in so doing leaving the country in which I had spent almost forty years. In a sense, Imajica became a compendium of locations I had known and felt strongly about: Highgate and Crouch End, where I had spent a decade or more, writing plays, then short sto­ries, then Weaveworld; Central London, where I lived for a little time in a splendid Georgian house. There on the page I put the summers of my childhood, and my fantasies of ar­istocracy. I put my love of a peculiar English apocalyptic: the visions of Stanley Spencer and John Martin and Wil­liam Blake, dreams of domestic resurrection and Christ upon the doorstep some summer morning. Gamut Street I placed in Clerkenwell, which has always seemed haunted to me. The scenes with the returned Gentle I set on the South Bank, where I had spent many blissful evenings. In short, the book became my farewell to England.
I do not discount the possibility that I will one day re­turn there, of course, but for now, in the smog and sun of Los Angeles, that world seems very remote. It's extraordi­nary how divided it can make you feel, having been brought up in one country and coming to live in another. For a writer such as myself, who is much concerned with journeys into the strange, and the melancholia and joy of such journeys, it's proved an educative experience.

I offer these scraps of biography in the hope that they illuminate the story that follows, and that some of the feel­ings that brought me to this novel will be left with you when it's finished. Christ and England have not left my heart of course-they never will-but writing about a subject works an extraordinary magic. It magnifies the passions that in­spired the story, and then-with the work finished-buries them, out of sight and mind, so as to allow the writer to move on to another place. I still dream of England, now and then, and I last wrote of Jesus walking on Quiddity's waters in Everville, telling Tesla Bombeck that "lives are leaves on the story-tree." But I will never again feel about them as I did when I wrote Imajica. Those particular forms and emotions have disappeared into the pages, to be redis­covered there by somebody who wants to find them. If it pleases you to do so, make them your own.
Clive Barker
Los Angeles, 1994