Galilee
Author: Clive Barker
Release: May 19, 1998
Tagline: A Novel of the Fantastic
Publisher: HarperCollins
Genre: Fiction, Fantasy, Horror
ISBN-10: 0060179473
ISBN-13: 978-0060179472
Main Character(s): Mitchell Geary, Rachel Pallenberg, Maddox Barbarossa, Galilee, The Gearys, The Barbarossas
Synopsis: As rich as the Rockefellers, as powerful and glamorous as the Kennedys, the Geary dynasty has held subtle sway over American life since the end of the Civil War. But they are a family with secrets. Dark, terrible secrets about the roots of their influence, which the Gearys have successfully concealed over the generations.
Little do the Gearys understand that their world is about to shatter when an innocent young woman enters their glittering fold. Rachel Pallenberg never dreamed she’d ever meet–much less marry–the most eligible bachelor in America, Mitchell Geary. Swept off her feet by this all-American prince, Rachel falls madly in love, lost in a romantic dream that ends with their wedding day. Though she knows she is marrying into an extraordinary family, Rachel is not prepared for the nightmare she faces when she begins to uncover the secret life of the Geary clan.
For the Gearys are a family at war. And their adversaries are the members of another dynasty–the Barbarossa family, whose origins lie not in history but in myth, a family whose influence is felt not in Washington or on Wall Street but in the intense, sensual exchanges of flesh and soul.
When the prodigal prince of the Barbarossa clan, Galilee, who sails the world, seldom setting foot on land, meets Rachel, they fall in love–an all–encompassing passion that unleashed the long-simmering enmity between the families. Old insanities arise, old adulteries are uncovered, and what seemed to be a great American success story begins to erode, exposing its unholy roots…
Galilee is an epic from a master storyteller at the peak of his creative career, mingling powerful realism with the eroticism, magic, and grand metaphysical visions for which Barker is known worldwide. He stunningly encompasses the themes of his greatest works in this masterpiece: a tale of intertwined bloodlines that reflect our own divided selves. The battle between the Gearys and the Barbarossas is a battle between the human and the divine, between the natural and the supernatural. And as such, it reflects the struggle played out in every one of us, as we struggle to comprehend the mystical possibilities in our secret souls.
Declassified by Agent Palmer: Galilee: A Romance by Clive Barker is a Masterpiece of the Written Word
Quotes and Lines
“I’m making something entirely different. It’ll be a ragtag thing, no question, sewn together in its way as a small, nicely formed tale. And by the way, more life like.”
“Which brings me to her second remark: something to the effect that I was no better than a village storyteller. I smiled from ear to ear at this, and told her that nothing would give me more pleasure than to have my book by heart, and to tell it aloud. Then she’d see how much pleasure there was to be had from my bag of tales. You don’t like what I’m telling you, sir? Don’t worry. It’ll change in two minutes. You don’t like scandal? I’ll tell you something about God. You hate God? I’ll recite you a love scene. You’re a puritan? Have patience; the lovers will suffer. Lovers always suffer.”
“There’s more to tell of this matter, of course; but some stars take longer to show themselves than others. The paradox is this: that the darker it gets, the more of these secrets we can see. Eventually, they’re arrayed in all their glory; and it’s the very things we hid from sight, the things we’re most ashamed of, that we use to steer our course.”
“I daresay most of us live in such pitiful realms. It takes something profound to transform us; to open our eyes to our own glorious diversity.”
“Nothing happens carelessly. We’re not brought into the world without reason, even though we may never understand that reason.”
“It’s not always possible to stay where you belong.”
“That attempting to understand the big picture was to partake of a peculiarly male delusion: the belief that events could be shaped and dictated, forced to reflect the will of an individual.”
“This world was like a labyrinth; it was easy to get lost in, to become a stranger to yourself.”
“You can’t go through life worrying about what the echoes of the echoes of the echoes of your deeds will be; you have to do what you can with the moment, and let others take care of their moment when it comes.”
“Matters of the spirit, matters of the bedroom, matters of the grave. These are the truly important elements. The rest is just geography and dates.”
“Suffice it to say that it would break your heart to see her; and it would mend what was broken in the same moment; and you would be twice what you’d been before.”
“Jefferson’s extraordinary taste and passion for detail was in evidence all around me, but married to a wilderness of conception that is, I’m certain, my mother’s gift. It’s an extraordinary combination: Jeffersonian restraint and Barbarossian bravura; a constant struggle of wills that creates forms and volumes utterly unlike any I have seen before.”
“The house wasn’t simply a reflection of Jefferson’s genius and Cesaria’s vision: it was a repository for all that it had ever contained. The past was still present here, in ways my limited senses had yet to grasp.”
“I began to see that one of the curses of the Barbarossa family is self-pity. There’s Luman in his Smoke House, plotting his revenge against dead men; me in my library, determined that life had done me a terrible disservice; Zabrina in her own loneliness, fat with candy. Even Galilee–out there under a limitless sky–writing me melancholy letters about the aimlessness of his life. It was pathetic. We, who were the blessed fruit of such an extraordinary tree. How did we all end up bemoaning the fact of living, instead of finding purpose in that fact? We didn’t deserve what we’d been given; our glamours, our skills, our visions. We’d frittered them all away while we bemoaned our lot.”
“…there must inevitably be unholy business here, just as there will be sacred, but I cannot guarantee to tell you–or even sometimes to know–which is which.
“They all have their poetry: the glittering cities and the ruined, the watery wastes and the dusty; I want to show you them all. I want to show you everything.”
“My Galilee who has been, and is, so many things: adored boy-child, lover of innumerable women (and a goodly number of men), shipwright, sailor, cowboy, stevedore, pool player and pimp, coward, deceiver and innocent.”
“He may not think he sent you. You may not think you were sent. But you were born your father’s son and whatever you do, you do it for him. You’re like the fingers of his hand, digging in the dirt while he counts his bales of wool. He doesn’t even notice that the hand’s digging. He doesn’t see it drop seeds into the hole. He’s amazed when he finds a tree’s grown up beside him, filled with sweet fruit and singing birds. But it was his hand that did it.”
“In this book, as in life, nothing really passes away. Things change, yes; of course they change; they must. But everything is preserved in the eternal moment–Zelim the fisherman, Selim the prophet, Zelim the ghost; he’s been recorded in all his forms, these pages a poor but passionate echo of the great record that is holiness itself.”
“… it’s the image of little Atva, barely a day old, squirming from the hands of those who created him, and then, ignoring their cries and their demands, simply swimming away, swimming away, as though the first thing on his mind was escape.”
“So believe me when I tell you: everything’s fine; nothing’s going to go wrong; and you look… you look like a million dollars. I envy you. I really do. Your whole life is ahead of you. I know that’s a terrible cliche. But when you get to be old you see how true it is. You’ve got one life. One chance to be you. To have some joy. To have some love. When it’s over, it’s over.”
“My Savior is most diligent;
He has me in his book
With all my faults enumerated,
And I am certain there.
It’s only the Fallen One
Who wants us perfect;
For then we will not need an angel’s care.”
“He’s evidently thought long and hard about the paradoxes of our state: a family of divinities (or in my case semidivinity) hiding away from a world which no longer wants us or needs us.”
Luman: Godhood doesn’t mean a damn thing, all it does is make us crazy… We’re not that much better than them out there, when you come to think of it. Sure, we live longer. And we can do a few tricks. But it’s not the deep stuff. We can’t make stars or unmake ‘em
Maddox: Not even Nicodemus?
Luman: Nah. Not even Nicodemus. And he was one of the First Created. Like her [Cesaria].
Maddox: Two souls as old as heaven…
“I thought of Galilee while he was talking. Ha the same hunger as Luman was describing–unarticulated, perhaps, but burning just as brightly–driven Galilee out across the ocean on his little boat, daring all he knew how to dare, but never feeling as though he was far enough from land; or indeed from home?”
“I don’t suppose you want to hear platitudes from your old fart of a doctor, but if I may just say: you only get one life, Rachel, and nobody can live it for you. That means you have to take a long, hard look at what you want. One door’s just closed, and that’s a terrible shock. But there’s plenty of others, especially for a woman in your position. Just do one thing for me… Don’t end up like Margie. I’ve watched her for the last God knows how many years, drinking herself into an early grave.”
“Nobody, and I mean nobody, is ever deep in their hearts perfectly suited to anybody else. You have to make compromises. Great big compromises. I know I did with Hank and I’m sure if Hank were alive he’d say exactly the same thing about me. We decided to make it work. I suppose… I suppose we realized that we weren’t going to do any better than what we had right there and then. I know it doesn’t sound very romantic, but it’s the way it was. And you know, once I got over that silly feeling that this wasn’t Prince Charming–that he was just an ordinary man who farted in bed and couldn’t keep his eyes off a pretty waitress–I was quite happy.”
“You see there are times now, often, when I think to myself: I’ve lost my way. I’ve got all these tantalizing pieces laid out, but I don’t know how to put them together. They seem so utterly disparate: the fishermen at Atva, the hanged monks, Zelim in Samarkand; a letter from a man facing death on a Civil War battlefield; a silent movie star pursued to Germany, loved by a man too rich to know his true worth; George Geary dead in a car on Long Island shore, and Loretta’s astrologer predicting catastrophe; Rachel Pallenberg, out of love with love, and Galilee Barbarossa, out of love with life itself. How the hell do all these pieces belong in one coherent pattern?”
“No beauty without mystery. I hadn’t really thought about it that way before, but that’s nice. Elegant.”
“‘You put music before meaning!’ she [Marietta] said. (This was just spiteful; I don’t. But I think meaning is always a latecomer. Beauty and music seduce us first; later, ashamed of our own sensuality, we insist on meaning.”
“My father was a great improviser of stories. In fact, it’s one of the few truly fond memories I have of him. My sitting at his feet when I was a child, while he wove wonderful fictions for me. There were often malevolent stories, by the way: violent, bloodthirsty tales about the way the world was in some uncalendered time. When he was young, perhaps; if indeed he ever was.”
“…something about rubble making the fairest of worlds.”
“The Virgin Mary would have given up her pussy for Nicodemus.”
“The real challenge was my notes, of which there were many hundreds of pages. Some were midnight inspirations, jotted down in darkness when I woke from a dream; some were doodlings I made to break my own silence on a day when the pen refused to move. Some read like the jottings of a dyslexic poet, some like a paranoid’s stan at metaphysics; the worst are beyond comprehension.
I’d been afraid to throw any of them out, in case there was something here that I was going to need. Even in the foulest of this shit I thought there might be something that illuminated a murky corner of my intentions; offering a glimpse of grandeur where my text was squalid.”
“What’s wrong with me? This bloody book, that’s what’s wrong. It’s wearing me out. I’m tired of listening to the bloody voiced in my head. I’m tired of feeling as though I’m responsible for them. My father wouldn’t have wasted a day of his life, long though it was, writing about Galilee and the Gearys. And the idea that anyone, let alone his son, could sit down day upon day to report the voices that chatter in his head would have struck him as ludacris.”
“That’s how it’s been from the beginning: the strange, the grotesque, even the apocalyptic, has constantly intersected with the domestic, the familial, the inconsequential.”
“He’d always been a man who trusted his intellect: in matters of money and in the management of human beings it didn’t do to be too emotional.But a wise intellect knew its limitations. It didn’t go where analytical power had no jurisdiction. It fell silent, and left the mind to find other ways to comprehend whatever troubled it.”
“…I have been moved and changed by the journey I’ve taken, and I don’t look forward to its being over, as I thought I would. In truth, I’m a little afraid of being finished. Afraid that when I get to the end and set my pen down, I will have spilled so much of myself onto the page that what remains inside me, to fill the vessel of my being, will be inadequate. That I’ll be empty, or nearly so.”