Back to Kansas...
In contrast to the three novels we previously discussed, the plot of After Silence can be easily summarized. In fact we need to review it now, as it is in the story itself that all the major differences between this and the other novels begin.
The main character is Max Fischer, 38, divorced, a resident of Los Angeles, a cartoonist who has earned good money, a little fame and freedom from everyday troubles with his successful "Paper Clip" series of drawings. Narrating his story a few years later on he confesses: "I had a great job, some money, no girlfriend but that didn't bother me so much. In retrospect it was a time in my life when I was calm and on top of things. (...) It was a time when the only things I desired from life were not only possible, but quite probable." (AS, p.8) This tranquility is exchanged for anxiety and excitement when, at an art exhibition, he meets Lily Aaron and her nine years' old son, Lincoln. Lily is a single mother (she tells Max a story of her deceased husband Rick who, stricken by wanderlust, never cared much for his family anyway - but later on the story turns out to be made up), attractive and energetic, but most of all full of tough opinions on life which she spills on every occasion. Lincoln appears to be a resolute, bright youngster and the only thing about him that troubles Lily a bit is his penchant for drawing violent scenes: "Catapults flinging boiling oil, warriors. Every picture has hundreds of arrows flying about. I only wish they weren't always so aggressive. That's why we came today: I'm hoping he'll be inspired by this and start drawing Xanadus, instead of soldiers with cannonball holes in their stomachs." (AS, p.12) Otherwise Lincoln is "a secure, self-confident fellow who was generally fair and willing to listen to reason", as Max finds him. (AS, p.67) Lily is a manager at a low-key but stylish and welcoming restaurant "Crowds and Power", where the owner is Arab (he's also gay and, to use Max's newly coined term, a neophiliac, i.e. one who delights in novelties and spends most of his energy on devising ways to "modernize" the style of his place), the waiter is Vietnamese (who understands little of American culture - Max's cartoons included - but tries to memorize the names of as many of American celebrities as he can in hope this will help him obtain the green card) and the cook comes from Cameroon. To a reader familiar with Carroll's earlier novels, nothing is really out of manner so far: we're getting to know interesting people (modern oddballs, as usual, but still likable 86) and unique places, and we're listening to bizarre stories all along. At the same time it is noticeable (if only in the name and description of Lily's workplace) that After Silence is a novel much more deeply rooted in 1980s' America than any other.
Soon Max becomes Lincoln's best friend (a surrogate father, too) and his mother's lover (the latter happens, very appropriately, in France, where Lily joins Max for a few days' holiday). The first part of the novel ends with Max musing upon his new girlfriend: "Pragmatic yet moral, self-sacrificing, a firm good mother, funny, and a flame in bed... This was it. Lily Aaron was God's gift to me. I knew I must do everything in my power to win her." (AS, p.55)
Part Two begins with a story told by Mary Poe - Max's friend and a private investigator - which besides being a little gruesome is probably the novel's focal point, a miniature metaphor for its concerns. The story is of a couple who brought home a puppy dog found on the streets of some Thai city where they went on holidays. They nursed the pet and cared lovingly for it until the dog - so far "affectionate and sweet" - ate the cat the couple also had, and ate it fur and all. Alarmed, the owners took their pet to a veterinarian and than to a zoo, where they were told that what they'd been nurturing at home was not a dog at all, but an aggressive rodent known as Giant Siamese Rat. The animal was put to sleep, but the blood-thickening image this story evokes will stay with Max as he begins to learn more and more unsettling things about his new family.(87)
Startled by Lily's paranoid overprotectiveness toward her child and by the fact that at her home he can find no traces whatsoever of her late husband Rick, Max begins to suspect that not all of Lily's bedtime confessions are to be believed. The results of a little investigation he launches (sifting through Lily's shelves and hiring a private detective) are not at all reassuring. In short, what he learns is that Lincoln is not Lily's son at all. Miss Aaron (there was never any Rick in her life) kidnapped the boy when he was no more than a year old, and Max even thinks he found out who Lincoln's real parents are: Gregory and Anwen Meier, a couple living outside New York, themselves a little famous for the enormous sums of money they have spent looking for their lost son Brendan, for the house they live in: a postmodern, idiosyncratic masterpiece of architecture designed by Anwen (who used to work for Harry Radcliffe) and, finally, for being renowned dog breeders. Fearing for Lily's future and his own, still loving but apprehensive about his girlfriend ("Lily Aaron, the kidnapper") Max cannot resist the temptation to visit the Meiers under an assumed name(88) as a prospective client, interested in the breed of dogs they raise. Driving back towards the New York airport he gets attacked by a crazy (or drugged) motorist who shoots at him (but misses, or the gun was loaded with blanks) nearly causing Max's car to crash. It is then, in the instant between life and death, that Max realizes his love for Lily and decides to stay at her side no matter what consequences that might lead to. When he returns home his affection is only heightened by the warmest of welcomes he receives from both Lily and her son.
Max's love for Lincoln is genuine and it seems mutual. He is proud to be the one who introduces the boy into the rules and manners of men's world. Lincoln too seems to accept Max without limitations: "You're like my friend and my father at the same time. I know I had a dad but you take his place in every way." (AS, p.130) and is happy to have a caring, understanding companion with whom to share his youngster's secrets: "Lincoln wasn't good at hiding things. He was too open and friendly; wanted you to know what was going on in his life" (AS, p.111) But Lincoln has another friend, too: classmate Elvis Packard, a spoiled kid of rich parents who enjoys as much influence on Lincoln as does Max who, in turn, finds Elvis obnoxious in every way:
'Why are you always mean to me?'And further on:'Because you threw a hamster against a wall. Because you hit my son on the head with a flashlight. Because you step on our dog's tail whenever you don't think anyone's watching. Because of two hundred other reasons. However, Lincoln likes you so I will endure you. But behave around me, sweetie pie. I'm bigger than you.' (AS, p.126)
Looking at the two boys, I couldn't imagine what it would be like to live with Elvis Packard. If he didn't whine, he snuck. He lied outrageously, but when caught, he denied ever saying any such thing. I am making him out to be a dreadful human being but that's only because he was. I'm sure most parents know an Elvis P.(89) Usually these Children from Hell live next door (...) and for some inexplicable reasons are the favorites of your own, normally sane, well-balanced offspring. (AS, p.127)In fact, Elvis is more than just an irritating brat: he has all the makings of a juvenile delinquent and resembles in many aspects Voice of our Shadow's Ross Lennox, lacking only his predecessor's flair and invention.(90)
Before Elvis has a chance to contaminate Lincoln's mind with his own dark desires, an event occurs which opens Max's eyes onto his life's new horizons. At Lincoln's suggestion he and he boy become "blood brothers" by mixing drops of their blood - one from Lincoln's pinpricked finger and one from Max's forehead, cut accidentally during their father-and-son fake fight. For Lincoln it is just a boyish way of expressing his affection toward his foster father but Max feels shaken by the experience. The moment the drops of their blood were mixed, Max understood, in a flash of revelation - this is the novel's pivotal and most problematic concept at the same time - that he and the boy are in fact "the same person." He means it literally: "What I was left with was the fact this child and I were exactly the same person. Lincoln Aaron, or whatever his name was, was me." (AS, p.161) Putting aside all the religious/cosmic aspects of this situation, we will concentrate on the most immediate one which allows us to identify the novel's main concern. As Max explains:
This secret has been revealed to me so I would become Lincoln's father and teacher in one. To grow up again, only this second time with the perception and insight of your adult self watching over you-as-child, was an unimaginable prospect. All you have learned, combined with all the potential of childhood. Lily's crime would be my redemption. (...) Knowing who this burning child really is lets you get away with nothing.Part Two of the novel ends with just this diabolically promising statement, preceded by what must be the longest "internal" story ever told by any of Carroll's characters: the 25 pages' worth of Lily's confession of her youth (eg the traumatic relationship with an abusive drug dealer who would "lend" his girlfriend to some of his customers, and the disillusionment with the New York's college/gypsy-ish/pseudo-artistic, permissive culture of Andy Warhol years), the kidnapping and all the years she spent "on the run", afraid of being discovered and duly punished by the law. The only thing she stops short of revealing - and which Carroll already allows the readers to suspect(91) - is that Lincoln is not Brendan Meier: Lily snatched the baby from an unlocked car when an anonymous couple were making love at night out in the open. The fact she has been gathering information on the Meiers' life ever since is only due to a coincidence by which Gregory and Anwen's boy was stolen more or less at the same time and close to the place where Lily took Lincoln from.It could also be our deliverance.
Imagine the possibilities.
I did. (AS, pp.164-5)
The next seven years pass in silence, as Max moves in a "fast forward" fashion on to the time when Lincoln is already seventeen and the world is not the same anymore. "Crowds and Power" has become a trendy, literally crowded waterhole for Los Angeles' rich and snobbish elite, while Max Fischer's life has become a nightmare. He and Lily, now married, have a five years' old daughter(92) and nurture their loving, emotionally and intellectually satisfying relationship, but at the same time they are terrified to watch their son turn into a fully fledged juvenile delinquent who now wears safety pins, chains, combat boots and a "Fuck Dancing - Let's Fuck" T-shirt, uses drugs, hides an illegally owned gun in his locked room and belongs to a youth gang along with his friend Elvis (with whom he also shares the sexual services of their mutual girlfriend Little White and enjoys watching monster movies and listening to rock records like "Crepitating Bowel Erosion" by a group calling themselves Carcass).(93) Neither Lily nor Max are able to regain touch with their son and prevent him from the disaster for which he is heading full speed, but Max feels doubly responsible for Lincoln and blames himself for having failed to bring him up properly. Determined as he was to be the best of fathers, he admits to having made fatal mistakes during the past seven years, the mistakes which have made Lincoln "a dishonest, sullen, secretive knot of a human being.(94)
In the novel's fast-paced conclusion Lincoln, having discovered the truth about himself from the diary and notes Max kept in his room ("Now we do things my way, Daddy-o. Now that I know the big secret. Just today. It's like my friggin' bar mitzvah! Today I became a man!" AS, pp.187-8), steals Max's Visa card and, after a hateful showdown at "Crowds and Power" flies to New York to visit Mr and Mrs Meier. (95) Max follows him there but arrives a few hours too late. The Meiers had already found their long-lost son Brendan and it was him that Lincoln met at their doorstep. Furious and resentful now that he could no longer hope to recover his identity, Lincoln battered Brendan, set his parents' house on fire and ran away from the place. Max drives back to the airport, fearing that Lincoln will now take his wrath out on Lily(96) he gets attacked on the highway in the same manner he was before, but this time the killer motorist is none other but Lincoln himself. Max begs his son to allow him to explain, ask forgiveness, but Lincoln, irate, wants to hear none of his excuses; while talking, he beats Max up and threatens him with a gun:
'All along you and Lily playing God, thinking, It's okay we stole him 'cause we're gonna bring him up so wonderfully that he'll be Superman. King of Kings. (...) But you were wrong! (...) Why didn't you give me back when you knew? When you understood what she'd done!'(...)This whole passage deserves to be quoted because it connects the different threads of the novel all of which converge in the tangled character of Max Fischer - "playing God" as a cartoonist and a father, living out a comfortable life of deceit (and madness?), unable to stand strong when the time of payoff comes.(98) Even now, faced with raw, dangerous truth in his stepson's words, he sticks to his "mystical" rationale. In a more "typical" Jonathan Carroll novel this would actually lead to whatever redemption is still possible for the Fischer family: magic could be treacherous in the Land of Laughs, but it could also be used to a good cause by the characters in need and rarely failed them (vide Bones of the Moon and Sleeping in Flame). In After Silence, however, it is exactly this: the belief in the supernatural, the faith that there is more to our world that meets the eye, that apart from mundane there are other causes and other considerations to be taken into account - it is this sort of conviction that leads to the tragic demise of the story's hero:'Lincoln, you are my Guardian Angel. Do you understand? That's why it happened. (...) That's how you read my mind last night in the restaurant-(97)
'What are you talking about? What the hell are you saying? What do you mean, "Guardian Angel"? (...) You should have taken me home! Do you know what it was like last night, reading those papers? Suddenly knowing your whole life has been one fucking fake?'
'Lincoln, you're right (...) but let me explain this (...) Even if you and I had never met, you were born my Guardian Angel. Isn't that beautiful? And it's the truth; there really are angels. If you let them be and don't kill them! But no, I met Lily and that was my end. Because the moment I discovered what she'd done with you, I was supposed to make it right again. You're right - that was my test, my trial. I had one chance to truly deserve you, but my greed ruined it. Thou shalt not steal. I knew that. Thou shalt not covet. That's why it's all gone bad. It's my fault. You were such a terrific little boy before I found out, but once I did and did nothing... (...) All the blood's on my hands.' (...) But no, the blood was on your hands. You wanted to be blood brothers! (...) We put them together and there was God and I thought you were me! (...) And I was a good father! I did everything in the world for you (...)' He swung the gun across and hit me on the nose.
'This is no fucking cartoon, Max! I'm not fucking "Paper Clip"! Stop talking shit! That crazy fucking shit! I'm not your cartoon. I'm not an angel. Why don't you say the truth for once in your life!' (AS, pp.222-3)
Having left Max, unconscious and bleeding, by the wreck of his car at the side of the road, Lincoln and flies back home to finally commit suicide there. Desperate and guilty (and fearing imminent legal consequences for the first time now) Max drives to the mortuary to identify the body. It is there that the first scene of the novel finds him - the story is then told in retrospect up to this point - holding a gun to his dead son's forehead. But do angels die? Is Lincoln an angel? In what must now be interpreted only as Max's ultimate hallucination (while his mind slowly gives under the pressure from the past events, the fear, the guilt, from having to lie to the police and to his oldest, best friend Mary Poe when she asks him if he understands Lincoln's suicide note signed "Not Brendan Meier", but most of all from lying to himself all those seven years) he sees his son raise his head and smile, the strangulation mark on his neck gone in seconds:
Terrified, I put the gun to his temple. (...)Max does - and there arises just the faintest touch of suspicion that there is more to the hug than simply a mourning father holding the body of his departed son and that the "more" is not mystical, but grubby in a very much earthly fashion. All we are told is Lily's hysterical reaction on entering the mortuary room and seeing Max "on top of Lincoln":'What are you going to do, Dad, shoot a dead man? (...) Pull the trigger, but it won't work. Or maybe it will if you do it. I'm not allowed to. I gotta stay and take care of you.'
'Lincoln-'
'I hate this! I want to die! It's no trick. I'm not playing any fucking games. I want to die! (...) Hug me. Hug me tight.' (AS, pp.238-9)
She stood so near with the curtain in her hand. Her other hand was on her mouth and she stared at me, disgust, pity, and hatred all together in one look.Then, as he is forcefully dragged away from Lincoln's body, Max realizes what any of the characters from Carroll's previous novels would readily contradict - that all the magic he put so much trust in and built his life upon is no more but a fabrication of his own distressed psyche:'Get off him! Please, Max, get off'(99)
I knew there were no angels. Knew that short hours ago I had been given one last chance to save my son but had lost it through my madness and excuses.More modern in the problems it raises, more distressing and bitter in resolving them, more focused on the civilization as a whole rather than an individual than any of Carroll's previous works, After Silence - for all its flaws - is an immensely strong novel and it uses that strength to renounce and condemn all that the former six novels were made of, all that they stood for. We have already identified this bent by Max Fischer's spiteful reference to Bones of the Moon, but other clues can be found, especially in how differently certain scenes and stories, echoing similar ones known from earlier novels, are handled. For example, a waitress at "Crowds and Power" recalls how Lily got rid of two troublesome customers, simply "zapping" them with an (illegaly possessed) gadget shooting high-voltage electricity through the assailants' bodies. Cullen James uses exactly the same verb, to zap, describing how she put an end to Weber Gregston's indecent advances at their first meeting - only Cullen "zapped" him not, as she might, with electricity or nerve gas, but with a magical blast of orange light that came straight from her dreamworld, Rondua.There was no place left for me.
How lucky Lincoln was to be dead.
And he was dead.(100)
Among many symbolic references to Carroll's previous novels there is one of special significance: the arson perpetrated by the artless, wrathful, misguided Lincoln. All the magic of the Land of Laughs goes up in flames along with the Meiers' house which, reminiscent of Harry Radcliffe's architecture, is a building endowed with a personality. Anwen Meier explains:
When we bought the place it was only an ugly old chicken farm. My original idea was to create something Brendan would like. Childlike but not childish, you know?(101) A place with moods and colors and tantrums. (AS, p.101)Max's initial impression is one of a misplaced, bizarre, crooked piece of art:
I did an exaggerated double take when I saw the house. I also said, 'What the hellll!' because it was so strange-looking and so utterly, utterly out of place there. The colors struck me first - blood red, black, and anthracite blue stone. Then you saw, realized, the dazzling every-which-way angles at which they were set. Metal piping slithered up and along the sides of the structure like stripes of silvery toothpaste. What was this thing? (AS, pp.97-8)Inside the house looks just as postmodern and outlandish:
Every room (...) was a different world. They had cut through some of the walls and ceilings so as to build bridges linking one to the next like surreal dream sequences. One bedroom was only crooked objects at cockeyed angles. Pictures in free-form frames and the only mirrors were all mounted on the ceiling. A hole had literally been punched through the wall at foot level and filled with glass. It took a moment to realize it was a window. Another, called the Fall Room, contained only soft objects in two colors. (...) The most singular and frankly exhausting thing about the Meier house was the raw obsession at work. (AS, p.102)So when fire consumes most of the building there arise two aspects of the scene for the readers to consider. On the one hand it is a statement of a fact, a diagnosis of current state of affairs: as ancient empires fell under the blind, devastating onslaught of barbaric hordes, so, too, the Land of Laughs cannot hold any longer under the Sturm und Drang of modern violence. On the other hand, though, it seems as if Jonathan Carroll was carrying out - by proxy - an act of ritual cremation and scattering of the ashes, an auto da fe of sorts, thus distancing himself from the aesthetic and maybe even moral values that his old world had been built upon.
An interesting observation to be made is that the source of such a sharp contrast (a state of war, in fact) between After Silence and the previous novels lies not so much within the characters' personalities but in the rendering of the world's reality (vices and plagues, mostly). Lily and Max are neither more nor less romantic than, say, Cullen and Danny James or Walker Easterling and maris York, but when it comes to the matters of love and sex, their demeanor is surprisingly - but reasonably - blunt and down-to-earth. Compare this: in The Land of Laughs the use of prophylactics is only mentioned to intensify the contrast between Thomas Abbey's romantic infatuation with Anna France and the mere carnality, devoid of any nobler feeling, of her relationship with Richard Lee. Now here is a self-explanatory excerpt from a dialogue that develops when Max meets Lily at an airport in France's St Paul de Vence, that is shortly before they become lovers:
'Do you know what [Lincoln] said before I left? «Are you going to make love with him, Mom?» My son's now asking who I'm having sex with.' (...)One revealing aspect of After Silence that has so far gone unmentioned, present throughout the novel, is Max's art, the cartoon series he draws which illustrates his moods and expresses his (and the novel's) opinions and concerns in a fresh, crisply allegorical way. Among his drawings there is one that presents exceptional symbolic value, as it provides a "guilty" verdict on Carroll's own, earlier works, as well as a diagnosis of the 1990s western civilization's "state of mind." As Max describes it:I laughed. (...) 'That's a dangerous question.'
'You know you're dying to know. I told him yes. I'd be sleeping with you after you've had an AIDS test. Lincoln's very paranoid about me getting AIDS. He watches too much TV.'
I put a hand on her elbow. 'I already did. I had a test when I was in the hospital.' (AS, p.49)
The two [characters, the constant heroes of his cartoons] face the reader. Rising out of the screen behind them is a big hairy monster's arm. It's clear in the next second it'll snatch them up and eat them for dinner. Oblivious to what's coming, one says, 'Believe me, paranoia's the only sure growth-industry in the Nineties.' (AS, p.87)One way to interpret this passage is literally: paranoia seems to afflict individuals and whole societies these days more often than ever before; it was also known to Carroll's characters in novels from The Land of Laughs to Outside the Dog Museum - and even Max Fischer himself, as he just begins to suspect there must be a darker side to Lily's life, is becoming a little obsessed, too (and hires a private investigator to spy on his beloved which, Carroll skillfully assures, does not seem weird at the time. It is only having read the whole book that the readers may evaluate Max's conduct in a fully illuminating light.)
On the other hand we will notice that, as the cartoon's characters muse on paranoia, there is a real danger looming (in the form of a monster's hairy paw), of which they are not at all aware. Thus the actual message of this simple cartoon might be "You fear the wrong things" or "The catastrophe will come from where it is least expected"(102) - the paranoic fear is ridiculously irrelevant in the face of the impending real disaster. Understood in this way, the cartoon seems to address Carroll's previous novels: their detachment from reality, creating an intricate world of concepts and meanings which are disconnected from the crime-ridden, drug-crazed culture of late 20th century. Would Max Fischer have called these books - as Marshall France's wife called his - "goofy"?
Then again, would either of them have been right? Oftentimes in this guide we have tried to show how Carroll's writing, despite its ubiquitous "magic" is in fact as close to the reality as can be, if only due to the issues it addresses. What we are explaining here is Max Fischer's (and possibly Jonathan Carroll's) opinion: this critic is far from regarding the previously discussed novels as in any way "detached" from what is real and current by the end of the 20th century. If After Silence seems different in this respect (i.e. closer still to the world as we know it) it is because, unlike the other novels, it does not use any "filter" to process the everyday experience through - except maybe that which Max himself tries to impose, and which is bitterly proven to be a mere mockup. Whatever the case, it remains indisputable that After Silence marks a sharp turn away from what had become commonplace to the readers who were following Jonathan Carroll since the earliest years. As a stunning opposition to the fairy Land of Laughs it does not need to be wiping it all out: rather than that, it may work to create a macabre symmetry between the two worlds: one on this, and one on the other side of the looking glass. This idea finds expression in the words of the critic Roz Kaveney with which we will conclude this chapter and put a period at the end of our guide to the works of the infinitely inventive, perceptive, entertaining and, most of all, serious novelist that Jonathan Carroll proves to be. After Silence subverts everything we have learnt from Carroll's previous books. The flowing, passionate world of his novels turns out to be large enough to contain its sordid opposite.(103)