The Risen
Peter Whitehead
Hathor Publishing hbk, 439 pgs, £14.99/pbk £9.99
Review by DM Mitchell
Peter Whitehead is a mythologiser. If one really needs to fit him into a niche, he belongs in the small yet crucial one with the likes of JG Ballard, William Burroughs, HP Lovecraft, Mervyn Peake, and more recently Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore and David Britton. Although stylistically the aforementioned vary drastically, in terms of motivation and psychological makeup they function in basically the same way. All have looped perception, all portray self-referential visions of the world. All of them see the external world as the superficial aspects – a mere skin – of an underlying world of noumena and sentient symbols.
Peter Whitehead’s novels are an adjunct to his film work of the sixties, although not a substitute. One could say that his films were essentially literary, that he was a novelist trying to make film fulfil a literary function. Equally, that his novels are intensely visual and evoke the cinematic. The Risen is a continuation and development of his book Nora And..., with similar plot construction and similar progression of unfolding layers of psychological discovery. But The Risen goes beyond the earlier book, into the realms of shamanism, magic, prescience and possession.
I’ve heard various complaints about aspects of the work – the repetitive plot, the stilted dialogue, the artificial characters. I’ve pointed out to them that one could say the same thing about Kafka. The basis of the book necessitates the portrayal of the characters in a specific ‘non-naturalistic’ manner. They are not real people – or, rather all are aspects of one real person – Peter Whitehead. They are different pieces of a puzzle which, when connected in the correct combination, unfolds the ultimate revelation of SELF. It’s not as pretentious as I’ve made it sound! Like Baby Doll, reviewed last issue, the essential element in The Risen is what Austin Spare called ‘self-love’. The absorption of the self into the SELF to the exclusion of the phenomenal world.
Two women – lovers – seduce a crystallographer who has become obsessed with a bust of the Egyptian princess, Meritaten. They spirit him away to their country home, where they entertain him with erotic performances while he attempts to decode computer messages left by the vanished shaman/scientist John. As the book progresses, the web of references and synchronicities spin out like the web of the great spider goddess and twist reality in a masterful way. It’s not for people with short attention spans. There are no pyrotechnics in this book; this is invocatory.
At times it reminds of Roeg’s film, Performance, with its claustrophobia and voyeurism, but whereas Performance was about the outside world, mirrored in Turner’s little hideaway fantasy house, The Risen is an escape from a world which Peter Whitehead had turned away from in disgust and injured idealism – as recorded in his film The Fall.
I recommend all of Peter’s books and films, as they’re parts of an interlinking, developing mythology. In fact, read them several times each.