The Batin

The Novel That Never Was

About ten years ago, I tried to write a novel. Seen through the haze of my imagination, it had the shape of a bestseller. An edgy, self-referential genre-fiction mashup of highbrow literary pretension and comic-book violence and grandeur. The sort of thing that one writes after studying Jorge Luis Borges at university, dropping too much acid, and getting infatuated with a classmate. It started like this:

Being held at gunpoint is not an experience I normally associate with the British Library.

It was going to be an anarchic sci-fi mystical adventure about a sacred Sufi tome called al-Batin ('The Hidden'), which granted enlightenment to whosoever read it. The Islamic depiction of Azrael, as channelled through David Luke’s DMT experiences, was going to play some kind of pivotal role; as John Michael Greer strongly advises against using real-life spiritual entities as characters in fictional narratives, the fact that it never got written might have been quite a blessing.

Looking back on it, it was just a really ineffective way to process the grief of my brother’s suicide. The main character was dealing with the death of his older brother, just as I was, so the mixture of painfully raw biographical experience and superhero extravagance just made the whole thing too uncomfortable to actually write. Worse still, I was obsessed with Grant Morrison's idea of the 'hyper-sigil', a creative project that functions as a magic spell to bring about the desired changes in reality. As I recall, he came up with this concept while working on The Invisibles, and realising that he was in hospital with a collapsed lung shortly after his author-avatar King Mob got shot in the lung. Accordingly, he gave King Mob a speedy recovery and an attractive girlfriend, both of which manifested themselves fairly quickly (he was a victim of his own success on the latter front, apparently).

Naturally, this appealed to 24-year-old me, a desperately unhappy postgraduate student, devastated by a suicide in the family, pining over a girl who'd left the country to return home to a stable life with her boyfriend and family.

She was going to appear in the novel, but I never actually got around to writing anything about her. Her name was to be Anandhi Blossom – a spin on Molly Bloom, heroine of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The structure of the code went like this: 'molly' is American slang for MDMA or Ecstasy, which is known in Britain as 'mandy' -> Mandy is short for Amanda, which rhymes with Sanskrit ananda, bliss -> the feminine form of ananda is anandhi. “Blossom” is, of course, a synonym for “bloom”, so the whole thing seemed to write itself. The Blossoming of Bliss.

I think the thing that finally put that would-be novel to rest was the fact that the real-life 'Anandhi Blossom' got engaged. The whole project was an attempt to court this one person, so her demonstrating her unavailability in an even more symbolically potent sense pretty much put paid to it. Oh well. That was the end of that chapter. It took me about 6-8 months to really come to terms with it, during which time I did all kinds of things to take my mind off it, like joining a Bulgarian choir.

All's well that ends well. I eventually realised that 'AB' would never have been a particularly suitable partner for me. Sometime later, I also realised that Grant Morrison was equally unsuitable as a creative influence. Case in point:

We won the [Brave New World TV adaptation] gig out of a bunch of other potential writers, mainly because we insisted on treating the World State as a decent working model of utopia, rather than a classic dystopia in the mold of Elysium or Metropolis or 1984.

Let's backtrack a little bit here. Aldous Huxley, a member of the Fabian Society and advocate of eugenics, whose brother Julian was Director of the British Eugenics Society, considered his novel Brave New World to be a dystopian satire of the more optimistic visions of colleagues such as HG Wells. It's a novel in which human beings are grown in Hatcheries and divided along a strict caste-system, with the lower castes subjected to oxygen deprivation and traumatic conditioning to ensure their subservience and docility. Now, there are arguments to be made that Huxley may have been hiding a kind of blueprint for his ideal vision of society in this dystopia, given his technocratic and eugenic sympathies, but on the surface at least, Brave New World is presented as a satire.¹

So if a self-acknowledged eugenicist considered the nightmarish vision of Brave New World to be a dystopian satire of his Fabian colleagues, what does that say about a supposedly 'anarchist' writer who “insisted on treating the World State as a decent working model of utopia”?

The harsh light of the 2020s provides the clarity required to reassess these popular icons, and the cultural programming they engendered. Morrison has been open about how The Invisibles was an attempt at occult social engineering, although he doesn’t use those words. Referring to the way in which themes and visual elements from the series had influenced The Matrix, Morrison is philosophical: “well, wasn't that what the spell was supposed to do? Quit griping!”

The series helped to popularise Terence McKenna’s ‘2012’ hype, which was reflected in the notes that my brother left before he died, in which The Invisibles and 2012 are both mentioned. In 2012, while I was repeatedly rewriting the first couple of pages of The Batin, Morrison was awarded a Membership of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to film and literature; this is despite the fact that The Invisibles featured a subplot in which Princess Diana had been ritually murdered by the British Royal Family as part of a Crowleyite ‘Moonchild’ ritual, and another subplot in which AIDS is revealed to be a lab-created virus intended for depopulation.

I wonder if the committee who decides such matters was aware of any of this when they gave the award to Morrison. My parapolitical sensibility leads me to speculate as to whether he is being protected in some way, but it is enough for now to recognize that the counter-culture of transgression, hedonism, and antinomian spiritual eclecticism that became so influential in the 20th century now looks, at best, hackneyed and naive, and at worst, a road that leads straight to the gates of Huxley’s World-State.

1. Huxley's stated vision of utopia was presented in Island, and is basically an Etonian version of Burning Man, without the art cars.