Gaiman and Bacon (Part 1)

Early last Friday morning I flew up to Sydney to attend a Neil Gaiman performance that evening at the City Recital Hall in Angel Place.  I had missed out on tickets in Melbourne and was determined to see the Sandman.  Neil was to read chapters from his new novel which he described as a 'short story that had got away' from him, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.  Not only that, but groupies like myself, and I might add there is a sizeable army of us, would all receive an advance sample copy of the first three chapters from that novel.

I describe Neil Gaiman's evening as a performance, which for a writer is high praise in deed, not many have the eloquence, the stage presence (somehow he fills up a theatre, and its not just his clear well annunciated words delivered in a very particular English country accent) and the talent to take his audience, laughing and enthralled, all the way with him.  Neil traverses mediums with ease, his relationship with Amanda Palmer, his equally talented wife, has seduced the musical side of Neil the performer out on to stage.  A month ago at a New Years gig in New York Neil stepped out from the wings and joined Amanda front stage with her band accompanying him as he sang the theme tune to Gerry Anderson‘s Fireball XL5, something of a dare between the two.  On Friday night backed by the string quartet, FourPlay, Neil sang the same song with the pace and authority of a Brat Pack era crooner, albeit more shaggy in appearance.

Neil has been a 'friend' to me via the pages of his writing over many years.  I discovered him back in the late 1980's when I had the good fortune to access a collection of comic books by an astute collector.  The Sandman comic Neil authored served up story arcs of fantasy and horror, plundering but not butchering the classics of English literature and old ancient fables, weaving in and out of modern day via the imaginings of the Sandman and his band of brothers and sisters, most notably Death.  Death featured in her own 'mini series', a popular character, the traditional  bone and rattle skeleton of the Grimm Reaper usurped by an attractive young Goth, who gently, with compassion and kind words despatched the dying to the other side.  It was many years later and after the Sandman had published its last that I picked up American Gods, published in 2001, and sunk back into a world where old gods are dying in a new and disinterested world, in an America that had assigned them to the scrap heap, an America, without the gods and reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon's surreal nightmare.  Neil could write good novels, why that surprised me I don't know.

As an Englishman who now lives in America Neil's sense of place and what may be wrong with it is well honed and links in with a view that he is forming, or has formed of Australia.  Neil ended the evening with a poem he wrote two years ago to coincide with a performance Amanda Palmer was making at the Sydney Opera House on Australia Day.  Acknowledging the traditional owners and elders of the land, Neil began reading his poem with FourPlay winding out and curling their strings around him.  The poem begins, 'We killed them all, when we came here' and he spoke of a land where 'nightmares loped', and 'night falls down' to 'swallow up Australia Day'.  These few words lingered, and as Friday night would soon tick over into Saturday, Australia Day (26th January), we filed out of the Recital Hall, this poem from the Sandman ringing in our ears, a storyteller who understands the value and wisdom of the very old stories, and the horror we run from in the new.