About
fifty pages from the end of GATEWAY, the character of Rex makes this
pronouncement on his friend the Duc de Richleau:
I know that on many questions you’re a real old-fashioned die-hard. You’d like to see Britishers still running a third of the world, and playing polo in their off-time, with a Two-Power Navy to back them up. But you’ve liberal views where human relations are concerned.
After
one reads GATEWAY TO HELL, it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion
that author Dennis Wheatley was intentionally projecting his own
sociological outlook upon the leader of his “Four Musketeers.
Appearing in 1970, GATEWAY was the last-published in Wheatley’s
“Musketeers” series, and though Wheatley claims that the action
of the novel begins in 1953, it’s obvious that he wrote it during
the 1960s. He mentions a “Doctor Luther King,” even though MLK
wasn’t on the political map until 1955, when he lead the Montgomery
bus boycott. Further, the heroes’ Satanic adversaries this time
round have organized a movement called “Black Power,” which group
advocates the violent overthrow of White Culture as did the more
extreme movements of the sixties—none of which were seriously
active in the 1950s. Even the name “Black Power” is clearly
indebted to a political slogan that didn’t gain general acceptance
until the decade of the sixties (though Richard Wright did author a
book titled “Black Power” in 1954). Clearly, Wheatley took
material from events of the 1960s and back-dated it so that he could
show his heroes fighting Satanic evil when they were still relatively
hale and hearty—unlike the author, who passed seven years after
GATEWAY’s publication.
The
“Musketeers” series consisted of eleven books, and only the three
I’ve reviewed on this blog were outright occult adventures, the
rest falling under the “espionage” rubric. I’ve still read no
biographical material on the series’ author, though I’d
encountered one or two assertions of his conservative politics even
before beginning this review-project. Initially I tried to give
Wheatley the benefit of the doubt in my review of THE DEVIL RIDESOUT, choosing to read the book’s multi-cultural villains as being
an indicator of the author’s cosmopolitan sentiments. However,
STRANGE CONFLICT made this interpretation untenable, and in GATEWAY
Wheatley apparently takes great pleasure in depicting his
multinational cabal of Satanists to represent almost every culture on
the map except those from France, Britain and the U.S. To be sure,
some of the villains are Caucasian—particular a leftover German
Nazi, who still nurses grudges against the Allies. Still, Wheatley
seems a little too pre-occupied with how many of his walk-on villains
are of mixed race.
In
DEVIL, three of the musketeers have to rescue one of their number
when he’s seduced into Satanism. In GATEWAY the author basically
repeats this trope. American Rex Van Rijn apparently embezzles funds
from the family bank and flees to join a Satanist group in South
America. This supposedly explains the alliance of the leftover Nazi
with the Satanists, though it’s a little off-putting that the
author expects readers to accept a Nazi who allies himself to a
“Black Power” movement. To be sure, the aim of the Satanist
leader is to incite massive anti-white riots around the world purely
to foment suffering, not to empower people of color, and thus it’s
implicit that all of the “colored people” in the evil group are
basically selling their kindred down the river.
Before
exploring the novel’s politics further, I’ll note that there are
some decent thrill-sequences here, though far less than STRANGE
CONFLICT, which also showed Wheatley emphasizing politics over
metaphysics. The pace is much slower, as the heroes make slow
progress tracking down their law-breaking buddy, and Wheatley lets
the action bog down several times, particularly in a time-wasting
sequence where two of the good guys have to go on trial for murder.
Where occult theory is concerned, Wheatley does try to be
cosmopolitan, as there are a number of arguments set to prove the
existence of both ‘good pagans” and “good witches.” But often
the author interrupts the action so that his well-educated characters
can descant about this or that topic for pages at a time. Like the
voodoo-villain of STRANGE CONFLICT, the villains here are
one-dimensional blackhearts. I suspect the reason that DEVIL’s bad
guy was so persuasive was that Wheatley based Mocata in part on the
real-life occultist Aleister Crowley.
In
contrast to STRANGE CONFLICT, there are no attempts here to justify
negative racial characterizations; all the evildoers, light or dark,
are defined by their resentment of the people who are currently in
charge. As one sees in the above quote, Wheatley assures his readers
that the book’s heroes are basically respectful toward people of
all religions and ethnicities. Still, though the author takes pains
to acknowledge the many ways that people-of-color have suffered in
White Culture, he’s never passionate about those injustices, as he
is about his fears of a massive race-war.
I
certainly do not disagree with the logic of Wheatley’s assessment
about the wasteful stupidity of any sort of race-war, and the
concomitant stupidity of anyone who advocates such a position, be it
Stokely Carmichael or the morons who greenlighted the script of BLACK
PANTHER. Yet, because Wheatley conflates this particular extremist
position with the bugaboo of Satanism, it’s impossible to believe
that he’s made a genuinely moral assessment of the subject. In the
final analysis, despite his attempts to ameliorate his conservative
sentiments, he’s just as much of a clumsy manipulator as his
political opposite Spike Lee. But in contrast to Lee, at least
Wheatley can address more than just one monotonous subject.
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