Fionavar
Re-reading The Summer Tree, the first book in Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Trilogy is both a delight and a puzzle. The delight I’ll explore shortly, but the puzzle? The puzzle is why I am drawn to books like this, stories about elves and magicians, other worlds and fantasy kingdoms, books that are often in several volumes, books that require a preface giving the names and relationships of the thirty or more key characters about to appear. It isn’t the complexity, which at times can be a might frustrating: who was Na-Brendel again? Yes, I’m fudging here. The answer is clear. These books are the stuff of dreams, the tantalising if foolish and momentary belief that all this could happen to me, pulled out of a humdrum earthly life into an amazing adventure, thrilling, risky, and yet fulfilling.
How many pages did it take for Kay to grab my attention? Precisely one! Chapter 1 of The Summer tree begins like this:
In the spaces of calm almost lost in what followed, the question of why tended to surface. Why them? There was an easy answer that had to do with Ysanne beside her lake, that didn’t really address the deepest question. Kimberley, white-haired, would say when asked that she could sense a glimmered pattern when she looked back, but one need not be a seer to use hindsight on the warp and weft of the Tapestry, and Kim, in any event, was a special case.
White-haired Kimberly, a seer; the Tapestry; and she was a special case. Phrases like that tend to ensure I’ll read on, and just a few pages later we are at the University of Toronto and people are going in to a lecture theatre to hear a paper being presented at the Second International Celtic Conference. Dave Martyniuk is there, feeling uncomfortable, (his brother is a speaker, but the topic’s not his thing), and then he sees Kevin Laine, Paul Schafer (both of whom he might prefer to avoid), and meets Kim Ford and Jennifer Lowell. Whoa, it’s complicated already.
A couple of pages later, we learn that high up in the hall, effectively invisible, there are two observers, a dwarf and an older man. They watch the five – they are the five, whatever that means, and the older man looks carefully at each one. When he is studying Paul Schafer, Paul finds himself pulled away from the inside of the hall, and finds himself in a forest, confronting the ‘haunted eyes of a dog or a wolf’. As he looks round, he sees a tall man, with great antlers of a stag on his head. You might not be lost in this story at this stage, but I was, and was again when I reread it. I don’t mean lost in the sense of confused, but rather entranced, and I have to know what is going on. Once again, I won’t be satisfied until I reach the end of The Darkest Road, the final book in the trilogy.
Some books when you read them again are familiar, comfortable even. When I reread The Hobbit recently, it was like an old friend. I knew the shape of the book, and felt comfortable with the knowledge that I could already see the journey we were about to make. There would be details that I hadn’t remembered, but it was as if I knew the underlying shape of what was to come. Kay manages to make that harder, in part because he keeps throwing in details, presentiments, warnings and irrelevancies at every stage.
It is rather like trying to follow a magician’s tricks. You know what you are seeing has been carefully constructed, and you know what you want to see is being hidden. This trilogy is worse in the early stages because what you want to see is there, to be picked apart from all the other information, but everything in front of you has its place. It is far too tricky to follow it all. It is as if Kay wants to keep you reading, and then, every so often, go ’Ah, now I see what that meant.’ Isn’t that a literary jigsaw puzzle of the best kind, bits and pieces embedded in the narrative, waiting to be pulled out and used later on? Perhaps it reflects the structure of the books: there’s much to be covered in the early sections, often as background, only to make sense when you have it all available to you, once the story has progressed.
There is a wonderful section early on when one of the five who has crossed into the world of Fionavar, Paul, plays chess with the King. It’s a game that is fascinating in itself – youthful aggression played against older wisdom and patience. But it is also a preliminary to a long and important discussion, as Paul learns about some of the complexities of the world he has entered. We also pick up hints and understand that the two women are to play key roles in the future: Kim has some kind of connection to Ysanne, a seer; and Jennifer’s beauty will draw to her a key figure. We learn about the Summer Tree, where a king must go and die.
It is as if we are getting some outlines of a complicated three-dimensional sketch. As each tentative line is added to the picture, it becomes more complex, not less. As we get deeper into the story, we begin to worry some of the things we thought were clear are not. And, to pursue that sketch analogy, it is now apparent that some of the lines are green, some are red, some are indistinct and uncertain. This is an intellectual game. What is really going on? What is true? Dangerous games, for sure, and just as intoxicating as the events you read about. Guy Gavriel Kay can write: if Tolkien swept you up with adventures, Kay has the same ability to construct compelling events, but also has the same skill to entrance you. Even now, as I’m writing, I want to keep reading.
Let me ask again: why are stories of this kind so compelling? I wonder if they represent some kind of progress in our thirst for fiction. When we are young, the stories that entrance us are only gently complex. In The Wind in the Willows, much of the story is an account of friendship, leisure and small adventures. Toad is foolish, but not excessively so. Rat is heroic, but manageably so. Mole is loyal, but not blindly so. And Badger is wise, but not oppressively so. There are dramas and excitements, but they are at an easily appreciated pace. Even the battle at Toad Hall is easily won, and without much bloodshed. Similarly Alice, in Wonderland’, goes through amazing changes, and confronts difficult people, but there is a sense it will all be resolved and nothing really frightening will take place.
The next step up, for boys when I was that age, are adventures with more of an edge. Treasure Island is my best example. There are real fights, real dissensions, and the risk of being marooned, of death, of disaster. At the same time we meet people who are more than just nasty: some of the characters are frightening, some are evil, and some are paradoxical. Long John Silver is sufficiently complex to make him a memorable character, a mixture of good, caring, manipulative and downright dangerous. From there it is only a short step to Bilbo Baggins and the dramas of Lord of the Rings. Now our heroes are complex, and they face very real dangers. People die, and these include characters that you had come to love.
I think the Fionavar trilogy takes us to the next stage. It isn’t just that the story is complex, just as it was with Tolkien. It’s not just that we are meeting varieties of evil, and horrible challenges. Now we face another development, where even the heroes are themselves complex, their actions often foolish or self-serving. More to the point, you realise they have some critical flaws, and that they won’t always be ‘heroic’. We’ve reached the point where, as adults, we are reading about individuals who are closer to ourselves, flawed, confused, driven by unsettling passions, tempted in various ways, and weak enough to lead them on to places and relationships they should have avoided.
As I reread the Fionavar trilogy, I felt Guy Gavriel Kay was offering me two books. One is a marvellous, complicated, twisting story, concerned with overcome evil and risks to the world. As in all stories of this kind that get us involved, things go wrong, mistakes are made, and for a lot of the time it seems like evil will triumph. If not sitting on the edge of our chair, we are certainly thrilled, worried, occasionally flattened, and sometimes delighted. Like many of the excellent fantasy books I’ve read, it is a compelling adventure.
However, the ‘other book’ is about the key people. Dave Martyniuk, Kevin Laine, Kim Ford, Paul Schafer and Jennifer Lowell are very real. They are driven by muddled emotions as much as by logic. They have their personal flaws ad predilections. You want them to triumph, but every so often you groan. How could he have done that? Is she really that oblivious to how she’s seen? Like friends over the years, they become both close and yet frustrating. These people might be in a book, but there are moments when you feel like giving them a serious talking to, and other times when all you can do is despair.
As older adults, we want story and person: we like a complex twisting set of events. We like the unexpected, the challenging, and the sense that everything might go really bad before – almost by the thinnest of threads – everything is pulled back from the brink. But without those people, those very real characters, that wouldn’t be enough. Is Dave really that blind to what is happening? Is Kim aware of what will happen to her? With a really good author, we are, as we are reading, partly inhabiting the people of the story. Well, I am, as I groan at a choice that’s been made, or smile at a moment when love or understanding breaks through.
Compelling fantasies offer a subtle way to think about ourselves and those around us. Novels set in our world, exploring complex relationships also do that. But fantasies give us a freedom to step out of the self and enjoy experiences that are no longer ‘typical’. They can invite us to ask questions about our motivations and expectations, about what we value and what we assume. They have the advantage that is all at a distance, but, for me, they are no less personal. In the case of some excellent fantasies I am reduced to tears at various moments. How could that have happened? I often feel I should shake myself at moments like that and remind myself ‘it’s just a story’. But literature isn’t just a story, it’s a window, a window into humanity and a window into ourselves.
To use the word ‘window’ seems to suggest that this is all about looking at ourselves, using a story to make us reflect: is this something I would have done? Have I made mistakes like that? However, fantasy does far more than tell ‘good stories’ and sometimes make us look back at our own mistakes and misunderstandings. That makes the role of fantasy sound like a reflecting board, but it offers far more. It is also a means to stretch us, to pull us out of the happy reflective times sitting in a comfortable chair with a novel on our lap.
No, really good fantasy doesn’t just entertain, it makes demands of us. Like all really good fiction, we are being invited to learn, to reflect, but also to change, to see more possibilities in what we might do. I don’t mean that it suggests we should start looking in the back of cupboards in the vague hope our wardrobe will offer a doorway to a fantasy world. CS Lewis was helping his younger readers understand more about the adult world they were entering. Others provoke more than simple understanding (and even Lewis managed to sneak in some Christian thinking, and a place for God in his readers’ eyes).
Good novels do more than offer escapism, and a sense that our world is acceptable by suggesting all the nasty, exciting and alarming stuff taking place somewhere else. No, they keep reframing and rethinking what we think we know. Lewis did an excellent job in helping his characters, and hence his readers, appreciate some of the complexities of the adult world, and, most important that what was happening in Narnia was also happening in Hull, or Bermondsey or Adelaide. Situations change as you grow older, and you have to take on roles and responsibilities that once seemed irrelevant (the stuff your stuff parents did) as you move through adolescence.
Kay takes that further. As in any novel, he presents the reader with real interpersonal dilemmas and misunderstandings. The twist of his fantasy in that it does something more, in that it allows us to imagine our way past present and future relationships in the world we ‘understand’ on to worlds, and therefore ways of understanding and behaving, which sit outside our experience. That’s why magic matters: it creates something new. In Fionavar, magic is uncertain, dangerous, and yet it also holds out the promise that we can do more, be more than are today.
Fionavar offers another important perspective, as excellent novels often do, it allows us to imagine who we might do mor than out current lives suggest, to get us ‘breathe out’ as it were, expanding our world to offer space to what isn’t really or possible, and yet which is important if we are going to grow past the prosaic. It isn’t surprising that children, as they grow up, delight in the possibilities of these other worlds. Rather, the problem is that as children grow up, they – what’s the phrase – set aside childish things. I would like to catch up with Paul one day and explain to him how his vision in Corinthians is essentially conservative. What did he suggest? “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (I Corinthians 13:11). The idea of becoming grown up in Corinthians is limiting, entering and succumbing to the confines of adult world.
I’d much rather adults read books like to Fionavar Trilogy, and so many of the other excellent storis like them. I want adults to retain their fascination with fantasy, not as mere stories, but as explorations of what could be, how our visions are compromised by our careless ‘sensible thinking’, and how our ability to remain interested in what might be is actually keeping us alert to possibilities and the benefits of escaping from sensible thinking – well, I concede, at least some of the time!
As far as I am concerned, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar trilogy is one invitation alongside many others to keep on seeking something more. It is a reminder that our aspirations and hopes are often wrong or at least confused. However, it is also a series that reminds us there are alternative paths to explore. I might be getting older (just a little!), but I never want to lose that aspiration to seek another way, to step past increasingly out-of-date conventions and restrictions, and try something new to help us do better than we have in the past – both individually and in society as a whole. Right now we are witnessing political parties and national leaders who are dragging us back to familiar and traditional ways of behaving. I can’t think of a mor important time to toss all that stuff aside and find ways to take new steps forward, to want to create better ways of living for our friends and families, and to want to keep improving society. Kay has it right: it’s often messy, sometimes riddled with failure, but the desire to change and grow must be supported. Read the Fionavar Trilogy and allow fantasy to help you keep the radical mid-set alive.
