In a world of fantasy
I am back reading fantasy again. It started with the publication of ‘La Belle Sauvage’ the first volume in the ‘Book of Dust’ series, [i] and the prequel to Philip Pullman’s previous trilogy, ‘His Dark Materials’.[ii] As soon as I had La Belle Sauvage in my hands, I went back to Pullman’s first series, to read my way through all four books in the right order. Gripped by Lyra Belacqua’s travels through different worlds accompanied by her alethiometer while grappling with the mysteries of her own life, I am now waiting, rather impatiently, for the second Book of Dust. Karin Slaughter’s novels with detectives Will Trent and Sara Linton are waiting for my return, but once the hold of fantasy is upon you, it is hard to ignore.
Before travelling to Australia, I downloaded Guy Gavriel Kay’s trilogy, The Fionavar Tapestry.[iii] Written way back in the early 1980s, this series starts with five students at the University of Toronto, who are transposed to another world, Fionavar, where their destiny is to play key roles in a major war between good and evil, a war a thousand years in the making. I have just finished the first two books, and I’m about to start the third: drawn back into the evolving dramas and disasters, I am finding it hard to stay away from reading on, almost forgetting about the work I am doing at RMIT, and the family and friends I should be seeing.
The Fionavar story is an elaborate fantasy, set outside of any sensible world, and yet I find it both satisfying and exciting. Why are some of us so entranced and absorbed by stories of other worlds bumping up against our own, by the exploits of seers, magicians, hobbits or daemons? Other planes of existence, mystical beings, objects with incredible powers, the stuff of these stories is clearly unreal, impossible, and basically unbelievable. Yet disbelief gets set aside as addicts like me become drawn in to an unfolding saga.
Some of it has to do with the quality of the authors. As I am getting older, in returning to books I read years ago I find the best imaginative stories are so complex and demanding I have forgotten much that happened. Even the background stories are far more interesting than I remembered. I suspect the first time around I would have read as fast as I could, racing over details to find out how the story ended! Without the compulsion to finish quickly, the clever plotting, subtle clues, and intriguing asides become far more rewarding.
However, despite the plots, the magic and the adventures, the real draw is much the same as in any other novel: it’s all about the characters, the people, their loves and fears, the trajectory of their lives. While many are larger than life, the heroines and heroes are sufficiently normal (despite their amazing powers and attributes) to be like people in our world. They can be confused, disappointed, frightened, excited and sometimes grimly determined. Yes, we can map ourselves on to many of these attributes.
Is this all about wish fulfilment, then? Do we want to be Lyra, Frodo or Kim? I don’t think so. Rather, the world of fantasy is another way for us to learn, grow up and understand more about the lives of those around us. Through the stories we confront death and disaster, envy and hatred, and even love and despair. Novels about ‘real’ people do that too, but the vast canvas of many fantasy novels gives us the opportunity to experience life at the extremes, intense emotions, people at the limits. But it’s safe, too, at one remove, as if what we are seeing is on the other side of a sheet of glass, separated yet still very close.
When I was younger, my choices of fantasy were simpler, veering between talking animals, daring space travellers, and the adventures of an intriguing young woman.
Important among daring space travellers was Colonel Dan Dare, a space rocket commander who, with his friend Algy, would travel to planets in the solar system and on to other worlds, mainly in pursuit of the evil Mekon. Mekon was a small green chap with a big head who travelled around on a thing that looked like a far skateboard with inexhaustible power to keep it afloat and moving. He was dangerous, determined to destroy the earth, but foiled each time by Dan Dare’s amazing skills (no supernatural powers in these stories). Dan Dare was dashing, principled and totally uninterested in women, an ideal hero for pre-pubescent boys!
He appeared in The Eagle, a weekly comic, outstanding at the time with its high quality artwork, extended stories, and focus on science. I loved my weekly read, not just of Dan Dare but also the adventures of PC49, Harris Tweed, and Storm Nelson as they set about righting wrongs and (unbeknownst to me at the time) epitomising the colonial British at their moral best. Alongside all that were the cutaway illustrations of various bits of technology (engines, ships and aeroplanes) and updates on interesting science. Good for nerds!!
At the other extreme was Alice, an intriguing young woman, the Alice of the Lewis Carroll stories (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass). Lewis Carroll was the pen-name of Charles Dodgson, and his two books were elaborate imaginative stories, each time with Alice spending time in another world. [iv] Alice was based on Alice Liddell, the daughter of a friend, and the first book was the written version of a story he told her.[v] Alice in Wonderland uses playing cards as a motif throughout the story, and Through the Looking Glass appears to be a representation of moves on a chess board. Dodgson was a mathematician, and while most of the two books were focussed on playing with words, they also included a number of logical puzzles.
In some respects, these two books were rather more fantastical than Dan Dare’s adventures. At various times Alice would shrink or grow, usually because she followed signs that said ‘Drink Me’ or ‘Eat Me’, (we wouldn’t promote that sort of behaviour nowadays!). She would talk to various animals which would set her riddles, ask demanding questions, and even invite her to play croquet or join in a dance. Through all that happened to her, Alice remained straightforward, clear and principled. She was wholesomely normal, almost like the girl next door, and she never, absolutely never, put up with any nonsense.
While it is easy to see why I joined so many other youngsters in following Dan Dare’s every move, the fascination with the two Alice books is harder to explain. I suspect it was the puzzles in his writing that held me. There was always something to be deciphered or worked out: most of it was subtle (and when I was young I missed the majority of the clues on offer), but there was enough I grasped to hold my attention. Now, I also wonder if Alice was like a young version of my mother. Wow, that’s a scary thought!
There are two other mildly fantastical books I have read and reread many times since my childhood. One is Winnie the Pooh, the first of a series of four books about the stuffed toys belonging to Christopher Robin. Christopher Robin Milne was the son of A A Milne, the author of the books, and Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore and the other characters were based on real toys in their household (a few were added).[vi] Pooh is slow, amiable, thoughtful, proud of being a ‘bear with no brain’, considerate, and given to creating simple poems and eating ‘hunny’!
What was the attraction of those books? I find it hard to answer why. I guess I was in a minority even then, and I found there was something seductive about a slow-moving world, occupied by a gentle menagerie, enjoying the best of rural English life. Sadly for a possible new generation of young admirers, Milne’s book characters were flattened into cartoon misrepresentations by Disney a few years ago.
Rural English life: that takes me to Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Graham’s book describing the adventures of Mole, Rat, Toad, Badger, and a large cast of others. Wind in the Willows is a paean to a disappearing middle class English world. Published in 1908, it was stuffed full of large houses, life by the river, horse drawn barges and caravans (with the odd obnoxious motor car), and old traditions and celebrations. I recently saw it described as being about “four anthropomorphised animals in a pastoral version of Edwardian England.” [vii] Exactly, and somehow comforting for a middle-class boy in post-World War Two England, evocative of a world of incremental change, moments of drama accompanied by long languorous periods enjoying life, often simply “messing about in boats”.
Was nostalgia the source of my love for these stories? Not just that. They were funny! And why do I still find them comforting to read? There’s still that element of fun, but I think it is also the recollection of a peaceful childhood, the fleeting access to a safe and once familiar world long gone? Rat was a gentleman, in the best sense of the word, Badger a wise and elderly uncle, Mole a loyal and loving friend and Toad … and Toad was a lovable, foolish and impulsive aristocrat, without a care in the world, often getting into scrapes, but, deep down, loyal and caring, too.
There was one other aspect to the Milne and Graham books, and that was the illustrations, in both cases by E H Shepard. Other great children’s books illustrators have been employed for one or other series, (Arthur Rackham, for example), but Pooh, Piglet, Mole and Toad are the ones I saw in those drawings, and as I read the stories again, I still see them as Shepard drew them. Drawn to those stories when I was young, they must provide me with a kind of anchor, bringing me back to a safe harbour away from the stresses and strains of life today..
Between childhood and today, fantasy has gone on and off my reading lists with some regularity. Children are always an important incentive to read something new. When they were young, those were the days of Charlotte’s Web (the book by E B White, not the film), Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond, as well as tales about Peter Rabbit, Babar and a Cat in a Hat!
Then there were rather darker stories like The Mouse and his Child by Russell Hoban, and Stig of the Dump by Clive King. So many books about talking animals: am I obsessed by them? Possibly. One thing I do know, sadly but not surprisingly, is that as children grow up, they take their childhood books with them: if they hadn’t, I’d be rereading them right now!
One child initiated a more recent fantasy reading cycle, starting when I first read Sandry’s Book, the first volume of Tamora Piece’s quartet, ‘The Circle of Magic’, which appeared in 1997.[viii] This was complex stuff, and the four characters were to appear in twelve books in total. Her books combined drama, magic, wars and mysteries, and I have been a fan of her work ever since. Those books comprised one series, and Tamora Pierce has written several others. Compelling reading, but those collections have moved away too! Starting The Circle of Magic reminded of Guy Gavriel Kay, and sent me back to The Fionavar Tapestry for the second time. And here I am again: Fionavar for the third time, and just as compelling.
Of course, I’m living in a world of fantasy. Literally so. If fantasy is another world, like but also unlike our own, then surely the world Donald Trump has concocted is fantasy. It is a world where numbers are meaningless, facts are false, and people are appointed to positions because they oppose the organisation they have been invited to lead. It is a world of castles and green meadows (alright, of Mar-a-Lago and golf courses). Above all it is a world where words can mean what you want them to mean, and if the meaning you thought they had turns out to be wrong or inconvenient, you can say this is a matter of misspeaking or mishearing.
In a fantasy world, we know there will be trials, battles, tricksters and liars. Heroes and heroines will emerge through the chaos and restore order and the rule of law. We also know that those who save us will be hard to recognise, and there will be false helpers, frauds and charlatans. We have learnt to beware those who purport to help, but who are really pursuing their own narrow self-interest. If anything, the world of fantasy novels tells us that those who we should trust are not the people who are in positions of power, whose families have been rulers or advisers in the past. Typically, the end of the battle between good and evil is almost always a clean sweep, brushing aside those who were in charge before, and even many who were striving to make changes. Fantasies have a large element of tragedy.
I wonder if that will be true here? I confess that I’m worried when I see some of the old names reappearing, implicitly offering (or explicitly pushing themselves) to be back in the game, perhaps even leading the revolt against Trump. They may be good people, but their history has damaged them. One of Tamora Pierce’s most loved characters, Tris, in the Circle of Magic books, gets drawn into helping in a war. Once she had done that, she feels she has to abandon the prominent role she had played in the past as a magician. Damaged by her association with armies and battles, she realises her future has to be different, choosing to set aside her remarkable skills and become a day-to-day mage. It was a telling moment, late in the series: can our warriors of prior years make the same decision? Will she? [ix]
When the world you are living in becomes a fantasy, the temptation to live in other imagined worlds becomes even stronger. If my choice today is to read about Trump’s latest tweets and lies, or settle into a couple of hours in Fionavar, the decision is easy. Among fantasy worlds, some are clearly preferable to others. But running away to Guy Gavriel Kay’s world is hiding, a short term escape. We need to sort out today’s ‘real’ world, and do so sooner rather than later. We have to find those people who are going to sweep the accumulated disasters away and allow us to start afresh. Or am I experiencing another form of delusion, unable to recognise such a cleansing resolution only happens in fantasy fiction?
Hurry up Philip Pullman. I need the second volume of the Book of Dust. To escape. Now!!
[i] Philip Pullman, The Book of Dust, Volume 1: La Belle Sauvage, Knopf, 2017
[ii] Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials, the three volumes published as a boxed set by Yearling in 2001
[iii] Reprinted in 2001 by Ace, the three books are The Summer Tree, The wandering Fire, and The Darkest Road.
[iv] Alice in Wonderland was first published by Methuen in 1865. I read the 1940s Birn Brothers edition!
[v] There is much modern speculation as to whether or not Dodgson was a paedophile and his photographs of nude young girls. As many who believed he had paedophile tendencies, there are as many who have disproved the accusations – to their satisfaction at least.
[vi] A A Milne, Winnie the Pooh, Methuen 1926, with Illustrations by E H Shepard
[vii] < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_in_the_Willows>. The book was first published in 1908 by Methuen; I was brought up on the 1931 Edition, with illustrations by E H Shepard.
[viii] Tamora Pierce, The Circle of Magic, Book 1: 2001 edition ‘The Magic in the Weaving (US title) Scholastic.
[ix] Although the theme is known, the final book is still not completed
