I skipped out on my weekly writer’s group meeting last night to attend a signing by Lois McMaster Bujold at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego. I debated about going for a few days, because San Diego is a long way, gas is not cheap, and it was a school night. But when I didn’t manage to talk myself out of wanting to go, I decided to make the trip, and am very glad I did.

Ms. Bujold was a very engaging speaker and answered a lot of questions from what I feel was a very enlightened audience. I’ve been to a lot of signings where the audience asked a lot of questions about the content of the books — why did this happen, what about that character, etc — but this group were more interested in her process and experience as a writer. Very interesting stuff, from this writer’s point of view. It was recorded for a podcast, so within a few weeks you can hear it yourself if you like.

There’s one point in particular that I’m glad she brought up, which had caught my attention while reading an interview with her last week:

I have come to believe that if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF are fantasies of political agency. (Of which the stereotypical “male teen power fantasy” is again merely an especially gaudy and visible subset.) (Source: Fantasy Book Critic

I think it’s an interesting observation, but I am not sure I entirely agree. Or maybe it’s that I disagree that fantasy should be that way, though it certainly seems to be the case with the bulk of modern popular fantasy. I’m currently preoccupied with the labels we apply to the different genres. Typically, we classify them according to their dressing — this one is fantasy because it has magic, elves and dragons, that one is SF because it has spaceships, time travel and alien viruses. But with all the cross-over and blending, this way only leads to madness and an eternally growing list of sub-genres. Maybe we need to start labeling stories according to the kind of story they tell, instead … but that’s a topic for another post, when I have a better grasp on what it is I actually want to say.

After the signing (I had my ARC of Passage signed, along with my copy of Paladin of Souls and a second copy of Passage that will be a gift for my eldest sister) I got to enjoy a long Girl Geek Gab. I paused on the way out to tell Sam, who works at the store and who is also the co-host of the afore mentioned podcast, Adventures in SciFi Publishing, that I was a fan of the show — this is a very out-of-the-box action for me, since it is not always easy to get my introverted self to initiate conversation, but it really paid off.

We were joined by two other attendees (whom I had conversed with previously while in line to get my books signed) and spent the next hour talking about just about every major SF&F fan topic that you can think of, with topics ranging from whether it was Eowyn or Merry who killed the Witch King, why it was probably a good thing that The Golden Compass didn’t do well at the box office, and a comparison of the relative sizes of particular body parts of certain Jedi knights (”May the Schwartz be with you.”) It was GREAT!

I don’t often get the opportunity to converse about this sort of stuff anymore. My co-workers are great, but none of them are into the SF world (except for the owner of the company, who surprised me by being a Firefly fan) and only look at me strangely when I burst out in defense of Star Wars at a company luncheon. Oh, they all have their own fannish pleasures, so they understand, but their different fandoms so we can’t really share them. My social contacts outside of the office are very slim to none (I’m such a houserat). How rare a treat to be able to say, “Have you seen Viggo’s photography?” and have them know exactly what I’m talking about!

So it was a good night, and not too late (I was home by 11), and hopefully Lost was taped properly so I can watch it over the weekend without having to download it. Next week it will be back to the writer’s group (another group of people I enjoy talking with, but also not into SF-dom) and maybe, just maybe, I’ll have something to share for critique.

I have burbled happily about Lois McMaster Bujold’s fantasy novels here before (I’ve yet to sample her SF — can someone recommend where to start?), but not about her newest series, The Sharing Knife, which first appeared in 2006. I read the first volume, Beguilement when it came out, right after I first read The Curse of Chalion, and remember feeling a little disappointed in it. It was well written, and the characters had all the intrinsic appeal that Bujold conveys so well; in fact, I was quite engrossed in the tale until I was about 20 pages from the end, well into denouement territory, and I realized that nothing much had happened, story-wise. The climax of the book, if it can even be called that (and I won’t say what it was, for the sake of those of you who haven’t read it), was pretty low-impact, not the sort of “wowee wow wow” explosion (and I mean that most metaporically) of Chalion (and of Paladin of Souls though I hadn’t read that yet). Clearly, as I finished the book, the story was meant to continue, and in fact I found out later that books one and two were supposed to be one volume — they split it up for production cost or some such excuse.

Well, by the time the second volume, Legacy, came out last year, the urge to know what happened next had faded a bit, and because it was in hardcover, I put off buying it. But a few weeks ago, a chance came up (via the Eos books blog) to get an ARC of the third volume, Passage, in exchange for writing a reader review by the time of the book’s release on April 22nd. Never one to pass up on cool free stuff, I jumped at the opportunity. Nevermind the fact that this meant I had to go out and buy Legacy first, in hardcover because it’s not been released in paperback yet. Free is still free, no matter how much it costs you.

Whew. I need to learn to cut down this introductory blather.

Because I read the two books one on top of the other, it’s hard to talk about them separately. And really, that’s how it should be. In fact, I would go so far to say that to really understand and appreciate these books, we’re all going to have to wait until book #4 comes out in a year or so, because my sense of the story being told is of one comprehensive arc, not three or four independent stories that happen to come one after the next.

Now, a lot of people might call these books “romantic fantasy”, because of the heavy emphasis on the relationship between the two main characters, Fawn and Dag. Another term that might apply is “domestic fantasy,” since the emphasis is on ordinary folk doing more or less ordinary things (as opposed to kings, gods, wizards, etc. faced with extraordinary times, as comprises so much epic or high fantasy). I think Passage does a good job of shaking off both these labels. Yes, the romance is still important, but now we see that it is merely an essential catalyst that initiates the real story, which is about resolving the differences that divide the two cultures that Fawn and Dag represent, and very possibly (we’ll have to wait for book 4 to prove me right or wrong on this) resolving or at least better understanding the underlying evil that plagues both societies. As for domesticity, there’s till plenty of that (maybe too much, but more on that later) but Fawn and Dag are no longer even attempting ordinary lives in Passage, and much of the plot is taken up with their decidedly un-ordinary actions and events spawned by them.

I know, if you haven’t read the other books you’re helplessly confused right now because, really, I’m a terrible review writer. So let me try to explain succinctly and without giving away too many spoilers. The setting of The Sharing Knife books is remarkably similar to a pre-industrial Ohio, geographically and technologically, with the exception that there are no firearms. It may, in fact, be a post-apocalyptic Ohio — we learn of a long-ago magical disaster that wiped out much of civilization and still has repercussions in the land, in the form of “malices”, evil beings that are (apparently) spontaneously generated in random locations, and can suck the lifeforce from everything in the vicinity. Fawn is one of the farmer folk, who as a whole fear and mistrust Dag’s people, the Lakewalkers, semi-nomadic tribes who use magic (though they don’t call it magic) to battle the malices and keep the land safe. In the course of the first two books, Fawn and Dag meet, fall in love, and then try to make a life for themselves amongst all those who are against their relationship. The primary tension through these volumes is whether or not their relationship will survive despite all odds.

Now, I can’t talk about book three without spoiling for you that, yes, they do manage to stick it out together. I’ll try not to give away more than that, though. In book three, the pair set off (with an oddball collection of others) to see something of the wider world and, hopefully, find a place where they can settle into it. The bulk of their journey takes place along the Grace (cf. Ohio) river, and the story takes as leisurely a pace as the river current does — which is definitely not a bad thing. I enjoy the way Bujold lets the story unfold, letting her characters come to events instead of forcing events upon her characters. It doesn’t hurt that her characters, primary and secondary, are so well-drawn that just watching them be themselves is plenty entertaining. It is not a anxious-making page-turner in the usual sense (”Oh my gosh, what’s going to happen next?!?”) but I kept turning pages because it was just plain fun to read.

Bujold’s writing style throughout the books is a rolling, back-country cant well suited to the setting she’s writing in. It gets in your brain though, like watching a Firefly marathon will do, only you’ll be saying “blight” all the time instead of “gorram” (I did think blight was a bit overused … we have a lot more variety in standard English). Just don’t be surprised if you end up talking like a hick for a while after reading it (no offense meant to all my hick friends in the world!).

If I have one gripe with the book(s), it is a feminist one. Early in book one, Fawn seems poised to be a dynamic female lead — she is smart, curious and unafraid; her decision to leave home initiates the story, and she even takes out one of the malices herself. However, after that, her role in the story seems to drop off to little more than helpmate to Dag. In book 2, she spends a lot of time spinning and sewing and cooking and coddling of her mate — the one definitive action she takes (setting off on her own to go to him when he’s in trouble) only puts her in a position that allows him to solve the current dilemma. She herself is just a bystander, a position that becomes even more pronounced in Passage, when her role becomes little more than to inspire and encourage Dag as he explores his burgeoning powers and confronts some of the mysteries that make up their world. Even throwing her in the direct line of danger is only an excuse to test Dag’s abilities — she just stands around and waits for him to rescue her. I like Fawn, don’t get me wrong, I’d just like her to have the chance to do something notable in her own right.

As far as typical fantasy goes, this one is pretty anti-fantasy. The familiarity of the setting (at least for an American audience), the nature of the magic in use, and the very un-epicness of the narrative, create a unique niche for this book. It’s something that I’d feel easy recommending to people who are a bit leery about trying fantasy literature (wizards and dragons can be daunting, you know), and those already devoted to the genre will find it a pleasant revision of the familiar tropes. All in all, I was very happy with the book, and am now anxious for the fourth and (I believe) final volume to come out. While I have no idea what Fawn and Dag are going to do next (the narrative had no suggestion whatsoever), I do have a lot of suspicions and I want to see if they will hold out or not. Mostly, though, I just want to enjoy more of Bujold’s smooth prose, irresistible characters and compelling storytelling.

I realized, after the last post, that I tend to focus on what’s I didn’t like about a book when I write up my comments on it. That’s my inner editor at work, I think, picking on others’ writing because I haven’t done any of my own lately for it to pick on. Or perhaps it’s a vestige of my last writers’ group, which as a whole focused on telling the author of any given piece what they did wrong, or “you should do it this way instead.” That’s why I’m not a part of the group anymore.

As far as Ysabel goes, I was disappointed because it lacks the poignancy I loved from his earlier books. But while that may be missing, there are still a lot of real good things about this book, as you can see has been pointed out in the reviews posted at his site. I’ll excuse my failure to linger over the good parts by saying I’m not really writing reviews here so much as a quickly written up response to a book I’ve just finished. But I promise I’ll try to be less negative in future write ups, and include what I like as well as what I didn’t like.

Ysabel
by Guy Gavriel Kay

“You have blundered into a corner of a very old story…”

Ned Marriner is spending six weeks with his father in France, where the celebrated photographer is shootign Saint-Sauveur Cathedral in Aix-en-Provence. Both father and son fear for Ned’s mother — a physician with Doctors Without Bordres, currently assigned to the civil war-torn country of Sudan. This is not the first time she’s placed herself in harm’s way to help alleviate suffering — and Ned has inherited her courage. He’ll need it.

While exploring the cathedral, Ned meets Kate Wenger, an American exchange student with a deep knowledge of the area’s history. But even Kate is at a losss when she and Ned surprise a scar-faced stranger, wearing a leather jacket and carrying a knife, deep inside the cathedral. “I think you ought to go now,” he tells them. “You have blundered into a corner of a very old story…”

In this ancient place, where the borders between the livng and the long-dead are thin, Ned and his family are about to be drawn into a haunted tale, as mythic figures from conflicts of long ago erupt into the present, changing — and claiming — lives.

You know an author must be one of your favorites when you find his newly released novel in the sort room of the bookstore where you work and you carry it around with you for the remaining hour of your shit, even though you are still working. Yes, that’s the kind of draw the work of Guy Gavriel Kay has for me; it’s been a year since the release of Ysabel was announced, and I’ve been watching the inventory at work closely, waiting for the long anticipated date of its arrival. I even squee’d aloud when I saw the books on the back table — fortunately no one else was there to hear me.

Despite my excitement, I did not delve into the book immediately upon arriving home. First of all, I was really tired that day, and I didn’t want my reading experience dulled by fatigue. I was also still enmeshed in Vellum, and I knew if I interrupted my reading of that book, I’d never be able to get back to finishing it. I was also experiencing strange pair of emotions, sort of the flip sides of the same coin, that kept me from diving in as soon as I could. One was the knowledge that once I finished it, I would never have that magical “first kiss” again; sometimes when you anticipate a great experience, you want to put it off as long as possible, to increase your enjoyment of it. The second feeling was fear, fear that maybe the book wouldn’t be as great an experience as I was hoping.

I’ve been let down by Kay before, after all. My first encounter with his work was A Song for Arbonne, which a friend recommended to me knowing my interest in the Middle Ages. I was quickly hooked by Kay’s style, the poignancy of his storytelling, the subtle blending of myth, history and fantasy –everything just clicked for me and I quickly devoured every other work of his available up to that point: The Fionavar Tapestry, Tigana (my absolute favorite), The Lions of Al-Rassan. When the first volume of The Sarantine Mosaic came out, I was a little disappointed, and didn’t pick up the second volume until it came out in paperback. It wasn’t until I read both books together, a few years later, that I realized what a masterpiece it is. The Last Light of the Sun, however, Kay’s last book before Ysabel, remains a disappointment even after a couple of readings — Oh, it’s not by any means a bad book, and I’d rather read it than a lot of other fantasy fiction on the shelves. It just didn’t have the same impact on me that his earlier books did.

Sadly, the same is true of Ysabel, for a few reasons. The major one is that Kay’s distinctive lyric style, which heightens the emotional poignancy of the story (for me, at least…I know other readers who’d be put off by it) and elevates the tale and characters into a more mythic space, cannot survive the impact with cellphones, iPods and the World Wide Web. The book is set entirely in the real, modern world, a first for Kay, and while there is plenty of magical stuff happening, a true sense of being in a mythic space is never achieved. A lot of it has to do with language, and a lot of it has to do with technology. The hero’s solo descent into the underworld (which happens to be up a mountain in this book) just doesn’t seem quite so heroic when he flips open his cellphone at any time to check in with his dad.

This is also the first time Kay’s main character is an adolescent; even the youngest primary characters he’s created before have already crossed the threshold into adulthood. I don’t have a problem with young protagonists, and I should just be thankful that Ned isn’t a stereotypical angst-ridden teen. He’s a pretty normal kid, up until the start of the book, but that normalness is almost a drawback here. Aside from his concern for his mom, he has no depth, nothing that makes him stand out as a character we want to care about; I might even go so far as to say he’s a typical Mary-Sue — the average kid unexpectedly granted extraordinary abilities.

The most interesting characters (including, even, the surprise appearance of a couple of familiar faces from one of Kay’s other books — I won’t spoil the surprise by saying who) are those we see the least of, the three ancient individuals in whose story Ned becomes entangled. Even though Kay’s explored the tragic lovers’ triangle before (twice, actually, in the Fionavar Tapestry and The Lions of Al-Rassan), I wouldn’t have minded a repeat here, if only we’d been able to see more of it. These are the only three characters with real depth in the tale, and we are left guessing at most of their history together, tantalizing glimpse of the great story behind the series of events that make up the novel.

I guess what I miss most is the emotional impact that Kay’s earlier works seemed to have. I want to be moved to tears, like when Dianora walks into the sea or Diarmuid rides into battle for the last time or Rodrigo and Ammar must duel to the death. I want to be struck with the mystery of seeing a riselka, and feel the joy at discovering an unexpected love. That’s what I want most from a Kay novel, and I’m disappointed not to have found it once again. Well, you can’t strike gold every time, right? I’ll just have to put my hopes on hold until Kay’s next book is ready for me to read.

Upcoming:
Stealing Fire from the Gods by James Bonnet
Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West by Hampton Sides
Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison

For what must be thirty years now, my absolute favorite book — the one I would never surrender from my library for any reason — has been Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. I was a unicorn-enamored girl when I first read it (I used to think I was half-unicorn), which explains my early enthusiasm for it, but as I grew older and more sophisticated I only grew to appreciate the beauty of the novel in its entirety. Or maybe it was the beauty of the book that kindled my ardor for unicorns, without my realizing why. It’s become for me a kind of comfort food, the place I go when I find myself in need of emotional restoration. Not often. I’ve probably only read it twice in the past ten years. But it’s always there, in my heart, a feeling of wholeness that I can pull out and remember when I have need.

Just this week, I was filling out an introductory form for an online community, and I had to state who my two favorite book characters were. I had to think about that for a long moment, because there are just so many. How do you choose? But then, looking at the list of books I had just put down a few minutes before (also a difficult choice!), I knew the answer. Not the Unicorn, Amalthea. She is beauty and love, but not much else. No, not her, but Schmendrick. Which kind of surprised me. As a young reader, I let myself be beguiled by his ridiculous name into thinking that the character was ridiculous as well, a childish impression reinforced by the animated version of the story (an excellent adaptation, in my opinion) where a big nose and nasaly voice contribute to image of Schmendrick as a lucky fool, and little else. It’s taken me this long, thirty years of reading, to really appreciate the character and what he represents in the book. How aptly he portrays the human condition, the pure potential we each possess, trapped within a shell of mediocrity that can only be conquered by acceptance. If I had thought about the book in my twenties, I probably would have picked Lir as my favorite character, and perhaps in my fifties I will prefer (and have a greater understanding) of Molly Grue. By the time I’m 80 I may prefer the cat, or the skull. Who can say? Right now, though, it is Schmendrick who speaks to me.

A couple weeks ago, a sequel to The Last Unicorn won the 2006 Hugo award for best novellette, and I’ve just discovered that
you can read the story, Two Hearts, online at the Fantasy & Science Fiction website. It is a bittersweet read. The story itself, I mean, is bittersweet, as you might expect, but so is the fact that it simply leaves you craving more. It’s too short, by far, and while I really enjoyed the narrator of the story as a character (a young girl trying to save her village from a griffin), I feel a little cheated by the use of the first person. I always do, anymore; too often I think it is the author’s lazy way out of having to think beyond a single point of view. And while the girl’s story was good, I feel that she stands in the way of really engaging with the characters I know and love from the original; there’s too much she doesn’t understand or doesn’t hear. Ultimately, while it is a good story, I don’t understand the point of it in relation to the novel. Is it meant to be an epilogue? Is it meant to stand on its own? I don’t think it does either really well. If The Last Unicorn is comfort food, then Two Hearts is like sorbet for dessert when you really want ice cream — it tastes good on the tongue but you’re not really satisfied when you’re finished.

Okay, I apologize for the horrible simile, but I am curious as to what other people think of the story.

Mostly for my own reference, I’m putting down some (to me) significant quotes from other essays in the Lewis book.

“The Novels of Charles William”

Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find the incredible.

“On Three Ways of Writing for Children”

It is much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanged woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. This is a special kind of longing. The boy reading the school story of the type I have in mind desires success and is unhappy (once the book is over) because he can’t get it: the boy reading the fairy tale desires and is happy in the very fact of desiring. For his mind has not been concentrated on himself, at it often is in the more realistic story.

The dangerous fantasy is always superficially realistic. The real victim of wishful thinking does not batten on the Odessy, The Tempest, or The Worm Ouroboros: he (or she) prefers stories about millionaires, irresistible beauties, posh hotels, palm beaches and bedroom scenes — things that really might happen, that ought to happen, that would have happened if th reader had had a fair chance. For, as I say, there are two kinds of longing. The one is an akesis, a spiritual exercise, and the other is a disease.

(This idea of akesis is one that needs further looking into in relation to the value of the fantastic.)

“Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said”

The Fantastic or Mythical is a Mode available at all ages for some readers: for others, at none. AT all ages, if it is well used by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalise while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. But at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of ‘commenting on life’, can add to it.

“On Science Fiction”

We must not listen to Pope’s maxim about the proper study of mankind. The proper study of man is everything. The proper study of man as artist is everything which gives a foothold to the imagination and the passions.

Stories fo the sort I am describing are like that visit to the deck. They cool us. They are as refreshing as that passage in E.M. Forster wher ethe man, looking at the monkeys, realises that most of the inhabitants of India do not care how India is governed. Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, whish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of ‘escape’. I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple questions, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers. The charge of Fascism is, to be sure, mere mud-flinging. Fascists, as well as Communists, are jailers; both would assure us that the proper study of prisoners is prison. But there is perhaps this truth behind it: that those who brood much on the remote past or furture, or stare long at the night sky, are less likely than others to be ardent or orthodox partisans.

“…the proper study of prisoners is prison.” There are a few people of limited vision I wouldn’t mind saying that to.

If good novels are comments on life, good stories of this sort (Which are very much rarer) are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience. Hence the difficulty of discussing them at all with those who refuse to be taken out of what they call ‘real life’ — which means, perhaps, the groove through some wider area of possible experience to which our senses and our biological, social, or economic insterests usually confine — or, if taken, can see nothing outside it but aching boredom or sickening monstrosity.

It wouls seem from the reactions it produces, that the mythopoeic is rather, for good or ill, a mode of imagination which does something to us at a deep level. If some seem to go to it in almost compulsive need, others seem to be in terror of what they may meet there.

“A Reply to Professor Haldane”

I wanted to write about imaginary worlds. Now that the whole of our own planet has been explored other planets are the only place where you can put them.

“Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”

This book is like lightning from a clear sky; as sharply different, as unpredictable in our age as Songs of Innocence were in theirs. To say that in it heroic rommance, gorgeous, eloquent, and unashamed, has suddenly returned at a period almost pathological in its anti-romanticism is inadequate. To us, who live in that odd period, the return — and the sheer relief of it — is doubtless the important thing. But in the history of Romance itself — a history which stretches back to the Odyssey and beyond — it makes not a return but an advance or revolution: the conquest of new territory.

What shows that we are reading myth, not allegory, is that there are no pointers to a specifically theological, or political, or psychological application. A myth points, for each reader, to the realm he lives in most. It is a master key; use it on what door you like.

The value of myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which as been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity’…By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies to the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly. I do not think he could have done it any other way.

I’m a great believer in synchronicity, or meaningful cooincidence, so I don’t believe it was mere chance that I laid hands on a volume of essays by C.S. Lewis just a day after completing Yann Martel’s astounding novel, The Life of Pi. I was just wandering around the library, looking for some papermaking books while the kids busied themselves in the children’s section, and there it was, perched on the end of a stack like it was just waiting for me to find it: C.S. Lewis On Stories and Other Essays on Literature. I slipped it under my arm with the other books I brought home that day because, well, I was hoping to find a topic I might write about here.

I never expected that the title essay, “On Stories”, would explain in theory what had been demonstrated in practice in the novel I had just finished.

It will be hard to explain in full without providing spoilers from The Life of Pi, and since I don’t want to ruin anyone’s first read of the book, I’ll start with Lewis’ theory and then talk about the novel behind the split.

The basic premise of the essay is that there are two ways of reading “romances”, or stories read purely for pleasure. With plenty of personal anecdotes as evidence, he proposes that some readers are driven by pure excitement — it doesn’t matter what sort of danger is faced, so long as there is a constant, inscreasing level of fear. For other readers, atmosphere or the sense of otherness, is a more important factor in their enjoyment of a story. You don’t have to guess which type of reader Lewis is, and I have to admit that, like him, I am of the latter sort. He tries not to denigrate the excitement-loving reader, but there is a subtle disdain for the type, which he associates with cinema and American “scientifiction” (this essay was first published in 1947 ).

The bulk of the essay goes on to elaborate on his preference for stories that rely on mood, atmosphere and language to provide pleasure instead of merely providing a series of exciting events. I’ll let his words speak more to the point:

Jack the Giant-Killer is not, in essence, simply the story of a clever hero surmounting danger. It is in essence the story of such a hero surmounting danger from giants. It is quite easy to contrive a story in which, though the enemies are of normal size, the odds against Jack are equally great. But it will be quite a different story. The whole quality of the imaginative response is determined by the fact that the enemies are giants. (page 8 )

He makes the same point about pirates in the next paragraph, and then later:

I have sometimes wondered whether the ‘excitement’ may not be an element actually hostile to the deeper imagination. In inferior romances…we often come across an really suggestive idea. But the author has no expedient for keeping the story on the move except that of putting his hero into violent danger. In the hurry and scurry of his escapes the poetry of the basic idea is lost. (page 10 )

And later yet again:

Good stories often introduce the marvellous or supernatural, and nothing about Story has been so often misunderstood at this. Thus, for example, Dr Johnson, if I remember rightly, thought that children liked stories of the marvellous because they were too ignorant to know that they were impossible…Belief is at best irrelvant; it may be a positive disadvantage. (page 12 )

While he does not explicitely state the point (it’s couched in examples too numerous to quote), the purpose of the marvellous in a story is united with the purpose of Art itself: “to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.” (page 10 ) Which is why, I expect, that I have always favored fiction with some element of the fantastic. Real life is narrow and desperate enough as it is, right?

How often a person re-reads favorite stories is an indication of whether or not they read for pure excitement or if their imagination is being stimulated by a sort of poetry:

The re-reader is looking not for actual surprises (which can come only once) but for a certain surprisingness…In the only snese that matters the surprise works as well the twentieth time as the first. It is the quality of unexpectedness, not the fact that delights us. It is even better the second time. Knowing that the ’surprise’ is coming we can now fully relish the fact that this path through the shrubbery doesn’t look as if it were suddenly going to bring us out on the edge of the cliff. So in literature. We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which mearely wants cold wetness. The children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words. They want to have again the ’surprise’ of discovering that what seemed Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother is really the wolf. If is better when you know it is coming: free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia. (page 17 )

(The above passage doesn’t relate directly to Martel — I haven’t re-read it yet — but I wanted to keep it for my own reference. But I do re-read my favorite books, and rewatch my favorite movies for that matter, and the pleasure only deepens over time.)

Thus, Lewis’ “On Stories”. How does that apply to Martel? (more…)

I feel much the same way as Gregory Maguire when it comes to sharing the magic of reading with my children. These past weeks, I’ve been reading them the Chronicles of Narnia and loving every minute of it, and we’ll go see the movie for the second time tomorrow. The best part is when I overhear them working Narnia into their play, or when Anna confesses to me, “Yesterday, I looked in the back of my closet to see if I could get into Narnia.” See, I did the same thing when I was a kid. I love being able to share that magic with them.

Unsurprisingly, there is much in the media these days about C.S. Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia. Personally, I am thrilled with anticipation at the impending theatrical release of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, even if it is Disney, and even though I know should maintain at least a small degree of cynicism about potential changes the filmmakers might have made to what has been one of my favorite stories since I first read it in the fourth grade. Look what Hollywood did to Earthsea, after all. But I can’t help being excited, if only because in the trailers everything looks so splendid and I can’t wait to fall into that magic again, like Digory and Polly falling into the pools in the Wood Between Worlds.

The media seems to be concentrating on two themes. One is Narnia vs. Harry Potter. Personally, I think the Narnia movie will tromp all over the fourth HP movie this season, if only because with it’s PG-13 rating many younger kids won’t get to see Goblet of Fire. On top of that, Narnia is fresh, cinematically, and has been aggregating fans for 50 years, most of whom will be as ga-ga as I am about seeing it on screen, especially if it’s told as faithfully and as well as its cousin, The Lord of the Rings. As an extra bonus, Narnia has the potential to draw in the Christian audience that condems the “occultist” tendencies of Harry Potter, and likes to glorify the Christian allegories present in the Narnia books. That, of course, is the second major theme the media is focusing on — how much emphasis one can or should place upon the Christian elements of the Chronicles of Narnia.

By far, the most interesting article on the subject I’ve come across is Adam Gopnik’s “Prisoner of Narnia: How C.S. Lewis Escaped” over at The New Yorker, which tries to understand Lewis, his faith, and his creation without extolling Lewis as a paragon of Christian morality, nor condemning him for being…well, a paragon of Christian morality. What comes across most clearly is that Lewis was someone who was caught between fantasy and faith, wanting them very much to be the same thing all the while knowing that they were not and could never be.

As a member of the Inklings, Lewis is rightly hailed as one of the founding fathers of the modern mythopoeic arts, which brings me to the heart of why I am writing about this article at all. I know, personally, that Lewis inspired my first forays into mythopoeia — my first novel, co-authored with my best friend when I was 10, had many elements directly derived from the world of Narnia — and I’m certain he’s inspired many other authors as well. Gopnik’s article provides some brief insight into the workings of the mythopoet’s mind, starting with a quote from Lewis’s work of literary criticism, “The Allegory of Love”, which identifies three worlds available to the writer: the actual world of experience (it’s true because you can see it), the world of religious belief (you believe it to be true), and the world of the marvelous (you know it’s not true). Gopnik’s summary of Lewis’ observations is a succint “rule to live by” for any aspiring mythopoet:

“When we sit down to write a romance, then, we make up elves and ghosts and wraiths and wizards, in whom we don�t believe but in whom we enclose our most urgent feelings, and we demand that the world they inhabit be consistent and serious.”

This also goes a long way towards explaining why the Narnia books continue to be of such importance to Christians and non-Christians alike. It doesn’t matter that the tales happen to contain a message that is compatible with the Christian faith. The mythology contained within the books sustains itself without any external references at all, and its Truths are revealed through honest storytelling — actions, reactions, and emotion — not through didatic exposition or otherwise telling us what we should be learning. If Christians recognize similarities between their own beliefs and the mythology of Narnia, that’s fine, but even non-believers can take pleasure — Lewis’ “joy” — in a sojourn to a magical realm that emerges so completely from the page that even today, more than 50 years after it was written, kids are still poking around in the backs of closets, hoping to find a way in.

Minor Magus, an article by Laura Miller in The New Yorker, is a nice overview of the life and writing of Lord Dunsany.