The nasty pair take the Boy down into the regions of true damnation to their master, the snow-white Lamb, who has no soul and whose hands were “folded about one another as though they loved one another”—more body language and a further insight, this time of perfect selfishness. The Lamb’s hands are in fact very important. With them, he changes men into half beasts. All of them have died, though, except for the Goat and Hyena—even the Lion, whose demise is truly heartbreaking. And the Lamb wants more. He wants the Boy so much that his hands “were moving so fast about one another . . . that nothing could be seen but an opalescent blur of light.” This puzzles the Lamb’s henchmen. Pretending to explain this, Mervyn Peake produces the major insight to which the rest has been leading: the brain needs the body, and the body will sometimes do strange things in order to express what is in the brain. In other words, watch body language.
Then the Boy is prepared to meet the Lamb. By this time he knows what is in store for him and he has to do something. Here Mervyn Peake reverses what he has just told us. Up to now, Titus has been a mere helpless body. He has to tell himself that this body is connected to a brain, and to think, in order not to become another half animal. Brain can lead body, and save it. The Boy tries it. First he argues (something most boys are good at) and sows doubt in the minds of the Goat and Hyena; then he acts, with a trick, and distracts the Lamb long enough to be able to cut him in half. And the Lamb is only sudsy fleece. This could be allegory (in which case, I am afraid it is somewhat wishful thinking), or magic. Anyway, it makes a perfect ending. The combined insights expose something we see all the time and usually disregard: that the way people talk and move is part of the way they are. It may seem like nothing, the way the Lamb does at the end, but I myself would prefer every child to gain these insights from being frightened by this book, rather than the hard way, in a deserted field a hundred yards from home.
Freedom to Write
Using quotes from The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, here Diana explores fashions in fantasy.
The writing of fantasy is much in my mind just at present, because I am one of the judges for the World Fantasy Awards (these are really only “World” awards if you happen to speak English, and they are handed out each September in a different venue, Montreal this year). Now, these awards are largely concerned with fantasy written for adults, but not entirely. Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass is one of the books up for consideration and we are trying to get hold of Robin McKinley’s latest.1 One of the judges even asked for my own book, Year of the Griffin, but I told him it was unethical, me being a judge.
Anyway, since mid-February enormous parcels have arrived for me almost daily, full of truly enormous books. The majority run from five hundred to nine hundred pages. It seems that books are long this year.
That makes them sound like skirts, doesn’t it? With reason.
Writing is subject to fashions like most other things. It is one of the constraints you feel when you sit down with a pen (as I do) in front of a blank pad of paper. Oh, God, I may be about to do something dowdy and unfashionable! The lovely, crisp blankness of the paper ought to invite a huge sense of freedom. But it doesn’t always. What it actually invites, in me anyway, is a challenge: How do I evade this particular fashion, or better still, turn it to advantage? How do I do this and give people something worth giving and not just what they were expecting?
What people expect is a very powerful element in their reading. A good half of readers, whether they are nine or ninety, are truly uncomfortable with anything that strikes them as new or different—this is why soaps are so popular—and some of these people get quite petulant if they get what they don’t expect. Minor examples of this are two reviews I got recently of my book Year of the Griffin. One was quite short and said, more or less, “This isn’t Harry Potter so I don’t like it.” The other was longer because the reviewer went through the book side by side with the latest Harry Potter, saying where they didn’t match. The extraordinary thing is that he should have expected them to match.
Now, possibly because fantasy can be about almost anything really, people are more hidebound about what they expect of a fantasy than about any other kind of writing. About six years ago, I got so exasperated with the way that too many fantasy books deriving ultimately from Tolkien were so much the same that I wrote a book called The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. For those of you who haven’t come across it, it pretends to be a tourist guide and starts with a map—like all the conventional fantasies do. Only in this case it is a map of Europe upside down—a brilliant notion of my goddaughter’s and you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to recognize!—on which my agent and I had enormous fun filling in idiotic place names. The bulk of the book is alphabetical, having entries on Astrology, Dark Lord, Dragons, Galley Slave, Inn Signs (“Do not be surprised to find that every Inn Sign creaks loudly. This is a form of aural advertising”), Orcs, Magic, Stew, Temples, Wizards, and so on. The idea is that you take a selection of these and mix to taste, thus making a new book.
Of course, along with events and other features being so predictable, you get predictable language too. I had great fun picking out the most constant clichés and calling these Official Management Terms (OMTs): “reek of wrongness,” “thick savory stew,” “acrid smoke,” and so on, and marking them as they occurred. And each section starts with a saying or piece of verse that has nothing whatsoever to do with the section. I believe Sir Walter Scott started this practice—he has a lot to answer for.
Bear with me while I read you a few entries. Color Coding first:
CLOTHING. Although this varies from place to place, there are two absolute rules:
i) Apart from Robes, no garment thicker than a shirt ever has sleeves.
ii) No one ever wears Socks.
Oh, sorry. I meant to read you Color Coding. As follows:
COLOR CODING, section 3, Eyes.
Black eyes are invariably evil; brown eyes mean boldness and humor, but not necessarily goodness; green eyes always entail Talent, usually for Magic but sometimes for Music. Hazel eyes are rare and seem generally to imply niceness. Gray eyes mean Power or healing abilities and will be reassuring unless they look silver: silver-eyed people are liable to enchant or hypnotize you for their own ends. . . . White eyes, usually blind ones, are for wisdom: never ignore anything a white-eyed person says. Blue eyes are always Good, the bluer, the more Good present. And then there are violet eyes and golden eyes. People with violet eyes are often of Royal birth and, if not, always live uncomfortably interesting lives. People with golden eyes just live uncomfortably interesting lives and most of them are rather fey into the bargain. . . . Luckily, it seldom occurs to anyone with undesirable eye colors to disguise them . . . and they can generally be detected very readily. Red eyes can never be disguised. They are Evil, and surprisingly common.
Now Companions:
COMPANIONS are chosen for you by the Management. . . . They are picked from among the following (pretty well invariably): Bard, Female Mercenary, Gay Mage, Imperious Female, Large Man, Serious Soldier, Slender Youth, Small Man, Talented Girl, Teenage Boy, Unpleasant Stranger, and Wise Old Stranger . . .
Though a lot of these are Tolkien derived, many are cardboard figures from role-playing games, which have interacted with this type of fantasy for the last forty years.
As an example of Warrior, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland offers:
BARBARY VIKINGS wear horned helmets and fur cloaks, otherwise you could mistake them for Northern Barbarians. They swagger hugely, quarrel hugely, drink hugely, and boast hugely. The thing they like best is killing people, preferably lots at once . . . All of them are excellent seamen. And here is what the killing is done with:
SWORDS. You are advised to choose your sword with great care and, if possible, have it checked by a jobbing Magician. . . . Swords are dangerous. . . . Here are the hazards you should look out for:
i) Swords with runes on them. Runes are almost always a sign that your sword is:
b) Designed for some other specific victim, such as Goblins or the Undead.
Both (a) and (b) are liable to let you down if you are attacked by ordinary humans. Others will be:
c) Designed for some other purpose entirely, so that when drawn it will proceed to raise a Storm or—gods protect you!—try to heal your assailant.
Be wary of Runes. . . .
The entry goes on to list nine more preposterous swords, such as Swords with Souls, Swords with appetites—these tend to devour the wielder in various ways—Swords that signal the approach of enemies, Swords that are not Swords—being made of glass or something, Swords in Stones and so on . . .
Now you’d think that after six years readers might have noticed some of these absurdities, or that fashion would have moved on. But no. One of the fat fantasies I had to read—a mere five hundred pages—Faith of the Fallen (a Sword of Truth novel)2 has: “He was too far away to see the green of her eyes, a color he’d never beheld on anyone else. . . .” One OMT of this kind of book is that people never just see a thing, they always behold it.
Another, calling itself Book II of the Chronicles of the Raven, Noonshade,3 has at the start, on the page before the map—yes, they all still have maps—a list of companions on the journey:
Hirad Coldheart, barbarian warrior
The Unknown Warrior, a warrior
Thraun, warrior and shapechanger
Will Begman, thief [see the role-playing game archetypes]
Denser, dawnthief mage
Erienne, lore mage
I think one of these was female. The next tome I hefted out of the box was all about a warrior woman. At the court of King Arthur, too. Worrying.
Anyway, here they all are. The same things.
And the reason is that people expect them. Many readers of fantasy would be highly dismayed not to have them. If someone asked them to read about ordinary people with eyes of no particular color, they wouldn’t do it, even if these people had magical adventures that were really interesting. The fashion for so-called heroic fantasy, derived ultimately from Tolkien, has been going so long that it has now set into a convention, and, it seems, is quite unalterable.
This unalterable convention is now getting incorporated into books for children and young adults. One of my less fat entries—only 382 pages—for the World Fantasy Award was a book pretty well straight out of The Tough Guide. In it, our heroine learns to consult a crystal. The Tough Guide entry for Crystal is:
CRYSTAL can be any color. It can be set in a ring, suspended on a chain as a pendant, or just be a lump on its own; it is Fantasyland’s equivalent of the telephone, with attached vision. . . . The operator simply leans over the Crystal and concentrates. . . . Crystal usually takes over where Mindspeech leaves off.
Our hero is a prince forced into slavery. We have entries for both in The Tough Guide:
MISSING HEIRS occur with great frequency. At any given time, half the countries in Fantasyland will have mislaid their Crown Prince or Princess. But the rule is that only one Missing Heir can join your tour. . . . They can be a right nuisance. All Missing Heirs shine with innocence (some of them quite dazzlingly) and most have very little brain, which means they will not pick up any hints as to their true status. . . . In addition, they all have a lot of inborn Royal Talents such as chivalry, extreme (and embarrassing) honesty, a tendency to give everything away to Beggars, and a natural desire for the best of everything for everyone. Heirs go missing for a variety of reasons. . . .
SLAVES, male, are used by bad Kings, Fanatic Caliphates, and some Wizards in large numbers as Guards, attendants, fan bearers, waiters and entertainment, and for Sex. Bad Kings and Fanatic Caliphates always have their male slaves in matching sets, as in the following official clichés: a litter borne by four gigantic ebony slaves, fanned by two beautiful young boys, a troupe of slender young athletes, and the door guarded by two seemingly identical Barbarian slaves, etc. A Wizard tends to have his slaves more mismatched but rather attentive, unless he intends to rule the world, in which case he will try to be like a bad King.
And there are OMTs all over the place: “Ah, my friend . . . There’s said to be a mighty curse on anyone who lifts this sword for conquest.” I’m afraid my first dismayed thought was, “Oh dear! It’s spread here now!” As if it were foot and mouth disease—or I suppose sword and sorcery disease.
Of course there have been quite a lot of heroic fantasies for children and young adults, many of them original and good, but this is the first one I had met that was so conventional and full of sloppy writing, and yet deemed by its publishers worthy of an international award. Could this be an advance warning of a new fashion? One thing it certainly shows, and that is that it is suddenly acceptable now for this kind of crossover to happen. Adults are free to read and enjoy books primarily aimed at young adults or children and not feel ashamed of doing it. For a long time, this was not the case at all. Books for young people existed in an impenetrable enclave all by themselves.
I’ll come back to any implications of this at the end. For now, I’d like to talk a bit about the way the various fashions and conventions have affected me as a writer.
Books for youngsters are unique in one respect—their supposed audience has almost no say in their nature and contents. The books are written by adults, edited and published by adults, sold by adults, and bought by adults—teachers, parents, librarians, aunts—and mostly reviewed by adults too. Generally this has to be so. Most children are unable to say what they want in a book and why. They have to take the adults’ massed word for what is a good book, because they don’t yet know enough not to.
In one way this makes this audience a delight to write for. So many of them will be meeting whatever is in the book for the first time. They won’t necessarily know the myths behind my story of Eight Days of Luke, say, or they won’t know that Philip Pullman is plundering Paradise Lost in The Amber Spyglass—they will just see the remarkable things he does with it. That by itself does give you a joyous sense of freedom. On the other hand, they won’t know a cliché from a felicitous turn of phrase. I vividly remember how impressed I was at age ten on coming across somewhere in a book where somebody knocks a table lamp, which then “swayed drunkenly.” I thought that was so good! I had no idea this phrase had been used a thousand times before.
There is a good side and bad one to the freshness with which children come to things. And in the same way, there is a good side and a bad to the way the adults run it all. On the good side, there are enormously high standards. None of the editors I have worked with would have accepted much in the way of clichés. None of them have ever let me get away with any muddle in any plot, nor with any factual inaccuracy; and though some have queried things that struck them as peculiar, they have always been delighted by originality. This naturally has put me on my mettle. Knowing that everything I wrote was going to be subjected to extreme and shrewd scrutiny, I take pains to get the finished manuscript right, if I can. The bad side is of course that adults are a prey to fashion—and to fashion in its hardened-off form, as conventionality.
Yes, I know children are too. I can imagine the present fashion for mobile phones, despite government health warnings, turning into such a convention that teachers will say, as they say “Open your books at page nine,” “Get out your mobile phones and call up the weather forecast.” Perhaps they already do. But, unlike children, adults do have the last say in any matter to do with books.
For example, when I first started writing in earnest, it was perhaps lucky that I wanted to write fantasy for children, because anything whatsoever with magic in it was regarded with contempt as “only for children.” The great outpourings of adult fantasy that I am currently trying to deal with had barely started then, and anyway they were not considered at all respectable. Even in the little enclave of juvenile writing, fantasy was looked at sideways and people tended to ask why I didn’t write Real Books.
The convention then (it was more than fashion) was for these Real Books, in rigorously contemporary settings in which children were confronted with present-day problems—divorced or abusive parents, bullying, poverty, physical handicaps, all those things—and kids were supposed to be helped by reading them. Around that time I remember going to a talk given by Jill Paton Walsh who seemed to me to say the last word on this kind of book. “If you know two people who are divorcing,” she said, “would you give them each a copy of Anna Karenina? Can you imagine a less helpful book? Yet people do this to children all the time.”
I went away and thought about this deeply. And it seemed to me, and still does, that facing this kind of problem in your life is actually what most fairy stories do; and they do it much better than any realistic story because they can distance the trouble with magic, cool it off by setting it so often in a strange country, and make the reader able to walk round the bad stuff, pretend it isn’t theirs, examine it, and then solve the problem along with the hero. And, what is more, have fun doing it.
This was the first time that I had seriously understood that around each fashion or conventional notion—each fixed idea held by those adults who managed books for children—there is what I came to think of as brain space. That there is a way to duck around these notions. You can show you know the convention is there, find a way to use it, and carry on. Dogsbody was, I think, my most successful swerve around the prevailing fashion for books about problems. It helped to take a dog’s point of view. Dogs tend to think more about their next meal than the situation in Ireland. But I had a go with Power of Three and another with The Ogre Downstairs. The Ogre had a really bumpy ride around conventional thinking. One publisher insisted I send a synopsis, which read things like “Toffee bars come alive with animal spirits, commit suicide on radiators,” upon which he concluded this wasn’t about problems, it was just mad.
Reflections Page 23