I first came across words like ecologist and overpopulation in science fiction books in the late fifties and early sixties, long before they had become fashionable. Yes, probably Malthus had said it first—but you don’t read Malthus when you’re eleven, though you might read someone like John Brunner or Harry Harrison because their books have got an exciting spaceship on the cover.
I also came across the word neoteny, which means “remaining young.” It’s something which we as humans have developed into a survival trait. Other animals, when they are young, have a curiosity about the world, a flexibility of response, and an ability to play which they lose as they grow up. As a species we have retained it. As a species, we are forever sticking our fingers into the electric socket of the universe to see what will happen next. It is a trait that will either save us or kill us, but it is what makes us human beings. I would rather be in the company of people who look at Mars than people who contemplate humanity’s navel—other worlds are better than fluff.
And I came across a lot of trash. But the human mind has a healthy natural tendency to winnow out the good stuff from the rubbish. It’s like gold mining: you have to shift a ton of dirt to get the gold; if you don’t shift the dirt, you won’t find the nugget. As far as I am concerned, escapist literature let me escape to the real world.
So let’s not get frightened when the children read fantasy. It is the compost for a healthy mind. It stimulates the inquisitive nodes. It may not appear as “relevant” as books set more firmly in the child’s environment, or whatever hell the writer believes to be the child’s environment, but there is some evidence that a rich internal fantasy life is as good and necessary for a child as healthy soil is for a plant, for much the same reasons.
Of course, some may read no other kind of fiction all their lives (although in my experience science fiction fans tend to be widely read outside the field). Adult SF fans may look a bit scary when they come into bookshops, some of them have been known to wear plastic pointy ears, but people like that are an unrepresentative minority and are certainly no weirder than people who, say, play golf. At the very least they are helping to keep the industry alive, and providing one of the best routes to reading that there can be.
Here’s to fantasy as the proper diet for the growing soul. All human life is there: a moral code, a sense of order, and, sometimes, great big green things with teeth. There are other books to read, and I hope children who start with fantasy go on to read them. I did. But everyone has to start somewhere.
Please call it fantasy, by the way. Don’t call it “magical realism,” that’s just fantasy wearing a collar and tie, mark-of-Cain words, words used to mean “fantasy written by someone I was at university with.” Like the fairy tales that were its forebears, fantasy needs no excuses.
One of the great popular novelists of the early part of this century was G. K. Chesterton. Writing at a time when fairy stories were under attack, for pretty much the same reason as books can now be covertly banned in some schools because they have the word witch in the title, he said: “The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.”
MAGIC KINGDOMS
Sunday Times, 4 July 1999
When the third Harry Potter book came out, the Sunday Times asked me to address the subject of why the British seem to be so keen to write fantasy. I think the full brief was: “We need it by Thursday.” When it was printed, as “Fantasy Kingdom,” it turned out that some editor had kindly assumed that “numinous” was a mistyping of “luminous” and had changed it. Sigh.
I remember a back garden I used to see from the train. It was a very small garden for a very small house, and it was sandwiched between the thundering railway line, a billboard, and a near-derelict factory.
I don’t know what a Frenchman or an Italian would have made of it. A terrace, probably, with a few potted plants and some trellis to conceal the worst of postindustrial squalor. But this was an Englishman’s garden, so he’d set out to grow, if not Jerusalem, then at least Jerusalem artichokes. There was a rockery, made of carefully placed concrete lumps (the concrete lump rockery is a great British contribution to horticulture, and I hope one is preserved in some outdoor museum somewhere). There was a pond; the fish probably had to get out to turn around. There were roses. There was a tiny greenhouse made of old window frames nailed together (another great British invention). Never was an area so thoroughly gardened, in fact, as that patch of cat-infested soil.
No attempt had been made to screen off the dark satanic mills, unless the runner beans counted. To the gardener, in the garden, they did not exist. They were in another world.
The British have a talent for creating imaginary worlds, and there’s no doubt that we are major exporters. Joanne Rowling is currently leading the drive. She couldn’t be selling more books if her young wizard Harry Potter was Hannibal Lecter’s godson. Why are we so at home with fantasy?
Well, it’s in the air … almost literally. The early Christian Church helped things along by deliberately refraining from stamping on the pagan religions of the time. Instead, some of their festivals and customs were given a Christian veneer. No doubt this saved a lot of trouble at the time. It also preserved them, which wasn’t the intention. Since then we have been great accumulators of invaders’ gods, creating a magpie mythology that grabbed hold of anything that shone nicely. Some of the pieces came together to form the Matter of Britain, the Arthurian legend spun out of other legends to become the great British story. It’s built into the landscape, from one end of the country to the other. Every hill is Arthur’s Throne, every cavern is Merlin’s Cave.
Stories beget stories. I’ve always suspected that Robin Hood was just another robber, but he did have the advantage of a very powerful weapon. It was not the longbow. It was the voice of Alan a Dale, the minstrel. Weaponry will only keep you alive, but a good ballad can make you immortal.
Then this rich rural tradition was locked up in the mills of the early Industrial Revolution, which pressure-cooked it.
Of course there had always been fantasy. It’s the Ur-literature from which all the others sprang, and it developed in the cave right alongside religion. They grew from the same root: if we draw the right pictures and find the right words, we can steer the world, ensure the success of the hunt, keep ourselves safe from the thunder, negotiate with Death. A phrase sometimes linked with fantasy is “tales of gods and heroes,” and the two go together. The first heroes were the ones who defied or tricked or robbed the gods, for the good of the tribe, and came back to tell the story.
But it was in the last century that fantasy took on an additional role as a means of escape, a way out of the perceived grimness of the industrializing world. Out of the same pot, I’ve always felt, came the English obsession with gardens, with the making of little private plots that could become, for an hour or so, the whole world.
Some vitriol was printed a couple of years ago when The Lord of the Rings was voted the best book of the century in a poll of Waterstones’ readers. Certain critics felt that the public were being jolly ungrateful after all they had done for them, the beasts. It didn’t matter. The book is beyond their control. They might as well have been throwing bricks at a mountain; it doesn’t cause any damage and it makes the mountain slightly higher. The book is now a classic, and real classics aren’t created by diktat.
J. R. R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.
Fantasy worlds have a huge attraction. There are rules built in. The appeal is simple and beguiling in the complex world of the twentieth century. Evil has
a map reference and a remedy—the finding of a sword, the returning of a Grail, the destruction of a ring. The way will be tough but at least it has a signpost. If the Good exhibit enough goodness, moral fibre, and bravery, they will win through, although at some cost. And for a span they’ll live happily ever after … until they have to do it again.
And yet … The Lord of the Rings, while English to the bone, was not a typical British fantasy book. It was not part of the mainstream, even though it is now a river in its own right and has spawned numerous tributaries and has come to define “fantasy” for many people.
It was unusual because it started and finished in a world which is like ours but which isn’t ours, a world with different rules and created with meticulous attention to detail, and, above all, a world that you cannot get to from here. There is no magic door to Middle-earth apart from the covers of the book. There is no entry by magic carpet, wardrobe, dream, or swan-drawn chariot. It is a separate creation.
Since and because of Tolkien there have been more fantasy universes than you can shake a curiously engraved sword at, but the British have traditionally desired their fantasy worlds to be a lot closer to home. We like them to be about as close as the other side of a door or the back of a mirror or even to be in here with us, numinous, unseen until you learn the gift. And this has been accompanied by an urge towards a sort of domesticity, an attempt to make gardens in the goblin-haunted wilderness, to make fantasy do something … to, in fact, bring it down to earth.
In the Poetics, Aristotle said that poetical metaphor and language involve the careful admixture of the ordinary and the strange. G. K. Chesterton said that far more grotesque and wonderful than any wild fantastical thing was anything that was everyday and unregarded, if seen unexpectedly from a new direction. That is our tradition, and it has largely been kept alive by people writing for children.
Tolkien’s great achievement was to reclaim fantasy as a genre that could be published for and read by adults. Traditionally, we had left the journey to the kids, who rather enjoyed it and found it easy. Adults got involved only to the extent that some teachers carefully picked up any “escapist rubbish” the child was currently reading and dropped it in the bin. There are still, even now, some of those around—I believe a special circle of hell is reserved for them. Of course fantasy is escapist. Most stories are. So what? Teachers are not meant to be jailers.
Escapism isn’t good or bad of itself. What is important is what you are escaping from and where you are escaping to. I write from experience, since in my case I escaped to the idea that books could be really enjoyable, an aspect of reading that teachers had not hitherto suggested. The fantasy books led me on to mythology, the mythology led painlessly to ancient history … and I quietly got an education, courtesy of the public library.
For me, E. Nesbit’s young heroes flew magic carpets, travelled in time, and talked to magical creatures, but they were still Edwardian children. C. S. Lewis’s children certainly lived Here but went through a magical door to get There. Magic doors are a huge part of the tradition. An enduring image, that symbolizes real fantasy far more than any amount of dragons and witches, is an early scene in Terry Gilliam’s movie Time Bandits, where a mounted knight in full armour gallops out of the wardrobe in the ordinary room of an ordinary boy.
John Masefield’s Kay Harker, in The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights, did not even need a door, just the vision to see the magical world intersecting with this one and the characters that lived with one foot in each. Writers like Diana Wynne Jones and Alan Garner let their characters wander in and out of a similar magical world—this world, seen from Chesterton’s different viewpoint.
The best fantasy writers don’t write fantasy in the fluffy, hocus-pocus sense, they change the rules by which the world works and then write very carefully and logically by those rules. And it’s no longer enough that there should be wizards and goblins and magic. We know about that stuff. Now we want to know how the wizards are dealing with the challenge of genetically modified dragons, and what the dwarfs are doing to stamp out racial harassment of gnomes. We’re back to Chesterton again. Maybe a good way of understanding this world is to view it from another one.
Joanne Rowling’s Harry Potter is firmly in this tradition. In truth, the stories do not contain a lot of elements new to anyone keeping up with modern fantasy writing for children. Young wizards and witches have been to school before. But that really does not matter. Genres work like that; if they didn’t, there would only ever be one book with a Time Machine in it. Most crime novels are full of policemen, crimes, and criminals, and most cakes contain pretty much the same sort of ingredients. It’s the cookery that counts. Cook it right, with imagination and flair and a good pinch of luck, and you have that rare and valuable thing—a genre book that’s risen above the genre. And Harry Potter is beautifully cooked.
CULT CLASSIC
From Meditations on Middle-earth, ed. Karen Haber, November 2001
Hmm. When this was first published, U.S. critics said I was being too populist in complaining about the critics’ (other critics, that is) attitude to The Lord of the Rings.
Well, they were wrong. Tolkien had many fans in academia, it’s true, but in the U.K. at least it was, up until a couple of years ago, quite normal for the London media-rocracy to be dismissive of Tolkien and the “sad people” who read him. Then the movies happened, were very popular, and the carping got very muted indeed.
This was written pre-movie.
The Lord of the Rings is a cult classic. I know that’s true, because I read it in the newspapers, saw it on TV, heard it on the radio.
We know what cult means. It’s a put-down word. It means “inexplicably popular but unworthy.” It’s a word used by the guardians of the one true flame to dismiss anything that is liked by the wrong kind of people. It also means “small, hermetic, impenetrable to outsiders.” It has associations with cool drinks in Jonestown.
The Lord of the Rings has well over one hundred million readers. How big will it have to be to emerge from cult status? Or, once having been a cult—that is to say, once having borne the mark of Cain—is it actually possible that anything can ever be allowed to become a full-fledged classic?
But democracy has been in action over the past few years. A British bookshop chain held a vote to find the country’s favourite book. It was The Lord of the Rings. Another one not long afterwards, held this time to find the favourite author, came up with J. R. R. Tolkien.
The critics carped, which was expected but nevertheless strange. After all, the bookshops were merely using the word favourite. That’s a very personal word. No one ever said it was a synonym for best. But a critic’s chorus hailed the results as a terrible indictment of the taste of the British public, who’d been given the precious gift of democracy and were wasting it on quite unsuitable choices. There were hints of a conspiracy amongst the furry-footed fans. But there was another message, too. It ran: “Look, we’ve been trying to tell you for years which books are good! And you just don’t listen! You’re not listening now! You’re just going out there and buying this damn book! And the worst part is that we can’t stop you! We can tell you it’s rubbish, it’s not relevant, it’s the worst kind of escapism, it was written by an author who never came to our parties and didn’t care what we thought, but unfortunately the law allows you to go on not listening! You are stupid, stupid, stupid!”
And, once again, no one listened. Instead, a couple of years later, a national newspaper’s Millennium Masterworks poll produced five works of what could loosely be called “narrative fiction” among the top fifty “masterworks” of the last thousand years, and, yes, there was The Lord of the Rings again.
The Mona Lisa was also in the top fifty masterworks. And I admit to suspecting that she was included by many of the voters out of a sheer cultural knee-jerk reaction, mildly dishonest but well meant. Quick, quick, name one of the greatest works of art of the last thousand years! Er … er … well, the Mona
Lisa, obviously. Fine, fine, and have you seen the Mona Lisa? Did you stand in front of her? Did the smile entrance you, did the eyes follow you around the room and back to your hotel? Er … no, not as such … but, uh, well, it’s the Mona Lisa, okay? You’ve got to include the Mona Lisa. And that guy with the fig leaf, yeah. And that woman with no arms.
That’s honesty, of a sort. It’s a vote for the good taste of your fellow citizens and your ancestors as well. Joe Average knows that a vote for a picture of dogs playing poker is probably not, when considered against the background of one thousand years, a very sensible thing to cast.
But The Lord of the Rings, I suspect, got included when people stopped voting on behalf of their culture and quietly voted for what they liked. We can’t all stand in front of one picture and feel it open up new pathways in our brain, but we can—most of us—read a mass-market book.
I can’t remember where I was when JFK was shot, but I can remember exactly where and when I was when I first read J. R. R. Tolkien. It was New Year’s Eve, 1961. I was babysitting for friends of my parents while they all went out to a party. I didn’t mind. I’d got this three-volume yacht-anchor of a book from the library that day. Boys at school had told me about it. It had maps in it, they said. This struck me at the time as a pretty good indicator of quality.
I’d waited quite a long time for this moment. I was that kind of kid, even then.
What can I remember? I can remember the vision of beech woods in the Shire; I was a country boy, and the hobbits were walking through a landscape which, give or take the odd housing development, was pretty much the one I’d grown up in. I remember it like a movie. There I was, sitting on this rather chilly sixties-style couch in this rather bare room; but at the edges of the carpet, the forest began. I remember the light as green, coming through trees. I have never since then so truly had the experience of being inside the story.
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