First Word
When you're a child, one of the most thrilling possibilities you can imagine is that, as in C S Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, you can step through the walls of this world and enter another. At that age, it not only seems wholly possible, but reasonable, too. And in that parallel universe, despite being puny and useless at hockey, we can conquer invaders, knock out bullies and save the planet.
In our formative years, fantasy of this otherworldly sort fulfils an important role, allowing the psyche to resolve inner conflicts through hypothetical scenarios. But what does it say about us when we continue to turn to it when we're grown-up?
As a child I devoured the Narnia books, Ursula le Guin and Tolkien. Yet, as an adult, the very term fantasy fiction is, for me, as powerful a disincentive to picking up a book as if it had been dipped in slurry.
Millions, of course, think otherwise. It was no coincidence that at roughly the same time that The Lord of the Rings was voted the most popular novel of all time in Britain, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy was encroaching on territory hitherto reserved for seriously worldly, high-brow fiction.
The rise of Pullman's novels into the upper echelons of the literary pack scored a victory for fantasy fiction whose impact continues to reverberate.
In the next few weeks, for instance, it will be almost impossible to escape the publicity for the newest inmate of the fantasy stable, Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a tome so large it demands almost as much commitment as marriage.
Reading the plot of the novel in an interview The Herald ran last week with Clarke, a friend of mine reached the description of a magician moving Brussels to America and tossed the paper aside crying "gie's peace!". For him, this was an imaginative leap too far. I'm with him on that, but we're in dwindling company. The fantasy shelves in bookshops and websites are buzzing. It's obvious for all to see: fantasy is the 21st-century literary escape hatch.
Tolkien's epic struggle between good and evil has been accused of offering a fascist view of European politics. Certainly he drew on his own experiences in the trenches of the First World War for his depiction of battles, camaraderie and loss. But although his terrifying arena echoed the encroaching horror many feared as Nazi Germany's tentacles spread, his fantasy world has its roots in far older mythology than contemporary events. It's that ancient mythological underpinning that gives his work its timeless appeal.
In contrast with Tolkien's world, however, modern fantasy fiction is serving a much more immediate need. The plots might not involve current affairs, but on almost every level they reflect, and appear to defeat, today's crises. Forget romantic fiction as the ultimate security blanket; fantasy now holds the crown. As the world grows increasingly unstable and alarming, this sort of fiction offers readers the chance to play out their fears and hopes in a landscape of certainties, a land of black and white.
While the ethics of real life are often a grey area, the fantastical world comes with a full set of signposts. Through fictional heroes, readers from all points of the political and religious spectrum can pit their wits against evil and win the day, no matter how poor the odds. In so doing, the author can toy with the universal fear of apocalypse, yet avoid the cynicism that distinguishes fantasy's difficult twin, science fiction.
Fantasy is a very obvious form of idealism. In ordinary life, the difficulty at times of knowing whether we are adding to the world's woes rather than improving it leads to a kind of emotional paralysis such fiction promises to ease. While certain types of behaviour are unambiguously destructive, many of the things we do might have dire consequences for someone else, yet because the outcomes are hidden or remote, we cannot be sure. Do we know for certain, for instance, that our clothes aren't made by exploited orphans?; or that our pensions aren't invested in companies that are merrily deforesting Asian hillsides? Such small yet gnawing sources of guilt are invisible in fantasy fiction.
There, the concept of uncompromising moral combat is played out with total confidence. In these novels, evil may, in theory, triumph. Regime change is possible in both directions, but you can be sure there'll be no half-hearted, uncertain, inbetween world of creeping malaise such as that we live in.
One of the distinctions of fantasy fiction is that it is as consoling to a Hindu fundamentalist as to an It girl. The reader is always on the side of good, the baddies are whomever you want them to be. That should perhaps be a comforting thought. So why do I find it worrying?
[© The Herald, 13/09/04]
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