Ten Fantasies.

I’ve been vocal in the past about my distaste for fantasy and science fiction, a dislike partly temperamental and partly born from a dislike for the lichenous fandom that has aggregated around the forms until today they are shaggy and overgrown with pathetic imitations of what they once were. I still cordially dislike science fiction, and have done so ever since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. (I mean of course the true science fiction, the stuff that deals with important themes and casts a cold fictional light on mortal philosophies; mere nonsense featuring robots and aliens is as welcome to me as all other mere nonsense. I too loved the original Star Wars trilogy as a child.)

But for fantasy I have rediscovered my ancient love, thanks to the Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe DVD, which I found myself some weeks ago unable to stop watching. Then I burned through the seven books again, listening to them on CD (which, I should pause to note, is an excellent way to rediscover books I think I know by heart; I’m too often a skimmer, especially with familiar texts, and hearing every word from someone else’s lips engages me with the actual words more deeply than I have been for years), and then, after a short detour into the rest of C. S. Lewis (my old tutor, once upon a time; in my teenage years he was to me what he said George MacDonald was to him — not that I’m the only one), I returned to the granite pillar of my imagination, the book that when I was ten flung open a vast new world, terrible and beautiful, and whose echoes I am even now repeating in unworthy imitation prose. The Lord of the Rings, of course. (Mentioned it last post, didn’t I?)

I finished listening to it today, and decided, as a sort of truce to arguments I had a few years ago (and which seem to have receded into the vanished internet past, except for this solitary Google cache page; God, I was/am a pretentious twit), to list and write about ten fantasy novels I’ve enjoyed fairly recently.

You’ll notice that only one was published (barely) after The Lord of the Rings, and that only one is in that book’s tradition. Browsing in the sci-fi/fantasy section of any bookstore still brings the gorge rising faster than in any other section, paperback romance included. It’s a damned and damnable shame that a branch of literature which should be (and once was, perhaps) notable for its deep idiosyncracy of imagination, style, and voice should now be all so drearily similar. (Of course there are, and have always been, exceptions. I’m not really interested, though I’ll graciously fake it at need. I did like Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but that was because of its Austenian style and had nothing to do with the subject matter.) My favorite period of fantasy, as of much else in literature, is from the Victorian period to the 1930s, when the pulps began to regularize and streamline imaginative fiction into an easily-digested handful of settings, themes and character types, fossilized by The Lord of the Rings twenty years later. (Though that was a different and wilder strain, as I’ll dig into later; but it was quickly domesticated in the marketplace.) The tradition, if it could be called one, of Lord Dunsany, William Morris, Arthur Machen, and Walter de la Mare — even the violent, unsophisticated visions of Burroughs, Howard, and Lovecraft — is what I love, much more than most works written after electric lights, tarmac and plastic had covered the face of the earth.

Anyway. You will find hypocrisy here, and to spare; I couldn’t find ten fantasies that I loved deeply, nor that had been read within the past year, so I’ve scrounged and some books are half-elven only, and some unloved, and some almost forgotten (though the spines glare at me from the bookshelf and I think I will take them down again soon). There are also many books, both that I own and that I long to own, that I have yet to read and which perhaps might make a greater part of this list in coming years.

(Dammit, Tolkien, get out of my head; give me back my own voice, if I have one!)

Anyway, the list. The numbering is random, and should not be taken as any indication of quality, real or perceived:

10. The Stray Lamb by Thorne Smith (1924)
Smith has more in common with James Thurber, Damon Runyon, and Broadway playwright George S. Kaufman than with anyone whose book covers were painted by someone who admired Frank Frazetta. But all of his books are fantasies in the simple sense that things happen in them — and the stories are motivated by things — which are impossible, and which do not pretend to any degree of plausibility. They’re also comic (which is not to say funny), and generally feature middle-aged suburbanites breaking free of humdrum reality. The Stray Lamb is about one such henpecked husband who turns into various animals. I was reminded of T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, but this is much better (I loathe T. H. White), because there are no lessons learned, except the one every infant already knows in its bones: Do Whatever the Hell You Want.

9. Rose Royal by E. Nesbit (1911)
I wouldn’t call this a great book; it might not even be very good. But it’s memorable, and reminded me of Frankenstein and Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman. (Both of which, of course, owe much to the Faust legend, if not specifically to Goethe’s Faust.) It’s a scientist-(kind-of)-meddles-in-matters-too-deep-for-him romance, and wants to be a tragedy, but its earlier chapters are too lighthearted for that. It bears the telltale shifts in tone of a novel that was originally serialized in magazines, and was probably written quickly, for the money. But Nesbit was a good writer at worst, and a keenly observant fantasist at best (her children’s books, starting with Five Children and It, are the immortal ones), and it’s worth the afternoon or so it takes to read it.

8. Many Dimensions by Charles Williams (1931)
Williams was a friend of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, and T. S. Eliot; his seven supernatural thrillers are much prized by those who admire literary freaks that don’t fit into any category. Although the subject matter would fit into any old mass-market Da Vinci Code-esque potboiler today, this (my favorite of his books, for reasons entirely unrelated to quality) is a much stranger and deeper thing: written in an ornate, shrewdly delirious style that recalls Henry James or D. H. Lawrence, it has Williams’ wide-ranging theological speculativeness at its back, and there is almost no action, though strange, troubling, and highly magical things happen in it. There is even a talisman of great power, though any similarity to The Lord of the Rings ends there.

7. The Dreadful Dragon of Hay Hill by Max Beerbohm (1928)
This is, perhaps, more of a novella, and is certainly a fable in form and content, rather than a fantasy novel under the rules of the genre, but hell, it’s my list. Beerbohm’s odd take on male-female relationships (he was married for most of his life, but his biographers agree that he was either gay or entirely asexual; he almost certainly never consummated the marriage) is at the heart of the story, which reminded me at first of Tolkien’s children’s stories, then entered into a world which recalled Mark Twain’s late-life stories. There is a dragon, yes, but it’s almost incidental to the plot, such as it is. It’s certainly not one of Beerbohm’s best works, but I’d rather have read it than not.

6. The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton (1908)
Almost certainly Chesterton’s best work (well, fiction, anyway) (well, full-length novel, anyway), this only turns into fantasy in the last couple of chapters; but nearly all of Chesterton’s fiction has that wild, dream-like quality which he so much loved to describe, and even when it’s a straightforward spy story in the first few chapters, it’s the most romantic, fairy-tale-like spy story ever. Turning to John Buchan or Somerset Maugham (the great espionage novelists of the period) afterwards is almost to turn from rich, feasting fare to stale crusts, that’s how expansive Chesterton’s vision always is. Nobody staked out in a more satisfying way the borders between ordinary, daylit life and the moody shadows of romance and faery.

5. Phantastes by George MacDonald (1858)
I have almost nothing to say about this book; I read it once, long ago, and remember being very disappointed, after C. S. Lewis said that it had baptized his imagination. But that is all I remember, and it’s either been stolen or sold; I can’t find it in my library now. I’ll try to find and read it again soon, and I’ll report back to you. After ten years under my belt since I last looked at it, I expect I’ll understand it better.

4. Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis (1956)
This again only barely qualifies as fantasy; it’s a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth (from which the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale was derived) in sober, novelistic fashion, but without losing any of the power of the myth. Lewis being Lewis, there’s a didactic point about the relationship between God and man buried in the subtext, but this is late Lewis, and he’s more subtle and agnostic-friendly here than anywhere else; though as always I can’t really imagine anyone enjoying Lewis without at least partly agreeing with him.

3. The Stolen March by Dornford Yates (1926)
The main reference point here is Alice in Wonderland, though it’s never mentioned in the text. But the characters are adults (nominally, anyway; Yates’ protagonists were always a schoolboy’s vision of adulthood, heroic fantasy with revolvers and cars instead of swords and horses), and Lewis Carroll’s mathematician’s delight in conundrums is replaced by a lawyer’s delight in loopholes. At the end it turns into a mere chase scene, and what once seemed Chestertonian turns out to be only Buchanish. But it’s still a rare creature (literally as well as figuratively; it only ever had the one printing), and although the heroes are all the old Yates characters under different names, they are still charming. But the Berry stories are best.

2. The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany (1924)
I read this for the first time last weekend, and I’m not sure it’s yet settled in deeply enough for me to do more than babble. It is a great, very great, work of high fantasy, and I still seem to be under the spell of the prose. Though Tolkien’s more obsessively-varnished world may have supplanted Dunsany’s placid Edwardian vision of Elfland in the popular imagination (I had a difficult time not picturing Orlando Bloom in pale makeup), I think on the whole I prefer this less dominating vision, which is more akin to MacDonald’s, Chesterton’s (in Orthodoxy) and, through some strange sympathy of imagination, E. M. Forster in Howards End. I was prepared for a terrible letdown, and found instead a happy ending, if unintelligible to the mortal mind. (The Man Who Was Thursday has something of the same shape.)

1. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (1955)
Yes, okay. Here’s the excuse for the list itself. I just finished listening to it, and I feel shy in writing about it; not because I don’t think my opinion matters, or even because it will be lost in the great clamor of talk about it (much greater since the movies came out and made it common pop-culture property), but because I don’t want to be mistaken for the ordinary fantasy fan for whom this is a touchstone of imagination. Which is one reason I put forth the other books first: I don’t really care for this kind of story, except in the case of this precise story. The reason why I love The Lord of the Rings probably has more to do with when I first read it and how old I was and how it dovetails with my own mature understanding of the world and of literature (which were partly formed by it) than anything else, but I think more than anything I love the romanticized countryside sensibility which knits ancient Old English epics and a highly particular eighteenth-century English humor together; in places, not unlike Sam Weller trotting along behind Beowulf. (Have the fantasy geeks who outbid each other for Weta-approved swords on eBay even heard of the Pickwick Papers? Do they realize that Dickensian is the only adjective for the Shire? Do they know what Dickensian means? Have they read Chesterton on Dickens, which is about the only way to really get it?) That, I think, is what I miss in other, later fantasies: the wide knowledge and understanding of various literary/cultural traditions. The Númenoreans are, of course, the Greco-Roman culture as seen by a Saxon peasant circa 800 A.D. or so; the Dwarves, and Orcs are straight out of Wagner (or rather, Wagner’s sources). We are a smaller people today, it seems, even than in Tolkien’s day, and where he, standing Prometheus-like in his rooms at Oxford, was able to forge the Icelandic Eddas, deeply-felt (if not studied) Catholic theology, nineteenth-century German romanticism, Homer’s understanding of love and war, the (nowadays homoerotic) Edwardian ideal of young manhood (not to mention class relations), a Spenserian attitude towards romance, Kipling’s understanding of soldiery, a Wordsworthian vision of nature, and a Chestertonian (I will say it; it sticks out a mile) vision not only of social life, but of valor, romance, and desperate circumstances, as in “The Ballad of the White Horse” — he was able, I say, to forge all this into a fairly coherent novel with real depth and even some psychology to it (this sticks out all the more when compared to something like The Worm Ouroboros, which is a long dull thing of battles and pseudo-heroism without a pinch of humor or a recognizably human motive, and even fewer women than in Tolkien). Compare that to the world-builders of today (they would have us believe), who can only vaguely echo Tolkien and other twentieth-century writers, and who are trying not to develop the mythology of a nation (Tolkien wanted his Middle-earth to do for England what Wagner’s operas had done for Germany; it is perhaps a relief that it hasn’t yet done so) but merely develop a personal vision, which always turns cramped and airless and sour. Even the fantasy addicts I know always complain that the a series turns bad after the first five or so novels; not that they stop reading them. This is not even to touch on the thrice-accursed plague of Dungeons & Dragons; no, I don’t mean the silly charges of Satanism I heard as a child in the ’80s, I mean the lack of real imagination, the mass-market streamlining, categorizing, and foul, hideous merchandising, which is all the modern world knows how to do with any product of imagination. (We’ve delivered the world to the Hoopers, as Waugh said, and I don’t think Tolkien would have disagreed.) And Tolkien was a poet. Not, of course, in the modern tradition; I don’t think he really cared for any poetry more recent than Chaucer, if so recent. But his long poems, which modern readers complain about and applaud their removal in the mass-market streamlined films, are the key to really understanding and loving The Lord of the Rings; or at least they are for me. This came home most clearly when listening to the books: Tolkien finds his greatest achievement, I think, in the many voices of the poetry, from the stately Elvish (very like the classical poets Tolkien the schoolboy learned by heart) to the saucy hobbitish (very English, and folk-English at that), to the blood-whipping songs of the Rohirrim (the tears start to my eyes, I shit you not, whenever I read Eomer’s lament for Theoden) to the craggy, hard-bitten lines lamenting Boromir (where I wonder if he first cast the words into Old English and then transliterated them; they are Beowulfian in their rise and fall). And then there are the languages: his deep love for language, only rivalled by his love for things of nature, is on strange display; and perhaps only the imagination that, loving trees, created the Ents, could possibly have, loving real languages, created fictional ones that pierce the heart with their strange, wild sound. It is these things that make his fiction great; but it is also these things that make it tolerable. Without these deeply strange and curious patterns running down to the very quicks of Tolkien’s Catholic soul, the story is nothing, a hodgepodge of Campbellian myth filtered through the shell-shocked memory of the trenches of 1914-18, with which libraries are already filled. But too many pretend (or believe, wrongly) that the story is the important thing. It’s not. Tales of good and evil only work when the teller actually believes in good and evil, as Tolkien did. Shades of gray of course there are, in life; but shades of gray in fantasy (that pretends to be of good and evil) is merely wearisome, and tells us nothing that twenty years spent among human beings has not already told.

If we must have fantasy, let us have world-creation, as Tolkien often said, and let the worlds be not merely imitations, shadows of other creations or doubtful improvements on them according to taste, but things actually builded, carved hard from the vast mountains of culture, wisdom, knowledge, and art which exist in the fields we know, as a sculptor carves from the marble a thing which has not been seen before. And if we pretend to reject the world as it is, then let us do so truly, and refuse the beggarly demand of fitting our tales to the need and whims of the fields we know. If we would discover an Elfland, then it will fit in with our world or not, as it will; but allegory, didacticism, and sophistry alike are hateful to the worlds beyond our own, and they wither at their touch.

Or, if we cannot approach those heights, let us have fantasy of the more domestic sort, and talk of strange things that happen in our own world, as the other nine novels have it (more or less), or on the borders of our world and some other, and so learn more of ourselves, rather than of our flickering dreams.

Not, of course, that the world as we know it today is one I willingly read about, unless it is transformed by a strong vision, and even for lazy comfort I read of things that no longer exist (butlers and gentlemen’s clubs and paranoid weekends in country houses), though that too is a kind of fantasy, a world-building of a gentler and less overbearing sort, though no less airless in the end. For of my part I am half enchanted by waistcoasts and frock-coats, by the wearing of spats and the romance of the top-hat. (How Chesterton would grin!) Canes are as romantic as swords when canes are no longer common.

Yet because I delivered myself up as a child to Lewis and Tolkien, it does pierce me to the quick to think of a broad sword worn on the side, and a suit of mail, and women in long robes with belts that meet below the hip. And if you have not read Surprised by Joy, you may not understand what the hell I’m talking about, and if you don’t know P. G. Wodehouse (as I read him), you won’t even understand the previous paragraph. Sehnsucht, the Germans call it, a longing which has something to do with nostalgia and something to do with the desire of our immortal souls for heaven (in the theology of Pope John Paul II). That, I deem, is the true purpose of fantasy (and here those who don’t like or who disagree with Lewis and Tolkien can fuck off, and welcome to it), to remind us that this world is not our home, that we long for other and better things, and to perhaps, if we labor truly and well, give some hint (though always, always conditioned by environment, culture, taste, and chance) of those unuttered heights to which our souls aspires.

(Ah, well. Perhaps it’s all nonsense, when all is said and done. Perhaps we are just children making tales. But it seems to me a curious thing, that children making tales can invent a world that licks your real world clean hollow. And that’s why I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan, and I’m for Narnia even if there isn’t any Narnia to be for. So begging your pardon ma’am, and thanking you for the meal, we’ll be off. Paraphrased from memory, of course. But there’s no more gladly Chestertonian moment in any book, even within Chesterton’s writings.)

Hate fantasy? No. I love it too dearly to be glad if it’s done poorly, or half-well, or even almost perfectly. And I can’t bear it when it tells lies, any more than a lover could. And since I believe the Christian creeds are true, anti-Christian or non-Christian fantasy is always dimmer and fouler than the stuff I was weaned on. Sorry, Pullman. You at least will have to get along without me.

Okay. I’m done free-associating. You can move on now. Very sorry to have taken up so much of your time, I’m sure.