A Reconsideration.

A recent conversation has reminded me of a promise I made some time ago (#5 in the list) to return to George MacDonald’s book Phantastes and see what I could make of it now, some ten years after my last assault on it left me disappointed and uninterested.

In fact, now I’m not sure I ever did read it. The opening chapter or so is vaguely familiar, but after that nothing rings a bell, and I have no idea why I gave it up back then, except perhaps that it didn’t seem to match my mood at the time. (If I remember right, I was enthralled by the torturous mythology of DC superheroes in those days . . . and it may have been assigned for a class, which is always reason enough to leave a fascinating book unread.) I do know that I read MacDonald’s other fantasy for adults, Lilith, around the same time, and disliked it without being able to say why; probably, I think today, because it operated on a more metaphysical level than I was used to in fiction. I wanted character and action — the stuff of Hollywood movies — and instead got mostly imagery and incident, the stuff of medieval poetry. And I was very young and fairly ignorant.

Phantastes is good, a very great book in itself as well as being notable for the influence it would have on the development of the fantasy worlds of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Its world is not, however, remotely like Narnia or Middle-Earth; it is not, in fact, about a separate world (and the consonant elaborate histories implied) at all, but about the spiritual journey of a single man in Fairy Land. Its real kinship is with books like The Pilgrim’s Progress or perhaps The Divine Comedy, though MacDonald’s theology is more private and speculative than Bunyan’s plainspoken Methodism or Dante’s ornate Catholicism. And he does not force allegory upon the reader, but presents strange, visionary incidents more like the original pre-Malory Arthurian legends, or the kunstmärchen of the German Romantics, or ancient fairy tales of indeterminate origin (all of which are deliberately invoked in the text), and leaves room for those who want merely the splendor of imagery and incident without metaphysical meaning. The metaphysical meaning, though, is profoundly relevant to my experience, and it’s quite clear why C. S. Lewis said that the book baptized his imagination.

The final paragraph, though, violates Chekhov’s law of dramatics (you never show a loaded gun in the first act unless it’s going to go off by the third act) pretty severely: the hero is promised that something good is going to happen to him, and he reflects that of course it is, since even evil is the only shape that good can take at that time and place. Which is either nonsense or very profound metaphysics indeed — but terrible drama. Today, of course, it would be called leaving room for a sequel. I think I’m going to have to re-read Lilith again next.