How I Got Here

In his younger days my brother Brendan was a professional dancer, and rather a good one I believe. He used to drive around London in a very enviable little sports car and he had a rather nice flat in an emerging part of the capital.

Once, when we were discussing the nature of success, he said to me, ‘When I was young I really wanted to be a dancer, to have my own flat and to drive around in a little MG. Now I’ve got that and I have keep stopping and reminding myself that I am the person I always wanted to be.’

A good point. So today as The Resurrection Fields, the final book in my fantasy trilogy, is published in the US, I am just pausing to remind myself of the same thing

The Perils Of Writing Fantasy

Last night my wife woke me in the middle of the night. I had been sitting up in bed yelling in terror. Even after she woke me, it took a long time for me to understand where I was and to be convinced that I really wasn’t in any danger. I sat there, trying not to hyperventilate while she told me over and over again in the voice one might use to calm a bewildered infant that it was all right, that I’d just been dreaming.

When I tried to describe my dream it sounded comical, ridiculous; but to me it had been simply horrific. I had dreamed that a demon had come into the room and was standing beside my bed. It was bottle green in colour and its skin was leathery, like a lizard’s. It wasn’t a conventional devil with horns and tail. It looked more or less like a man though it was smaller, but not as small as a child, and it radiated malice. I had no doubt that it had come to kill me or worse. I also knew that it was my fault that it was there. Somehow or other I had summoned it.

I wish my mind was not so leaky. Then all this stuff would stay in the part of my imagination that is reserved for writing books.

The Third Kingdom

About ten years ago I was having dinner with a French friend of mine. We were talking in French. At least she was talking in French; I was talking in broken French. ‘How would you describe yourself, Brian?’ she asked.

‘Well,’ I began, ‘I would say that I was a middle aged man…’ I broke off because she had burst into laughter.

‘What’s so funny?’ I demanded. Surely at forty-five my claim to be middle-aged was still sustainable? Or would I have to call myself an old man from now on?

But it turned out that what had prompted her laughter was the fact that I had said, in excellent French, I am a man of the Middle Ages.

Well I have just finished reading The Discarded Image by C S Lewis in which he outlines the medieval world-view and I have come to the conclusion that my unintended description of myself was right, after all. I am a man of the Middle Ages. Everything I read in the book struck me as infinitely more plausible and familiar than the world-view espoused by contemporary media.

I was particularly taken with his chapter called The Longaevi. The Longaevi (or long-livers) were those who did not strictly fit into medieval theology, which allowed for four orders of beings: angels, humans, devils, and animals. The Longaevi included all those who could not be encompassed within these categories but whom the medievals, despite the best efforts of the church, refused to stop believing in: faeries, sprites, goblins – call them what you will

I think fantasy writers are like those people of the middle ages, refusing to depopulate their imaginations to suit contemporary rationalism because both experience and intuition tell them that there are other realms where the tyranny of the everyday is left behind.

One thing that troubled the medievals greatly was whether the Longaevi had souls and if so what would happen to them on the Last Day. They came up with a great many ingenious solutions to this conundrum. My favourite was the Third Kingdom half way between heaven and hell. This was the natural abode of the Longaevi where they would remain for all time in the expectation of neither doom nor reward.

Doesn’t that sound an awful lot like the place where most writers end up?

More Than Just A Maniacal Laugh

I get asked to read a lot of fantasy manuscripts by aspiring authors. That’s not surprising. It’s the genre most readily associated with children’s fiction. Unfortunately, it’s also the genre that produces the worst results when done badly. So I wanted to highlight one area where a lot of bad fantasy falls down, in the hope that it might be of use to someone.

It seems to me that every fantasy needs a meta-narrative, by which I mean an over-arching account of the world within which the smaller narrative takes place. Take Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings, for example. Frodo has inherited a magic ring, which has the power to make him invisible. More importantly however, that ring is the one ring of power made by the Dark Lord to subjugate all the other rings of power and bind their wearers to him. It is the missing part in a historic struggle between good and evil that began before Frodo was born and will come to involve nations and peoples that he has only heard of in legends. So Frodo’s story is really part of a much larger story, the meta narrative.

In order for a fantasy to work properly the meta narrative needs to be fully integrated into the story. This means that the motivating forces within it need to be explicable i.e. the reader needs to be able to understand just what the hell this story is about and what circumstances produced the events that are being described. This sounds obvious but a lot of people who write fantasy get carried along by their own imagery and their sense of poetic narrative so that the reader has no clear idea what sort of world the story is taking place in or why the characters are acting as they are.

The motivating forces that govern the meta narrative need to be personified. In particular, there needs to be a clear source of evil in the book. This should not just be a cartoon villain who loves evil for its own sake. There should be a history to the development of that evil and a degree of human complicity so that we understand that the evil described has the power to take root in all of us. To put it bluntly: there needs to be more than just a maniacal laugh; there should also be a powerful sense of sin.

It goes without saying that the relationship between the smaller story and the meta-narrative needs to be watertight. That means no holes in the backstory, no random and unexplained happenings, no characters or incidents that are invented simply to get the author out of his or her difficulties with the story.

Finally the power of the meta-narrative needs to grow as the story unfolds, like a shadow looming larger and larger over the protagonist until he (or she) comes to realise that he is really part of a much larger drama than he could possibly have imagined when the story began.

Does that sound like a tall order? I don't think so. All I'm really saying is that fantasy, just like naturalism, needs to be properly thought out.