Here Be Dragons

by Stefan Ekman

  The magical domain and its inhabitants are often perceived as an ontological threat by the citizens of the mundane domain. In “Ghosts of Wind and Shadow” (1990), for instance, fifteen-year-old Lesli’s ability to see fairies brings her into conflict with her mother, Anna, who adamantly refuses to acknowledge fairies and magic as part of the real world. Anna’s final realization that magic beings are real destroys her worldview and forces her into drug-induced oblivion.43 Not everyone is as disturbed by the magical domain as Lesli’s mother, however. In “The Stone Drum” (1989), Jilly is given evidence that magic and Faerie creatures are real as a punishment. Like Lesli, Jilly is excited by her ability to experience the magical domain, and her wonder at the magical aspects of reality turns the curse into a blessing.44 The reactions of the majority of Newford’s citizens when confronted with the Faerie domain place them somewhere between Lesli’s and Jilly’s sense of wonder, on the one hand, and Anna’s dread, on the other. Most people push the out-of-the-ordinary from their minds and forget what they have experienced.45 Like the natural domain, the magical domain cannot be controlled and is therefore unseen, invisible. Invisibility is also a key concept when looking at the third way in which Newford is divided.

  The final division cuts across the city’s social space. While Minas Tirith is defined mainly by its defenses, Newford is defined by its inhabitants, and architecture tends to become a backdrop to human interaction. Although descriptions of the urban environment are allowed comparatively more space in a few stories (in, for instance, Trader [1997] and “Tallulah” [1991], the old part of the area called “the Market” is described; and “Pal o’ Mine” [1993] includes a description of a number of buildings and their gargoyles46), Newford is portrayed predominantly through descriptions of what its inhabitants do, say, and dream, not of the physical structures of houses, streets, and parks that constitute the city’s architecture. It is an environment defined by relations, social as well as physical, where the street grid and the complex web of personal connections can be mapped, but where houses are very seldom described. Unlike Minas Tirith, and New Crobuzon and Ombria (as discussed later), this city is almost entirely described as a social and mental space—a collection of people, not a collection of buildings.

  In this web of relations, the border between the last two domains stands out sharply. It is a social division, the nineteen-year-old squatter Maisie muses in “But for the Grace Go I” (1991), that is not as simple as dividing the city between the haves and the have-nots. “It’s more like some people are citizens of the day and others of the night. Someone like me belongs to the night. Not because I’m bad, but because I’m invisible. People don’t know I exist. They don’t know and they don’t care.”47 The same mechanism is at work when the domiciled members of the city’s hegemonic culture relate to the magic domain as when they relate to the “night people”: like the magical domain, unwanted people are pushed out of the mind, made to disappear. Thus, invisibility is also frequently used to refer to Newford’s homeless and outcasts, just as it is used in other works of urban fantasy as a form of social criticism,48 linking the metaphorical invisibility of the “night people” to an actual and therefore magical invisibility of the inhabitants of the magical domain. In “The Invisibles” (1997), the narrator sees people no one else sees, and his friend explains a fundamental Newford tenet to him: “Magic’s all about perception. Things are the way they are because we’ve agreed that’s the way they are. An act of magic is when we’re convinced we’re experiencing something that doesn’t fit into the conceptual reality we’ve all agreed on.”49 Be they urban fairies or “night people,” such figures are made invisible through the same mechanism of denial.

  “Night people” is not synonymous with “homeless,” however. “Everybody who spends most of their time on the streets isn’t necessarily a bum. Newford’s got more than its share of genuinely homeless people,” Maisie explains in a later story, but “it’s also got a whole subculture, if you will, of street musicians, performance artists, sidewalk vendors and the like.”50 This subculture, or alternative culture, consists of people who do not accept the majority’s view of what a proper way of life should be, people who at least to some extent do not subscribe to the consensual reality. It is to this subculture, or to people closely associated with it, that many of the Newford stories’ central as well as minor characters, such as Maisie, belong.

  Despite the attempts of the mundane society to ignore its opposites, those opposites remain. Together with domains of alternative culture and magic, the penetration of wilderness challenges Newford’s city culture from within. One of the numerous epigraphs to the stories illustrates how de Lint weaves together the three domains: “There are seven million homeless children on the streets of Brazil. Are vanishing trees being reborn as unwanted children?”51 This quotation from the “Poet Laureate of Deep Ecology”52 links environmental concerns about deforestation to social concerns about street children. In a fantastic context such as de Lint’s urban fantasy, the link between social and environmental issues—the transformation of trees into children—also suggests something magical. In “The Forest Is Crying” (1994), a social worker is asked to consider how the spirits of cut-down trees might literally turn into children, and evidence of the world’s magical nature eventually persuades him not to dismiss that possibility (“Forest” 68–76). He is made to accept a basic premise of Newford: nothing should be dismissed as impossible simply because it has always been considered as such. If spirits or fairies are living in the trees, it would be equally plausible that the felling of a tree would result in yet another unwanted child on the city streets. Such is the reality of Newford, where the changing world kills spirits with concrete, polluted air, and poisoned water (see, e.g., Forests 253). The epigraph thus highlights the links between the three domains that are so central to the Newford stories.

  The intersections of the three domains create “bubbles” in the hegemony, free from and thus undermining cultural control. In such bubbles, the links between domains are readily identifiable but are brought out in different ways. Four prominent bubbles of wild nature are considered in the following discussion, of various sizes and relations to the city culture. Stanton Street and All Souls Cemetery are both fairly small, contained areas. The former is a quiet residential street and as such seemingly a part of Newford’s social hegemony, the latter a cemetery deserted by that hegemony. Both offer impressions of wilderness and prove to be associated with the magical domain as well as with alternative culture. The two largest bubbles in Newford, for their part, do more than give the impression of wilderness—to a great extent, they are wild: Fitzhenry Park, although linked to city culture along its edges, is wild at heart, a place of wild nature where the magical and alternative cultural domains have the upper hand. The Tombs, finally, is in many ways the park’s opposite. The wilderness it contains is feral without any hint of cultural control. It serves as a reminder that the denizens of the subjugated domains are also dangerous, be they magical creatures or social outcasts.

  The oak-lined Stanton Street runs through the urban center. On the surface, the avenue looks tame; and certainly, trees lining a street offer little of the imagery that can be expected from wilderness. Some descriptions of the oaks along Stanton Street approach the wild, however. As the street narrows, the hundred-year-old oaks give the impression of a tunnel rather than an avenue. The “two once-tidy rows of manicured shade trees [are] enormous now, and [have] more or less gone feral.”53 When Kerry Madan first arrives in Newford in Someplace to Be Flying (1998), the quiet of the street makes her uneasy:

  There was something claustrophobic about walking under this long row of enormous oaks. The trees were too big, their dense canopy almost completely blocking the sky. They threw deep shadows against the tall houses and the shrubbery collected against their porches and brick walls, throwing off her sense of time. It no longer felt like the tail end of the day. It was too much like late evening now, a time when anyone
could be out and about, watching her, waiting in the shadows for her to step too close. Anyone, or anything. (93)

  Noticeable in both quotations is that the oaks are described as “enormous,” and to Kerry, they seem “too big”—too big to belong in the middle of a city. Controlling a tree means keeping its size in check, and such control has been relinquished in the case of the Stanton Street oaks. Instead, it seems to Kerry as if the trees control their surroundings. Their shadows obscure the houses, hiding the city’s architecture, emphasizing the sensation of wilderness. Kerry feels as if she is walking somewhere dangerous where anyone or anything might confront her, and it is not “the usual dangers of a big city” that worry her. Instead, she imagines “other threats, nameless things, creatures with hungry eyes and too many teeth” (93). Her impression is of a place that does not follow the rules of consensual reality, a place of magic. And she is right: Stanton Street is a haunt for a number of inhabitants of the magical domain. Kerry is on her way to the Rookery, where Raven—creator of the world and a being of great mythological importance—lives together with a group of animal people. In Spirits in the Wires, numerous Faerie creatures are observed under and among the boughs of the oaks (151). Furthermore, on Stanton Street lies the residence of Cerin and Meran Kelledy,54 a commonly recurring setting that is a rambling house surrounded by oak trees, “a regular forest of them larger and taller than anywhere else in the city, each one of them easily a hundred years old” (“Buffalo Man” 104; my emphasis). Although not every description of the oaks around the Kelledys’ house is as explicit, their extraordinary size is stressed, just like the size of the other trees along the street. The implied explanation of the immensity of the trees is that Meran Kelledy is the oak king’s daughter. When Meran visits a bookstore, the house fairy there sees her as a “piece of an old mystery” and “an old and powerful spirit walking far from her woods”;55 but to most people, she and her husband are simply a duo playing traditional live music. It is also in a coach house off Stanton Street that the troll-like Rushkin teaches Isabelle the art of the numena paintings that can provide spirits with physical bodies.56 Similarly to the Kelledys’ home, Rushkin’s studio is flanked by an oak tree, and the Rookery has an immense elm shading the lawns behind it (Memory 32; Someplace 86).

  Stanton Street, in other words, is a locus where feral nature and the Faerie domain intersect; it is also touched by the alternative culture. While the Kelledys and Rushkin are domiciled, they are not fully part of the “day people.” The Kelledys do not have regular employment but make money from their gigs and from teaching music. The deformed artist might be extremely successful, but he is a recluse who shuns society. Still, Stanton Street remains a part of the city, cutting through its center. Other wilderness bubbles are left deserted, pushed to the edge of the city, if not physically then at least socially and mentally, and in Newford, with its social/mental focus, that is highly relevant.

  One such deserted bubble is the disused All Souls Cemetery, which provides a central setting for “Held Safe by Moonlight and Vines” (1996) and is also briefly described in The Blue Girl (2004). In this novel, a ghost likens it to “something out of a Southern Gothic novel, full of dead and dying trees, old-fashioned mausoleums and crypts, with paths of uneven cobblestones winding narrowly between them.”57 It is a scary place, even to a ghost, a place no longer part of society. Here, the trees formerly under cultural control have not grown to the immense size of the Stanton Street oaks; instead they, along with the mausoleums and crypts, underscore that this is a place of death. Only the rosebush by a particular grave has grown wild again (252). The graveyard is a desolate wilderness, but it still links the magical domain to feral nature. The descriptions in “Held Safe by Moonlight and Vines” match that of The Blue Girl (including the dead and dying trees and the rosebush58); but in the short story the domains of wild nature, “night people,” and the magical intersect even more clearly. It is a place where only drug dealers and junkies come, according to the male narrator, Alex. Everyone else, he claims, “likes the idea of making a place gone wild safe again” (116). By “wild,” however, Alex does not simply mean that the nature in the graveyard has gone feral. What scares people, he suggests, is that “a piece of the night” bides there, “thinking about them” (116). Lillie, the female narrator, dismisses any dark, dangerous wildness but suggests a more noticeable intersection with the magical domain. She explains how, when she has spent time in the cemetery, it changes into a different place, a garden, walled but wild, with a “tangle of bushes and briars, trees [she has] got no name for and vines hanging everywhere” (118). This wild place is the dreamed-up sanctuary for an abused child, a young Alex of several years previously (130), and the notions of time travel and a dreamworld combine with de Lint’s pervasive theme of child abuse in this bubble of wilderness.

  The popular Fitzhenry Park, Newford’s equivalent to New York’s Central Park and Toronto’s High Park, and one of the most frequently used settings in the Newford stories, is also, counterintuitively, a prominent bubble of wilderness. On the surface, the park seems to be a place of tame nature, or possibly even just a cultural construct. Maisie’s description of the park almost exclusively defines it in terms of the social (human) interactions that take place there:

  [Fitzhenry Park is] close to the Combat Zone, so you get a fair amount of hookers and even less-reputable types drifting down when they’re, let’s say, off-shift. But it’s also close to the Barrio, so the seedy element is balanced out with mothers walking in pairs and pushing strollers, old women gossiping in tight clusters, old men playing dominoes and checkers on the benches. Plus you get the lunch crowds from the downtown core which faces the west side of the park. (“Waifs” 34)

  The impression is of the park as a totally cultural space, an impression common to almost all Newford stories. Like the rest of the city, Fitzhenry Park is a place of social interaction, not of flora. There is a lawn or the odd shrub or tree, insofar as any vegetation is mentioned at all. The major exception to this portrayal occurs in Trader, where the park is one of the novel’s central settings and the text includes descriptions of more than just a bush or two. When Max Trader, who has woken up in the body of the unpleasant and irresponsible Johnny Devlin, finds himself homeless and penniless, he walks deep into Fitzhenry Park, where there are woods that, like those in the Kellygnow grounds, might be untouched from the days of the first settlers (Trader 67). Feeling that he has no other option, Max makes the park his home, only to discover that the wooded tracts are much larger than he has previously believed and that quite a few of the city’s homeless are squatting there with him (74–77). Like Max, the various point-of-view characters repeatedly draw attention to the wooded areas of the park, often setting it apart from the surrounding city and associating it with the wilderness outside the city. Max is most explicit about this:

  I lie back again, stare at the sky, the stars, feel the warm length of the dog pressed up against my side. The city seems impossibly far away. I can’t hear it, can’t see it except for a hint of its glow refracted in the boughs of the trees. We could be on a camping trip, up in the mountains behind the city, or out along the lake in cottage country. (85)

  Forced into the domain of the homeless and the magical, Max’s perception also shifts as regards the natural domain; he now sees wilderness where he previously saw only controlled nature. The tame nature has shifted into wilderness in Max’s mind, and the park has become a natural rather than a cultural space. The impression that the city is “impossibly far away,” that Max could be outside the city rather than in its center, is emphasized, linking the wilderness in Fitzhenry Park with the external wilderness. A similar dissociation between park and city is experienced by the strip dancer Nita as she follows a (possibly) suicidal vampire into the park. “They could have been a thousand miles away, a thousand years away from this time and place,” Nita ponders, echoing Max’s sensation of being “impossibly far away” in a forest predating the first (Europ
ean) settlers.59

  The dominant impression is of Fitzhenry Park as a city location, however, where nature is tame, under culture’s control—something that is not the case with the other subjugated domains. Through numerous stories, it is made clear that the homeless are not the only “night people” to be found in Fitzhenry Park. The location is apparently well suited to criminal activity—from reasonably mild offenses, such as tagging and unlicensed vending, to teenage gang confrontations and murder. Runaway Lesli is nearly recruited by one pimp and then kidnapped by another (“Ghosts” 204–6). Buskers and fortune tellers work the crowds. In the controlled natural environment of the park, hegemonic culture has lost control, not of nature but of the subjugated domain of alternative culture. Similarly, several stories link the park to the third subjugated domain, that of magic.