A Family of Readers

by Roger Sutton

  Fantasy can and does engage all the themes of other kinds of children’s literature — from board books to humor to poetry to hard-hitting young adult novels — but it has one consistent element: “magic.” Its “magic” can be expressed in something as obviously fantastical as talking animals or as possibly realistic as someone who hears voices that may or may not be imagined. It can be exercised in a made-up world or in supernatural powers that awaken in a hero in our own world. Time travel, fairy tales, myths, legends, and stories of magical objects popping up in our own familiar world, as well as stories of talking animals, animated toys, and wizard schools, all propose a departure from the laws of nature as we recognize them.

  Children with an appetite for fantasy often read it to the exclusion of other kinds of literature, sometimes making parents worry that their reading springs from unhealthy escapism or a fixation on the trivial. Of course, realistic fiction can present at least as much escapist indulgence as fantasy — one need look no further than Gossip Girl and its ilk. But the real argument for reading fantasy is that, at its best, fantasy stretches the imagination, intellect, and emotions in ways that enhance, rather than discourage, children’s engagement with real life. True, it can offer consoling escape. J. R. R. Tolkien argues that it can be a way of assuaging profound human longings — to communicate freely with animals, to fly, or to conquer death itself. But it can also make abstract ideas concrete, inviting young readers to consider complex philosophical, theological, and political questions in uniquely accessible ways. Because ideas are central to fantasy, adult/child book discussions on good fantasy can be particularly rewarding. Indeed, it is in fantasy that adult and child readers are most likely to converge: witness the crossover success of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, for example.

  In the wake of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, “high fantasy” — stories of heroes on grand epic quests, usually in invented, nonindustrialized worlds — has surged in popularity, but this popularity comes with its own special pitfalls. Some contemporary writers of high fantasy seem to think that wordiness, a self-important tone, and an overdependence on magical creatures, gadgets, and geography (to offer just a few examples) can take the place of well-developed, complex characters, ideas, and plot. They often imitate (poorly) the style of Tolkien. Christopher Paolini’s Eragon is a particularly egregious example, with its similar names (Aragorn/Eragon; Arwen/Arya), its Tolkien-like dwarf and warrior cultures, and its uninspired prose.

  But even reading such run-of-the-mill fantasies can have its benefits if a child can identify their conventional features and question them. (Why do authors so often choose to write about evil wizards who want to take over the world? What does this tell us about what they value or fear?) As well, fantasies that keep readers turning pages on the strengths of their thriller plots and quickly sketched characterizations (for example, Rick Riordan’s books about Percy Jackson, based on Greek myths) may spark a reader’s interest in more substantial retellings of mythology — just as a love of Tolkien’s and C. S. Lewis’s fantasies has led many a reader to explore Norse sagas, or Beowulf, or medieval Arthurian romances. And any exposure to a well-constructed alternate world (such as in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels or Philip Reeve’s Hungry City Chronicles) allows children to absorb different ways to deal with the pressures and problems of “real life” — one of which is to retreat, now and then, to the gardenlike space in the mind that an alternate world offers.

  Epic or “high” fantasy often involves expansive terrain and long journeys, giving children, in imagination at least, a freedom of movement unavailable to most of them in the physical world. In this, fantasy is the quintessential backpacking, trail-riding genre. It also often explores the discovery of new talents and the pleasure of increasing prowess: whether sword fighting or wand waving, these skills symbolize the hard-won abilities that come with physical and intellectual maturation.

  Perhaps one of the most enticing satisfactions of a reader’s imaginative engagement of an alternate world is that he or she can know pretty much everything there is to know about that world. The world of a fantasy novel is limited by its textual evidence: the story. As a thorough reader, a child can be an authority on an entire world. Fantasy gives kids worlds they can rule over — ones in which they, not their parents or teachers, are experts.

  But how does one negotiate the overburdened shelves and pick among the many fantasies, serial and otherwise, that are displayed there? How does one find those that best nourish the imagination; that are most powerfully original; that might draw readers into engaging the hardest, most exciting questions we have to ask about the meaning and nature of human life? Judicious reading is really the answer to these questions — there is no substitute for cracking the cover oneself and looking for a few salient features.

  In outstanding fantasy, magic is not just decorative. It is an organic part of setting, plot, characters, and meaning, and works as a metaphor that reveals and deepens all the fantasy’s themes. It helps isolate and explore something that is difficult or interesting about being human, and draws attention to the activity of imagination and reason. This is true whether the story involves a magical ability that descends on a person in the otherwise “real” world, or a voyage in time to historical places and periods that really existed, or the hijinks and dragon dueling of a wizard-ridden fantasyland.

  Take, for example, the story of a boy wizard: Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. Here the hero’s mission, the world’s geography, the nature of its magic, and the hero’s inner development are part of a single coherent vision. Ged, an uneducated boy from a rural island, is lavishly endowed with magical power but is arrogant and ambitious. In a fit of temper, he shows off to a rival at the school of wizardry and lets loose a dangerous shadow creature, which goes on to threaten all Earthsea. Humbled, Ged must track the creature over island and sea and conquer it — which he does by accepting the dark, destructive side of himself.

  What a good adventure story! But Le Guin is not just giving children an exciting ride. She makes them think, at every turn, about power and restraint, about how every act and every bit of the world affects the whole. Earthsea is a world of sea and many small islands; each has its own culture, but altogether Earthsea is a single world made one by water. Thus its very geography represents one of Le Guin’s most important themes — the interrelatedness of all things. And in this world of sea and boats, the notion of Equilibrium fittingly governs the magic: every wizardly act affects the Equilibrium; the wizard’s task is to learn the name of every particle in the world (thus affording it due respect) and to work magic as unobtrusively as possible. This theme reaches its fullness when Ged finally embraces his shadow: accepting the destructive part of himself, he has “made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.” All of Le Guin’s ideas — about an ecology that ranges from personal self-knowledge to human cooperation in societies to the global environment — are wrapped up in a story about a headstrong boy who sails wild seas, argues with dragons, and graduates from wizard school. This is the kind of intellectual, moral, and literary nourishment that high fantasy can offer.

  Such rich meaning, embodied in one governing metaphor, can also be found in fantasies in which magic enters the real world. In the young adult novel The Changeover: A Supernatural Romance, Margaret Mahy uses the idea of the “changeover” from human to witch as a metaphor for changes that are a natural part of maturation. Her heroine, Laura, is just beginning to awaken to her own sexuality and is half fascinated, half nervous at the interest witchy Sorry Carlisle shows in her. When Laura’s little brother is possessed by a consuming spirit and she asks Sorry to help her, she is told by his mother and grandmother, two witches, that she must “change over” in order to effect the rescue hers
elf.

  Magic, imagination, nature, and sexuality are woven together in Mahy’s story. On her heroic quest to “change over,” Laura makes an imaginative journey through a forest that is in her own head, furnished with images from her own past. “Your journey is inward, but it will seem outward,” Sorry’s grandmother tells her, in words that could apply to all fantasy. The forest Laura brings to life in herself represents a magical creative power that will let her win back her brother — but it is echoed in her newly discovered female powers. Sorry’s interest in Laura underscores that theme: “She was going to be kissed. On one side of a kiss was childhood, sunshine, innocence, toys and, on the other, people embracing, darkness, passion and the admittance of a person who, no matter how loved, must always have the quality of otherness.”

  A Wizard of Earthsea and The Changeover are good examples of the coherence and cohesiveness with which a fantasy world and its governing magic, or metaphor, can function. Both deepen and broaden readers’ understanding of matters that are very real and very human, showing that fanciful invention and impossible creatures are not so removed from the issues realistic fiction addresses. For those who would like to woo their children from the overt trappings of magic, however, fantasy has its own ideal subgenre: time travel. Time-travel stories offer a delicate bridge between fantasy and more realistic fiction, usually historical fiction — as if a visit to the past is not so very different from a visit to a fantasy world. At its best, the magical ability to traverse time suggests that there is a close relationship between imagination, desire, and memory — never more fully, perhaps, than in British author Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden.

  Ten-year-old Tom is frustrated at being quarantined in his relatives’ flat in the city, and one midnight, roaming restlessly in the old house where the flat is, he opens the door onto a beautiful garden. When he tries to return the next day, however, he discovers that the door opens onto a parking space; only at night can he visit the garden. There, he eventually befriends Hatty, with whom he spends idyllic hours exploring as the garden presents itself first at one season, then another, without regard for the natural progression of time. Tom soon realizes that Hatty and the garden belong to a time different from his own: by night he and Hatty revel in its freedom; by day he tries to determine when and where Hatty and the garden really are. The intense longing he has for the garden and for Hatty’s companionship come to a head as his stay with his relatives nears its end, and he makes plans to stay forever in the past. He hasn’t noticed that while he has stayed ten, Hatty herself has grown older: in a moment of poignant distress, Tom is forced to recognize that she is now grown up. The next night, when he opens the door, the garden is nowhere to be seen.

  Only in the last moments of the story does Tom begin to understand his visits to the garden. Called up to apologize for waking the building’s elderly landlady, he suddenly faces his playmate: “Her bright black eyes were certainly like Hatty’s; and now he began to notice, again and again, a gesture, a tone of the voice, a way of laughing that reminded him of the little girl in the garden. . . . Tom suddenly leaned forward and whispered: ‘You were Hatty — you are Hatty! You’re really Hatty!’” With intense clarity, Pearce’s readers suddenly recognize the child in the adult — that adults do not leave their childhood behind them, but take it with them as they mature. The elderly Hatty’s memories of her loveless childhood have made her dream of her youth; Tom’s longing for freedom and companionship has drawn him into its past. The garden’s erratic seasons and unreliable presence suggest that memory, and even the past itself, are somehow as much a work of shifting imagination and dream as they are of hard fact.

  Not all time-travel stories have the depth of Tom’s Midnight Garden; some are simply devices to teach history, with the extra frill of an astonished contemporary hero who comments on what she or he sees there (see Betty Carter’s “When Dinosaurs Watched Black-and-White TV”). However, in Susan Cooper’s King of Shadows, Ruth Park’s Playing Beatie Bow, or Kit Pearson’s A Handful of Time, crossing time makes readers think of how we understand the past, both as we see it in the present and as we reconstruct it through partial evidence and intelligent imagination. It is also a means by which characters come to a new perspective on themselves. Distanced from their own problems, they live parallel stories that help them resolve the emotional crises they face at home. They are changed by realizing what they share with people of the past and also by confronting and accepting a cultural experience alien from their own.

  Parodies of traditional fairy tales and adventure stories are another fruitful branch of fantasy. In Gail Carson Levine’s fairy-tale fantasy Ella Enchanted, Levine offers girls, especially, the means to look critically — and laughingly — at fairy-tale stereotypes and the obstacles they raise for over-believing readers. Ella’s fairy “gift” always to be obedient proves to be downright sinister, because it makes her vulnerable to every commanding presence she encounters. With a light, easy tone, Levine gets at something deep at the heart of what is still a struggle for women: the ability to say no. This story and others — such as Terry Pratchett’s reworking of the Tam Lin folktale in The Wee Free Men and Diana Wynne Jones’s flipping of fairy tales’ youngest-sister convention in Howl’s Moving Castle — invite readers to question the status quo. Both in retold fairy tales and in parodic high fantasy, humor makes young readers aware of the fundamental patterns of story, which in turn helps them become more acute readers — not just of story, but of the world.

  A voyage to another time can be a device for distancing protagonists from their problems, thus giving them a chance to resolve them in a less threatening environment. Travel between worlds can also work this way, as C. S. Lewis shows in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as the four Pevensey children exit war-torn Britain, take part in a conflict in a magical land, and return to the real world with the empowering feeling that evil can be vanquished. Similarly, in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, travel to an alternate world heightens and focuses the character’s anger at her parents and ultimately has the healthy effect of dissolving it. Just as we understand dreams to be stories of what is going on in our subconscious, so can adventures in alternate worlds and times clarify inner conditions.

  Whatever the magical element is in any fantasy — a landscape with invented beings, the ability to travel through time and across worlds or to perform magic spells — as readers we understand it to represent something more than itself. Making something fantastic distances it from reality, as if the events and concerns of real life are distilled and concentrated into features more brilliant and intense than their usual selves, set apart for clearer examination. Children enjoy the suspense and action of heroic quests or the desirable notion of flying brooms, casting spells, or communicating freely with animals — but in the best fantasies, all these features point to aspects of our own world and to real human abilities.

  Of all forms of literature, fantasy is the one that most openly acknowledges that it is “made up.” It celebrates boldly the creative power of the artist to imagine things other than the way they are. Unlike other genres, it has the singular feature of admitting right off the bat that it does not represent reality but rather interprets it. Fantasy’s very departure from reality signals something important to the reader about reading: this is a story that asks to be interpreted and openly demands that we exercise our powers of translation. It is fantasy, in fact, that leads children into some of the most complex questions they can ask about being human. And you can’t ask more of reading and books than that.

  What if rugs could fly? What if pigs could talk? Every writer of fantasy poses a what-if question that is the theme of his book. He can ask it in many ways, and all of these ways are different approaches to the dividing line between truth (the real world) and fantasy (the unreal world). Then, once the fabulous axiom has been cited, the writer must cleave to logic. He must answer the question, “Then what? Given such-and-such a situation, what would really happen?” (It is the
really that is to be stressed. Realism sharpens fantasy.)

  But what is it that makes a fantasy unforgettable? What does it all add up to, the what ifs and the then whats? After all the invention and the action and the clever devices, so what?

  I can think of two things that set some books of fantasy apart. The first thing, surely, is a strongly realized personal vision. The writer’s obsession comes first, and the books come after. When you open one of them and turn the pages, you are traveling in a place invented by that writer, a piece of fictional territory, a fanciful stomping ground. Many writers have discovered and mapped their own personal geographies, and they are places as real to us now as Iowa or Tibet or the Bronx: Jean de Brunhoff’s Celesteville, where Babar is king; the Cherry-Tree Lane of P. L. Travers and Mary Poppins; Maurice Sendak’s land where the Wild Things are; C. S. Lewis’s Narnia; the foolish villages of Isaac Bashevis Singer; Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood; Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Asteroid B-612, inhabited by the Little Prince; Tolkien’s Middle-earth; Tove Jansson’s Moominland; Margery Sharp’s Black Castle; the various hilarious provinces of Dr. Seuss. Each of these places is somehow whole and perfect and entire — real-ized and altogether there. With the borders of these imaginary territories placed end-to-end, a child’s mental dominion can stretch all the way to Homer’s Ithaca or Shakespeare’s forest of Oberon. A world like this is rich freight to carry around inside any child’s head.

  The other quality that sets apart some books of children’s fantasy is, of course, a second level of meaning — significance, symbolism, allegory; a stab at a moral, a message, a lesson. The meaning may be as bald as the last sentence in one of Aesop’s fables (“Slow and steady wins the race”) or as unpretentious and delicate as the distillation from the modest adventures of Milne’s animals (what it means to be a friend). Meaning is not easy. Sometimes the attempt at it is too vaguely vast, too preachy-teachy, too thin and scant. But when it works, the book gains a value that may outlast the short time span during which young readers are available to us. It may last them all their lives.