Literary Wonderlands

by Laura Miller

  Harry actually begins his life in a wizarding home, but is ushered out of that world and into the life of Muggles with his aunt and uncle, not through a change of location or consciousness, but a traumatic event that he only remembers in dreams. Rowling at first merely suggests the happenings of that night celebrated by every wizard in England: Voldemort has gone into hiding after spectacularly failing to kill the one-year-old Harry. As Voldemort does manage to kill his parents, Lily and James Potter, “the boy who lived” must be hidden away in the Muggle world. He is subjected to eleven years of privation on Privet Drive with the Dursleys, who are not just aggressively Muggle (partly in response to Aunt Petunia’s embarrassment over her sister’s magical abilities) but also petty and mean.

  As in the Chronicles of Narnia, readers are acquainted with the space and environment of wizard life through the eyes of a newcomer. Harry does not understand the flood of letters that are so determined to be opened only by him that hundreds of them follow the Dursleys’s escape to a deserted island. The letters are the first of the adapted objects mentioned earlier. These are missives that can fly, squeeze under doors, come down chimneys, and change address at will if the recipient changes locations. Sentient letters are only part of Rowling’s versatile system of communication technology—owls are the major means of communication for all wizards. Simple oral instructions from their owners send owls off to carry letters and packages back and forth between wizards, anytime, anywhere. Photographs, newspaper illustrations, and paintings are also forms of communication, conveniently allowing their occupants to move about and even move between frames to convey information to their viewers.

  Rowling’s world is full of objects and practices that possess enhanced capabilities for wizards, showing points at which magic and Muggle technologies morph into something new. Brooms are not cleaning tools at Hogwarts; instead they are, not unlike bicycles, modes of transportation for one or two people and equipment for organized sports. Similarly, the now-famous (and popular tourist photo op at King’s Cross Station) Platform 9¾ is only accessed by hurling oneself at the wall between the Muggle train platforms. The Hogwarts Express itself seems to operate just like an ordinary Muggle train, aside from the fact that it has a platform invisible to most of the station’s travelers. That last point indicates another practical advantage of this parallel mode of transportation: It is not detectable by Muggles, thus avoiding the necessity of applying “memory” charms to those baffled non-magical humans who would be alarmed at the sight of people flitting about on broomsticks.

  The juxtaposition of a train and broomsticks for transportation purposes—as opposed to cars, which are comically mysterious to wizards—exemplifies a feature of Rowling’s world that may seem puzzling: A fundamental distinction between our existences is the markedly different capabilities of Muggles and wizards to master, and then manage, the knowledge required to make technology or magic work. We have developed complex mechanical and electronic products and systems external to our beings that control our lives probably more than we like to acknowledge. If a car coughs and stalls, many are helpless in the face of the blinking lights on the dashboard. If a computer screen is suddenly blue and blank, a visit to the electronics store is in store. Witches and wizards, trained for seven years in the magical arts, learn to control certain forces with their own minds and talents to accomplish similar tasks. We flip a switch on a flashlight; illumination springs from a wizard’s wand at the sound of “Lumos!” After a big meal Molly Weasley waves her wand at the dirty dishes, and they quietly begin to wash themselves in the sink. A mirror does not reflect one’s own face, but, as Dumbledore says to Harry, the Mirror of Erised “shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts.”

  It may assumed that the potential scope of a wizard’s abilities would bestow unlimited powers, but Rowling has not resorted to that easy way out. For instance, they choose not to exercise complete magical control over their world. One question raised by magical skill is the creation of wealth: Why not conjure up endless supplies of money? Some wizards are wealthier than others (the rich, haughty Malfoys versus the poor but good-hearted Weasleys), but they do not generate gold out of thin air, despite the Philosopher’s Stone. Neither is the handling of their wealth what we might expect. One of Harry’s first visits in the magical world is with Hagrid to Gringotts Bank, a Dickensian-looking establishment staffed by goblins so nasty they even intimidate Hagrid. We might expect wizards merely to render their money invisible, or enchant it to prevent theft. Instead, Harry enters an institutional setting organized vaguely like Muggle banks, but with special features: Gringotts sits above enchanted passages hundreds of miles beneath London, reached by a goblin driving a sort of miner’s cart, with dragons guarding the most precious vaults.

  This existence is imbued with magic, but is not effortless, uncomplicated, or free from evil. The world envisioned in Philosopher’s Stone raises numerous questions addressed throughout the series: How does one negotiate with non-human creatures who also have powers? Can wizards create life? What happens if they try to control Muggle lives? To Rowling’s credit, she has conceived rich possibilities, not just for plot purposes, but to explore how we interact with nature, exert power over others, and cooperate in a diverse and sometimes dangerous world.

  CHINA MIÉVILLE

  THE BAS-LAG CYCLE (2000–04)

  The seminal New Weird novels of China Miéville’s mold-breaking cycle intermingle urban fantasy, steampunk, science fiction, horror, and surrealism, engrossing readers with visions of wonder and grotesquery.

  Born in Norwich, England, in 1972 and brought up in London, China Miéville has become a daring and influential voice in speculative fiction, renowned for his sweeping imaginative scope, erudite political perspectives, and richly evocative prose style. His debut novel King Rat is a London phantasmagoria—kin to works such as Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere—but it was with the publication of Perdido Street Station in 2000 that Miéville became a literary sensation. The Arthur C. Clarke award-winning novel and the two sequels that followed, The Scar and Iron Council, together comprise the Bas-Lag cycle, a trilogy seminal to the literary movement dubbed the “New Weird.” Looking back to the weird fiction of the early twentieth-century—a genre most closely associated with H. P. Lovecraft, but which also includes such under-appreciated luminaries as William Hope Hodgson, Clark Ashton Smith, and Algernon Blackwood—the New Weird exists in what the sinister crime-boss Mr. Motley of Perdido Street Station would call “the hybrid zone”: a liminal space somewhere between existing genres, borrowing liberally from worlds too-often deemed incompatible. In Bas-Lag artificial intelligence and quantum mechanics mix with magic and monsters in a heady, hallucinogenic brew, simmering with unruly potential.

  Perdido Street Station takes place entirely in the city of New Crobuzon: a churning industrial megalopolis calling to mind not only Victorian London but also Cairo, the French Quarter of New Orleans, and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast castle (see here). The many districts of Miéville’s sprawling, baroquely described city are rendered in loving detail, from the eerie, crime-ridden slums of Bonetown, shadowed by the ribs of some centuries-dead behemoth, to the alchemical laboratories of Brock Marsh, where badger-familiars run errands for masters somewhere between scientists and sorcerers.

  Magic—or thaumaturgy, as it is more generally termed in Bas-Lag—suffuses New Crobuzon’s labyrinthine streets, but it is treated as a science, obeying its own distinct laws and logic, rather than an unknowable, uncontrollable mythic force.

  Ruled in Perdido Street Station by Mayor Bentham Rudgutter, and in Iron Council by the coldly calculating Mayor Eliza Stem-Fulcher, New Crobuzon is a place of intrigue and everyday brutality. Though nominally a democracy, the city has strongly authoritarian leanings and rapacious colonial ambitions. Disguised militia make the city a gigantic panopticon, plain-clothes agents blending in with the crowd to ruthlessly enforce the will of their masters, while the rails radiating ou
t from the imperialist metropole extend its power to all corners of Rohagi, Bas-Lag’s most-described continent. Resistance to the oppressive Fat Sun party seethes throughout Perdido Street Station in the form of the righteously seditious newspaper Runagate Rampant and the mysterious outlaw and social bandit Jack Half-a-Prayer, only to boil over into open revolution in Iron Council, the most overtly political of the Bas-Lag cycle.

  Two other cities feature prominently in the Bas-Las cycle. Armada, a pirate-city fashioned from thousands of lashed-together boats, forms the setting of The Scar. The quasi-anarchic politics of Armada contrast markedly with the oligarchic corruption and totalitarian tendencies of New Crobuzon: here the various communities of the city jostle for power, debating which direction the flotilla should drift, which seas to sail, which targets to pick. Press-ganged captives and natives of the city co-exist uneasily, while erstwhile slaves and convicts find freedom and a new life on the waves. As in New Crobuzon, each neighborhood of Armada possesses its own unique character, like the lucrative library-district of Booktown, the vampiric fiefdom of Dry Fall, or Clockhouse Spur, the intellectuals’ quarter, to name just a few. The eponymous Iron Council of the third book is similarly egalitarian, a “perpetual train” populated by radical train laborers turned renegades, gone rogue into the wilds of Rohagi. The train-city’s odyssey across the nightmarish mutant wasteland of the Catacopic Stain and other strange lands forms the heart of Iron Council.

  Other cities receive only tantalizing mention. There is Tesh, the City of Crawling Liquid, a place of “moats and glass cats, and the Catoblepas Plain and merchant trawlers and tramp diplomats and the Crying Prince,” an economic rival and sometimes military enemy of New Crobuzon; High Cromlech, a macabre metropolis peopled by quick and abdead in intricate castes and ruled by the embalmed thanati; The Gengris, monstrous sub-aquatic realm of the grindylow, a place of limb-farms and bile workshops and unthinkable weapons; Maru’ahm, with its casino-parliament and cardsharp senators; the crocodile double-city of the Brothers; Shud zar Myron zar Koni, City of Ratjinn, the Witchocracy of the Firewater Straits.

  These allusions and countless others give Bas-Lag a feeling of place rarely found in fantasy fiction, a sense of depth and verisimilitude further fostered by the densely layered history Miéville hints at throughout the cycle. Never overburdening readers with heavy-handed exposition, the novels are scattered with allusions and subtle details to past events and political entities. From piecing together these tidbits we learn of the Ghosthead Empire and their possibility mines; of the bloodsucking Malarial Queendom ruled by the terrifying anophelii, of the Ravening of Bered Kai Nev, the continent across the Swollen Sea; and of the Torque-bombing of Suroch and Jheshull, left in nightmarish ruins. This version of the past—resolutely anti-nostalgic, punctuated with atrocity, shaped by such forces as technology, class, imperialism, and revolution—resonates strongly with Miéville’s political outlook and steadfast historical materialism.

  A founding member of Left Unity and a founding editor of Salvage, “a quarterly of revolutionary arts and letters,” Miéville is an outspoken Marxist and acknowledges the importance of politics in his novels. He wrote his PhD dissertation—now published in book form as Between Equal Rights—on Marxism and international law. While a socialist perspective informs the political conflicts and intrigues of Bas-Lag, the novels stubbornly evade reduction, politically or otherwise. Miéville is adamant that his books not be read as allegory. “I’m not a leftist trying to smuggle in my evil message by the nefarious means of fantasy novels,” he sardonically insists. “I’ve invented this world that I think is really cool and I have these really big stories to tell in it and one of the ways that I find to make that interesting is to think about it politically. If you want to do that too, that’s fantastic. But if not, isn’t this a cool monster?”

  Bas-Lag certainly has no shortage of monsters. Miéville scorns the now-clichéd Tolkienian favorites in favor of decidedly less familiar creatures, some culled from mythology, others wholly invented. Instead of orcs, elves, and dwarves, Bas-Lag is peopled with beings such as the beetle-headed khepri, the lumbering, vegetal catcacae, the amphibious, water-shaping vodyanoi, the vulturine garuda, the resilient scabmettlers, and the elegant, enigmatic stiltspear, to name a small handful. Refusing to reduce his characters to stereotypes and assiduously avoiding the monocultural conceits endemic to an unfortunate preponderance of fantasy fiction, Miéville fills Bas-Lag with complex and eccentric characters, often at odds with their own society and customs. Xenians—the non-human inhabitants of Bas-Lag—frequently suffer prejudice and oppression at the hand of human supremacists like the fascist New Quill party. Similarly the Remade, convicted and sentenced by the city’s magisters to horrific transformation in the dreaded Punishment Factories, endure the contempt and repugnance of “whole” citizens. Each of the Remade is unique, a chimera of grafted body-parts or machines, their particular mutilations apportioned according to the malignant precepts of an awful poetic justice. These biopolitical horrors exemplify Bas-Lag’s fixation on monstrosity in both its fantastic and its societal aspects: the Remade are spectacularly original fantasy monsters and, simultaneously, powerful metaphors for socioeconomic marginalization and exploitation.

  Others of Bas-Lag’s species occupy a similarly fraught political space, a liminal existence. Take, for example, the khepri, refugees from Bered Kai Nev and its nebulous cataclysm. Inspired by the Egyptian goddess of the same name, khepri resemble human women from the neck down but have the heads of scarab beetles; male khepri are nothing more than oversized insects, imbecilic and necessary only for reproduction. Living in the New Crobuzon ghettos of Kinken and Creekside, the khepri have a fractured spiritual culture, torn between the crushing religious orthodoxy of the Insect Aspect and the more progressive but still-insular following of the Awesome Broodma; this religious division in turn has profound economic implications for the khepri of the two districts. Lin, a khepri herself and one of the protagonists of Perdido Street Station, recognizes the shortcomings of both communities and rejects both faiths, while feeling, nonetheless, their ineffable nostalgic tug.

  Some of Bas-Lag’s monstrous inhabitants are less comprehensible than others. Instead of dragons Bas-Lag gives us monsters like the Weavers, arachnid aestheticians of supreme power and alien intelligence who live only to perfect the beauty of the worldweave, a kind of multidimensional weft of objects, events, and people the Weavers obsessively manipulate. The Weavers exemplify what Miéville, in his theoretical writing, calls the abcanny: an aesthetic affect grounded in a sense of alterity and otherness which he contrasts with the psychological uncanny of Freud. One of the few Weavers encountered in the series dwells beneath New Crobuzon, mercifully dormant, amusing itself with patterns of scissors and crooning a steady stream of lush, stream-of-consciousness poetry. Others of this sublimely unfathomable species have been known to reshape the tapestry of existence more overtly, though no less intelligibly—to destroy whole armies, commit acts of unspeakable atrocity, pretend to be dead, transmute a gun to glass… anything to refine the artwork that is the world.

  The Weavers are right to see their world as artwork, for Bas-Lag is an imaginative achievement rarely equaled. Though the three Bas-Lag novels have compelling, suspenseful narratives and richly realized characters, it is the setting that lends the cycle its tremendous fascination, a world at once vividly bizarre and yet unnervingly familiar.

  JASPER FFORDE

  THE EYRE AFFAIR (2001)

  The defining feature of the “Thursday Next” series is change. It is an unstable universe, worked through with time paradoxes, alternate histories, peculiar futures, and logical inconsistencies, all cheerfully waved away.

  London-born writer Jasper Fforde had a twenty-year career in the film industry, before turning his hand to writing. He cites his film career as fueling his imagination and the required global travel brought many opportunities for gathering comic ideas and inspiration for his characters.

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bsp; Thursday Next, protagonist of The Eyre Affair and a subsequent seven titles, is a literary detective (or “LiteraTec”) who spends her life hiding inside the plots of unpublished novels. England is a republic, Wales is a socialist republic (there is no United Kingdom), and the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars is continuously in flux due to ongoing issues with French Revisionists.

  The alternate universe of Fforde’s novels is best introduced through Next’s dealings with bureaucracy and the rule of law: the SpecOps forces, dealing with threats and crimes that become stranger the higher the bureaucracy goes. Some elements—particularly the Chronoguard, responsible for dealing with time disturbances—have powers that can alter the past, present, and future. (Fforde neatly establishes that every element in this world is mutable by introducing the banana, a fruit created in the far future and sent back through time to provide early humanity with a superfood.) The various bureaucracies and systems represent doomed attempts to impose order upon chaos, inverting tropes related to genre fiction and dystopian worlds. Vampires and werewolves are an irritating fact of life, and vampire hunting is an unenviable, sometimes soul-destroying job; comedically unethical giant corporations controlling the media are simply a fact of existence.