Literary Wonderlands

by Laura Miller

  In this postmodern world where fact can change at any moment, there are strict (if absurd) rules around the interpretation and impact of literature and art. Riots happen as a result of extreme adherence to particular aesthetic movements; free interpretations of literary classics are crimes. Next’s background is in enforcing these rules, dealing with forgery and other crimes relating to the written and printed word. Fiction, in Fforde’s universe, is a double-edged sword: crucially important but potentially dangerous. When Acheron Hades steals an original manuscript and uses world-hopping technology—developed by Next’s uncle in his shed—to open a portal into the book itself, he gains the capacity to alter the fiction in ways the author never intended. In a world where stories are the bedrock of social order, this incredibly literal misinterpretation of the text is the ultimate crime.

  The barriers between reality and fiction are softer than we think; a bit like a frozen lake. Hundreds of people can walk across it, but then one evening a thin spot develops and someone falls through; the hole is frozen over by the following morning.

  The Eyre Affair is a story in which the author is not only dead but also occasionally non-existent; characters have agency not just within their own stories but between and outside them, freed to move between worlds and to exist outside the confines of the written narrative. Edward Rochester hosts Japanese tourists at Thornfield while the reader’s attention is elsewhere; a minor character from Martin Chuzzlewit can not only be liberated from the confines of the original manuscript but also killed in Fforde’s “real” world. In his essay “Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes wrote that, “A text is… a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations.”

  Ultimately The Eyre Affair and its sequels hinge on a reimagining of the reader as an active agent of change within the text. Fforde makes the concept of individual interpretation a literal event, creating a world in which other texts by other authors are just as malleable as his own. A reader’s intervention can change not just the meaning of a book but the events that take place within it: Thursday Next’s imagination and the Prose Portal technology allow her to hop between literary worlds and alter them completely, restoring the writer’s original intent or, in the case of Jane Eyre, dramatically improving the ending by providing the impetus for the protagonist to return to Thornfield.

  CORNELIA FUNKE

  INKHEART (2003)

  Mortimer Folchart possesses the ability to call characters out of books. In doing so he releases a pair of robbers into the contemporary world, where they create problems that he and his daughter must attempt to resolve by entering books themselves.

  Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart trilogy is not only a celebration of the love of books and reading, but also a meditation on, and warning about, the potential power of words, blending the grit of the real world with the fantasies that are encased in fictions. The page-turning excitement of this action-packed hybrid has won the series a global audience, selling more than twenty million copies worldwide.

  Funke (b.1958) had already established herself as the “J. K. Rowling of Germany” with her previous titles, and her first novel The Thief Lord (entitled Herr der Diebe in its original German, 2000) almost succeeded in topping the New York Times’ best-seller list. However it is her award-winning Inkheart series for which she is best known. Here Funke pursues the notion of being “lost in a book” or “living in a book” to its logical extremity with her creation the Inkworld, the world within the pages of Inkheart, a book written by one Fenoglio that is itself a story within Funke’s own novel.

  At the beginning of the novel, twelve-year-old Meggie discovers that her father, Mortimer “Mo” Folchart, has the ability to bring fictional characters to life when he reads aloud. Having learned to his cost that for every character fetched from the page, a person from the real world must enter the book in return, Mo has sworn never to read aloud again. Yet the characters of Inkheart that Mo once read into the contemporary world are not content to let him forget the past. Dustfinger seeks to return home to the pages of his story, while the villainous Capricorn and his accomplice Basta attempt to take control by destroying all the existing copies of Inkheart. Books, we understand, are powerful objects in both the right and wrong hands.

  The tension between the roles of reader and writer becomes ever more apparent in the later titles Inkspell (2005) and Inkdeath (2007) as the author Fenoglio, living in the fictional world he has created, finds it is constantly changing from his memory of it, while Orpheus, a “silvertongue” like Mo, having written himself into the story, endlessly tinkers with it, creating interpolative pastiche texts, what we might call fan fiction, in which he plays increasingly significant roles. The implication seems to be that, as the theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes suggested, once a novel is published, the original author is supplanted by myriad reader-authors. As Mo says:

  Perhaps there’s another, much larger story behind the printed one, a story that changes just as our own world does. And the letters on the page tell us only as much as we’d see peering through a keyhole. Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan; it always stays the same, but underneath there’s a whole world that goes on developing and changing like our own.

  Critics of the series have argued that, although she raises intriguing questions about the metafictional nature of text, Funke cannot properly answer them because the Inkworld is itself too insubstantial to support a full-scale enquiry into the nature of fiction. Nonetheless, the series continues to win favor with younger readers and Inkheart was produced as a movie in 2009.

  SUSANNA CLARKE

  JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL (2004)

  Clarke’s alternate history, set in England at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, imagines an England in which magic once existed, and is reawakened by the titular magicians.

  A dark blend of nineteenth-century literary tropes and magical adventure, the debut novel of British writer Susanna Clarke (b.1959) has been an enormous best seller since its publication in 2004. Described by Neil Gaiman as “unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years,” Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is both critically acclaimed and beloved by many.

  At the beginning of the book magic is only barely present in England, or so it seems. There are magicians, certainly, but of a theoretical sort only—gentlemen scholars unable to cast spells. And so England seems to be a magicless, ordinary place. But once the titular practicing magicians do appear, their practice of magic reshapes the nature of England itself—making it a wilder, stranger place. The more magic that is done in England, the more magical England shows itself to be.

  For approximately the first third of the book, English magic is in the cold and fidgety hands of Mr. Norrell. He is capable of great and stunning spells—the speaking statues of York cathedral are haunting—but he treats magic as if he must make it a tame thing, regimented and contained, its memory stripped, so that it—and England—no longer remember that they used to belong to John Uskglass, the Raven King. The only exception to this caution is a spell that reverberates throughout the rest of the book—Norrell’s summoning of a fairy servant, the gentleman with thistle-down hair, in order to raise Miss Wintertowne, soon to be Lady Pole, from the dead. This magic is strange and terrible, and has dire consequences. Aside from this, as Norrell practices, English magic is something that is staid, businesslike, and would prefer to hide in a library.

  Once Jonathan Strange becomes a practicing magician however, English magic is greatly altered. Strange goes to war (taking part in the Napoleonic conflict, in the service of Lord Wellington) and takes magic with him. On the battlefield, Strange learns much magic that was hidden in Norrell’s books—spells great enough to speak with the dead, and to rearrange the very geography of Spain.

  But while Strange is away remaking Spain via English magic, England itself is being changed by magic as well. Indeed, it is impossib
le to talk about magic without talking about place, about the way that the presence of magic changes a place, and the ways that places themselves are changed by the presence of magic. The realm of Faerie encroaches England, creeping in by bits and pieces, here and there. The gentleman with the thistle-down hair steals Lady Pole away every night to his palace of Lost-Hope—leaving her exhausted and seemingly mad—and soon begins to steal away one of Sir Pole’s servants, Stephen Black, who he plans to make a king. Black witnesses Faerie itself stealing its way into England, layering over streets and places that were once familiar to him, and making them uncanny.

  But even then, English magic remains, or so it seems, recognizably English, and in recognizably English hands. This changes, drastically, when the gentleman with the thistle-down hair abducts Strange’s wife, Arabella, to Faerie by magic, magic that makes it appear she has died. In his grief, Strange goes to Venice, and then chooses to go mad—madness being a condition that allows an easier window into Faerie. In this self-inflicted madness, Strange is able to literally return magic to England—he throws open the doors between England and everywhere else, and writes magic on the rocks and stones. Magicians spring up in unlikely places and the eye of the Raven King turns to England again.

  But while magic is returned to England, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell are taken out of it—cast into eternal darkness through a spell of the gentleman with thistle-down hair. Bound together until they learn the spell to free themselves, they are gone, “Wherever magicians used to go. Behind the sky. On the other side of the rain.”

  DAVID MITCHELL

  CLOUD ATLAS (2004)

  Six different lives interlock in Mitchell’s award-winning narrative. Cloud Atlas circles the globe and stretches from the nineteenth century to a post-apocalyptic future, all the time redrawing the boundaries of time, genre, and language to explore the consequences of humanity’s will to power.

  The world David Mitchell creates in Cloud Atlas is, for much of its duration, distinctly ours. Running parallel to events, experiences, and phenomena we know from our own history—slavery, artistic composition, homes for the elderly—with such care taken to wind them into our reality so that it’s almost disarming when, toward the halfway point of the novel, we’re thrown into a future of clones and post-apocalyptic language.

  The structure of the text is its most distinctive feature. It falls into six nested parts—some would call them individual stories, but that’s actually doing them a disservice, suggesting separation where there actually isn’t any. The flow between them is far deeper than most linked story collections—they are presented in a way that cuts each of them off at their midpoint, only to later return to them. So: the first section, which is set in 1850, is both the first and last section of the book; the second, set in 1931, is the second and penultimate; and so on. Each part can’t stand on its own because of the structure, and the structure requires each part in order to work. There’s something symbiotic going on between the form of the text and each of the parts—more so than in most novels that adopt this approach.

  That structure is, of course, the entire point of the novel. Character and theme run hand in hand throughout, as Mitchell tells us a story about reincarnation, order, and chaos. Each character in the book is, in some way, a reincarnation of a character that we have met at another time. That’s not to say we’ll always recognize them in each piece, but they’re definitely present: in modes of speech, thoughts, and ideologies, in the events they enact, and the way that they live. In the 2012 movie adaptation, actors played multiple parts throughout, throwing that reincarnation theme to the forefront; in the text, it’s rather more subtle than that.

  Just as the book loops back on itself, as the characters do the same, so does the world presented to us. Across the sections—each of them named, each of them nudging stylistically toward a different genre of fiction and, most importantly, spanning an enormous (and undisclosed) period of time—we see that same loop exist on a plot level. We see a world of conquered savagery at the start, with an American witnessing the slavery of the Maori in New Zealand in the middle of the nineteenth century; then by the end of the novel, having taken in other forms of slavery (to our own identities; to the truth; to time; to the state), we’re back in a world that, at a glance, resembles the first presentation, but is, in actuality, a post-apocalyptic future—a future that humanity is a slave to.

  It’s a world we recognize for much of the book, but that then manages to fall into something entirely different: a future that seems less than plausible—and intentionally so—and that then casts doubt on the text that precedes it. With the concept of reincarnation being so prevalent, it’s clear that this is not our world. It’s Mitchell’s, and it’s a world he links together with every novel he has thus far written. They’re all tied together, with characters leaping between them, and events in one setting up stories told in another.

  KAZUO ISHIGURO

  NEVER LET ME GO (2005)

  Ishiguro’s darkly imagined version of contemporary England hauntingly dramatizes the fragility of life through the fates of a group of students at a seemingly idyllic boarding school.

  The seemingly niche area of “organ-transplant-fantasy” fiction can claim some notable hits. Most would agree with Brian Aldiss, the “Dean of British Science Fiction,” that the science-fiction genre, in its modern form, begins with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), in which a brilliant young Swiss scientist puts together a “creature” from a medley of body parts. Similarly, Frederik Pohl also dealt with organ transplantation in his 1964 novel (co-written with Jack Williamson) The Reefs of Space. A sardonically dystopian novel in which those branded “risks” to society find themselves incarcerated in “living body banks,” reservoirs of limbs and organs to be harvested as the need arises.

  These scenarios, however, were fantasy, since medicine had not at that time developed the techniques by which body parts could be successfully transplanted. South-African surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the world’s first heart transplant in 1967. The patient lived for only eighteen days, but a string of ever more successful transplant operations followed, and transplantees were surviving for months, years, and then decades. Science fiction had become medical fact.

  Transplant scenarios became commonplace in film and science fiction following Barnard’s pioneering surgery. A literary highpoint, well beyond the reach of genre fiction, was reached with Kashuo Ishiguro’s (b.1954) highly acclaimed novel, Never Let Me Go (adapted into an equally lauded film in 2010). Japanese-born novelist Ishiguro had already received the Booker Prize in 1989 for The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go was shortlisted for the same award. Time magazine went on to name it the best novel of 2005.

  The story opens in what appears to be an idyllic English boarding school called Hailsham, located in the bucolic Norfolk countryside. Mysteriously, none of the Hailsham children seem to have parents or family, and live in the care of “guardians.” Their education is sparse and suited for no kind of examination, or even productive post-school life, the principal focus is on their physical health. Nonetheless, the children develop friendships and, as they grow up, loving relationships.

  As the narrative continues the truth emerges. The children have been created in laboratories as living organ banks for specific owners (“normals”), of whom they are clones (“doubles”). Some of the young people, now they know the truth, rebel. Others seek ways to postpone the fate that awaits them. Others embark on desperate searches for their “normals.”

  The novel in its last section depicts the pathos of the donors’ (as they are called) lives, as parts are clipped off them, until they “complete” (when they are used up and disposed of). The clones come to understand, more acutely than their normal “receivers,” the nature of the humanity they are doomed never to possess, of mortality, and—most presciently—what is evolving outside the school:

  … a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old s
icknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel, world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.

  Ironically, the children and the adult donors they become are merely a transitional remedy. Already, in their adulthood, they are being overtaken by new medical “advances.”

  However one labels it (and Robert Heinlein’s description of “SF” as “speculative fiction,” rather than “science fiction,” seems appropriate here) Ishiguro’s is rightly regarded as one of the twenty-first century’s greatest works of literary fiction.

  NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O

  WIZARD OF THE CROW (2006)

  Ngũgĩ’s absurdist satire on postcolonial kleptocracy is set in Aburiria, a fictitious African dictatorship whose tyrant is challenged by a self-styled wizard and his lover.

  The Free Republic of Aburiria owes most to Ngũgĩ’s (b.1938) native Kenya—particularly the twenty-four-year dictatorship of Daniel arap Moi (1978–2002), under whose vice-presidency Ngũgĩ was detained for a year without trial in 1977, and his books banned. By the time this prisoner of conscience emerged from Kamiti Maximum Security Prison in December 1978, Moi was head of state.

  In Wizard of the Crow, “the Ruler” is a supreme kleptocrat (“A loot-a continua”) whose hubristic goal is to build Africa’s tallest skyscraper. His western suits are patched with big cats’ fur. Yet the allusions stretch to despots far beyond Kenya, from Mobutu and Idi Amin to Marcos and Pinochet. As Ngũgĩ wrote in an afterword to the novel, published in his own English translation in 2006, he drew on his exile in London in the 1980s, when he campaigned to free political prisoners from Kenyan and other dungeons—hence the novel’s atmosphere of paranoia about the “M5” secret police. The Ruler’s sycophantic ministers go to extreme lengths to keep enemies under surveillance. One minister has his eyes “enlarged to the size of electric bulbs,” while his rival’s ears are made “larger than a rabbit’s.” There is “almost a comic element, except that they’re so dangerous,” the author said of his targets. Asked how he approached them, Ngũgĩ responded with his own question: “How do you satirize someone like Moi, who says he wants all his ministers to be parrots?”