Larvatus Prodeo

The latest installment in an occasional series on speculative fiction by guest poster Patrickg:

Distant Suns VII: Darkness like a dream

Fairyland, Fae, Anwnn, whichever name you like to call it, occupies a very unique place in fantasy settings. It is a rare – if not the only – fantasy locale that by its very existence is inextricably linked to our own world.

It’s a fertile land for writers: Beyond Fairy’s medieval, mythological roots, there dwells a wellspring of metaphor that is easily flavoured by a contemporary world. After all, everyone is aware that time moves differently for the Fae, so who’s to say what era an unwary traveller may stumble into after a dalliance in an elf-mound? It provides the fairy underworld with a fluidity and relevance almost unmatched in fantasy. Moreover, these unstated, omnipotent links can turn Faery into a kind of enchanted mirror, from which to survey our own attitudes towards gender, transgression, and morality.

Hope Mirrlees did just such a thing with Lud-In-The-Mist (1925), sadly her only book still in print, and the last one she wrote. Lud-in-the-Mist is an eminently sensible city, situated on the converging banks of two rivers, The Dapple and The Dawl. Unfortunately, fruit from the bordering land of Faerie is infiltrating the city, and the inhabitants find themselves at the mercy of strange visions, uncomfortable emotions and worse yet: a disturbing hunger for more.

Lud-in-the-Mist has grown in status since its initial republication in 1970, and rightly so. The book represents seminal steps of a type of fantasy far removed from Tolkien, Eddison, and Howard. It’s an introspective, almost interrogating novel, with a setting that could easily dissolve into puddles of Enid Blyton treacle, but instead becomes something equally rich but also human. Mirrlees deftly toys with her era’s focus on Freud (and its corollaries of thwarted desire, irrational passion and infantile escapism) into a compelling novel with a surprising amount of pathos.

She also highlights a key component of tales involving Fairyland: Is this a location we escape from, or escape to? Is it even possible to do either? Or like some code embedded in our DNA, is this a place that lives within us, impossible to dislodge?

I must confess, this is what I love most about Fairyland. I feel its very construction is a negativist one – an existence that compels us to ask more questions than it can answer. And indeed, the answers it does provide seem illusory and unsatisfying: gold that turns to coal at daybreak; sumptuous feasts the melt away at a cock’s crow, leaving nothing but dew and nectar, scattered across some oak leaves.

No book dealing with the Seelie and Unseelie courts does this better than John Crowley’s Little, Big. Even the title encapsulates the unknowns when dealing with otherworlds; is our world the small one, or the large? Are we the big people, though little in scope and understanding? Or, as the title contends, is it both one and the same?

Crowley is a masterful writer. His greatest gift lies in understanding and clarifying the way magic – or more accurately, the perception of magic – infiltrates and touches us all. Virtually nothing untoward happens for a third of the novel, and yet it breathes magic: the pages pulse with it, the prose rimed with it (be sure to get an edition with lovely drawings and fonts on different pages).

Better yet, this isn’t some kind of arcane high-magic, as foreign to us as Tolkien’s Elvish. No, this is – if not everyday magic – full moon magic, perhaps. The kind of magic I hope you remember from your childhood, or perhaps a lonely walk home in the rain yesterday. It’s a real magic, and it’s also an inchoate, did it/didn’t it? kind of magic, more concerned with emotion and atmosphere than fabulous acts.

What happens in the book? Well, at the risk of infuriating, everything and nothing. At the end, I was hard pressed to say what actually happened, or even what the book was about, really. It’s about everything. It’s not really about anything.

The Drinkwater Family are a fey and attractive one. When Smoky Barnable falls in love with Alice, one of the rangy daughters, he finds his life transforms quite rapidly from its previous monochrome haze. But Smoky isn’t the only one transformed. As the years pass, the family must fight their own battles – both domestic and mystical, and future generations find the world they move in becoming increasingly strange and troubled.

This doesn’t really do it justice. I couldn’t even tell you who the main character is – certainly not Smoky. The narrative ambles about like a fae-touched lad, almost falling to near-death slumber at more than one point. And yet it stays with you. The contradictions, the confusion, the mania and the despondency. Nothing seems to really make sense – at least, it’s never explained, it’s all guesswork, really – and yet characters must move on; grow old, try to stay young, fall in and out of love.

What a crystalline metaphor for the act of reading. The sense of being whisked away to an undiscovered country, spending a lifetime there only to discover it’s a day. Of meeting characters that captivate and confound in equal measure. The seemingly banal – wood pulp – containing the impossibly transcendent.

But more than that, I personally think Fairyland is an excellent allegory for life, hence its enduring resonance. Each time you think you’ve grasped some understanding it slips away, only to be replaced by something different, equally alluring and solid-seeming. Feelings can turn out to be illusions, and others still seem mysteriously bonded and branded to us. People are revealed to be fickle changelings, or those whom you thought small grow in stature and beauty – so much so you can barely look at them, or resist loving them. Qualities and objects we think are protection turn out to harm in the end, and things we thought malicious suddenly grant boons. Time seems to hang – a night becomes a year – and then suddenly your bones are creaking on cold mornings, and you’re surrounded by a host of little people. The only constant is your own ignorance, and a bewildering array of emotions that seem to cut sharper than any mortal sword, and feel richer than any mundane gold.

Little, Big may not be everyone’s cup of tea. It’s a heavily-spiced brew, redolent and dreamy. Yet for all that, there’s a familiarity to the taste that I welcomed. And at the same time, an intrinsic exoticism. Sound like a paradox? Don’t say I didn’t warn you…