>Keeping the unicorns at bay

by Roger Sutton
Mar 25, 2006 | Filed in Articles & Opinion
>Last week on childlit, Monica Edinger mentioned Hope Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist, an English fantasy novel for adults first published in the 1920s. I remember this book from my teens in the mid-seventies, a time when lots of long-forgotten "adult fantasy" was being republished in the wake of Tolkien's resurgence. My friends and I read tons of it--William Morris, Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell, Mervyn Peake, and E. R. Eddison. We were all chasing the Tolkien dragon, only occasionally finding it in these books that had frequently been forgotten for a reason, dated by style as much as anything. A lot of them went half-read, but I encountered enough books I enjoyed on their own terms to make their adherence (or lack thereof) to Tolkienism irrelevant. (One of my favorites was Jane Gaskell's trashy The Serpent and its sequels.)

But I don't think I could read any of them today to save my life. I love the Wee Free Men stories by Terry Pratchett, and recently enjoyed Julie Hearn's The Minister's Daughter, but the vast majority of invented-world high fantasy makes my eyes glaze over--and if your taste in spelling runs along the lines of faery, don't sit by me. While this of course says more about me than about the books, it has me interested in how, as adults, we reject books or genres that spoke so clearly to us at an earlier age. Interests change, certainly, and dare I say, mature. But I wonder if there is also a subconscious rejection going on, a determination to separate the grown-up self from the child self. It's different from rejecting genres/authors/themes because of indifference; I'm talking about the books from which we run screaming precisely because they meant so much to us at a different time.

I don't think I'm alone in this, and there's plenty of room on the virtual couch. How does the dynamic I describe work in/for/against you all as adults invested in books for children?
Roger Sutton
Roger Sutton

Editor Emeritus Roger Sutton was editor in chief of The Horn Book, Inc., from 1996-2021. He was previously editor of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books and a children's and young adult librarian. He received his MA in library science from the University of Chicago in 1982 and a BA from Pitzer College in 1978.

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James A. Owen

>Followed this link back from Roger's most recent note -

I'm a voracious reader. And as much as I love books that I feel appeal to both adults and children (to me, several of Garth Nix's books fall under this heading, as do Philip Pullman's), there are books in my library whose place is most definitively in bygone years.

Some books I read as a child I can reread, and reread again - but some, the Narnia books among them, are just too difficult. The problem lies in the fact that I'm comparing my current experience (in both senses of the term)to a well-entrenched, very fond, recollection. Impressions. Reverberations. And those attachments are impossible to recreate, for a lot of those books.

Roger mentioned being unable to reread Tolkien, but acknowledged fond memories. And I think that's what's most important - not to try to recapture the original impression, but to cherish it. I adored (and still do) certain books - but a few passages, a few favorite scenes, are enough to EVOKE the impression the books once had. And it's those impressions that I'm able to pass along to my own children, so that they know I loved the books.

I don't have to reread all of PRINCE CASPIAN to thrill at the rediscovery of Cair Paravel; three paragraphs and a quick skim will do it. I don't have to reread all of THE MAGICIAN'S NEPHEW to get excited over the creation of Lantern Waste - a few pages, and the memory of the joy I once felt comes rushing back. And it is enough.

And maybe, in passing on those impressions, my own children will be more encouraged to read those books - for their first time - and create their own impressions that they'll keep, fondly, throughout their lives. Whether they reread the books, or not.

Posted : Apr 18, 2006 05:23

Andy Laties

>Also -- Fantasy has been grappling with its "outsider" status for quite a while. "But Is It Literature?" -- this is a horrible question, and one which led to the creation of the Hugo and Nebula Awards (Fantasy & Sci Fi). Ursula LeGuin has written eloquently arguing the case the Fantasy and Sci Fi deserve equal billing with Official Literature (whatever that is -- which ambiguity is THE point!)

Posted : Mar 31, 2006 05:40

Andy Laties

>This "transposed" aspect of Fantasy Novels is a sort of sub-text to The Lord Of The Rings. The premise underlying the "novel" is that there's a book called "The Redbook Of Westmarch", which is a chronicle started by Bilbo and then Frodo and then Sam and carried on by Sam's descendents, and that somehow Our Novelist (AKA Tolkien's alter-ego) has access to the Redbook and is writing a book for us Readers Of Today that's drawn from the content of this ancient chronicle. Our Novelist also has access to a whole corpus of other material (The Silmarillion, etc.) -- and Tolkien had actually written all this stuff.

So -- again -- if the Modern Fantasy Novel is effectively a transposition of the traditional Romance into Modern Novel form, then Tolkien's project is a sort of analog of this -- he created his own "primitive" source materials, and then wrote a Novel that draws on them.

(Of course he was part of a club, The Inklings (including C.S. Lewis), who were all embarked on analogous projects. Much of their work was created partly just to read to one another. It's not their fault if we've repurposed their books!)

Posted : Mar 31, 2006 05:22

Andy Laties

>Isn't the Fantasy genre we're speaking of really sort of a combination of the "Romance" with the "Modern Novel"? ("Romance", in a technical sense--like Sir Walter Scott--or Cervantes--and, "Novel", thinking Defoe, Dickens, etc.??) That is -- you take the themes and concerns of the Old-Time Romance and play them out in a Novelistic way, with conversations and interior emotion and judgemental narrative?

Out of my depth here.

Also, I've read the argument that a lot of "Fantasy" is a sort of repositioning of Swashbucklers (Scarlet Pimpernel, for instance) -- or, in a more crude transposition, Westerns -- and -- Seafaring Chronicles (Hornblower=Star Trek) --

So -- sometimes the mediocrity of some Fantasy may relate to its highly derivative quality?

Posted : Mar 31, 2006 05:02

Roger Sutton

>Monica--

I was a bit older when my Tolkien craze struck--I chased it for several years because my adored older sister read them, but it took me a while to get hooked. I definitely enjoyed the sense of immersion you described, the sense of actually being in another place with rich landscapes and weather.

Posted : Mar 31, 2006 03:46

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