“Can fantasy ever tell the truth? - The Guardian” |
| Can fantasy ever tell the truth? - The Guardian Posted:  China Miéville's fictions 'riff on the nature of fantasy itself'. Photograph: Chris Close There is nothing wrong with escaping reality now and again. Like a well brewed ale, or a good malt whisky, a finely crafted escapist fantasy can be a thing of joy and beauty. But while the occasional tipple can be a good thing, most of us recognise that a bottle of Jameson's a night is unhealthy for body, mind and soul. An unfiltered diet of escapist fantasy blockbusters can be similarly unhealthy. As master anti-fantasist M John Harrison expresses it in his essay The Profession of Science Fiction while discussing the appeal of fantasy to young children terrified by adult life, "Many fantasy and SF readers are living out a prolonged childhood in which they retain that terror and erect – in collusion with professional writers who themselves often began as teenage daydreamers – powerful defences against it." For many literary readers it is this suspicion of escapism that deters them from fantasy. Literary fiction is rooted in the idea of engaging with reality as it is, of facing all the pains and pleasures of life and examining them in detail. Iris Murdoch described great writing as having "a conception of truth, a lack of illusion, an ability to overcome selfish obsessions" and as being the work of a "free, unfettered, uncorrupted imagination." Bad writing for Murdoch, and for the generation of literary writers surrounding her, could be defined as "the soft, messy, self-indulgent work of an enslaved fantasy". Kevin Brockmeier's The Illumination is not soft, messy or self-indulgent. But it is fantastic. The novel charts a jagged course through the lives of its six protagonists in a world transfigured in one fantastic way. Wounds of all kinds, from cuts and bruises to amputated limbs, have begun to emanate light. The narrative offers no explanation for the phenomenon of illumination, and its consequences are not explored in any depth beyond its profound impact on the characters of the story. It is a fantastical device which helps Brockmeier arrive at the kind of hard truths literary fiction so admires. China Miéville's fiction is no less truthful, but far more extravagantly fantastic. Miéville's early Bas-Lag trilogy reworked the familiar trope of the fantasy city, but New Crobuzon owes more to Dickensian London and M John Harrison's Viriconium than it does to Tolkien's Gondor. Miéville's upcoming Embassytown is generating considerable excitement as his most sophisticated work to date. The Embassytown of the title is a human colony on an alien planet inhabited by the Hosts. The Host language is so alien that it can only be spoken by genetically engineered Ambassadors, and uses human colonists as living similes for complex ideas. The game with Miéville's fiction is to unpick the complex, many layered metaphors he twists from the fantasy he is creating. In Embassytown Miéville continues to explore socialist ideology and the power of language to control and enslave. It is hard to escape, however, the sneaking suspicion that Miéville is riffing on the nature of fantasy itself and the complex relationship between the pusher of fantasy and their adoring, addicted audience. Catherynne M Valente is the author of perhaps the most baroque and stylish fantasy being written today. Valente's novel Palimpsest also explores a fantasy city, an other-worldly, phantasmagorical metropolis that can only be reached by travellers from our reality through sleep. Visitors to Palimpsest are tattooed with unique maps of the city, and must then seek one another out to continue their explorations of that place. Valente's latest novel Deathless reworks the Slavic fairytale of Koschei the Deathless, returning Valente to her ongoing fascination with folk and fairytales. Valente describes her own work, along with other writers including Ekaterina Sedia and Theodora Goss, as "mythpunk" fiction that combines fantasy, folktale and myth with postmodern techniques, non-linear storytelling and academic critique. The results are fantasy that begins to capture the highly subjective truths of contemporary reality. As an escapist experience, fantasy has fallen in to disregard with writers and readers who seek to understand the often difficult and painful truths of real life. But writers such as Brockmeier, Miéville and Valente are returning to fantasy for the many ways it can unlock truth. Perhaps it is a consequence of living in an era of such radical change, but the fantastic seems once again to play a part in expressing the truth of our time. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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