Surrealism in fantasy novels
There's a section in 'A Wizard of Earthsea' in which Le Guin has Ged try to save a dying boy's life using his magic powers. The wizard goes into the land of death and it's like one of those running-through-treacle moments and he can't catch up. It's a land steeped in gloom and completely nightmarish. Also, as he turns back, to return to his corporeal body in defeat - he is met by the dark spirit who has been haunting and hunting him since the day he first summoned it. It's a wonderfully frightening and disturbing moment in Ged's quest.
It also reminds me of those atmospheres of dread that you tend to get in paintings by the surrealists. The examples above are from Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington. And I'm wondering... if the thing I really love about these kids' books that use fantasy images and tropes and storylines... is not just the stuff plucked out of ancient world myths... but the fact that they are infused with the atmosphere of surrealist painting? John Gordon, Susan Cooper, Joan Aiken, Ursula K Le Guin... their work is as informed by the irrational and the nightmarish as it is legend, I think. My favourite moments, anyway, are those bits when it's just as if we are slipping into a waking nightmare - full of dread but tantalised... like stepping into 'Tom's Midnight Garden' by Phillipa Pearce - in pyjamas, with the clock striking thirteen - and stepping into the fantasy landscape without even knowing what's out there...
Maybe that's why I find some of the contemporary fantasy unsatisfying? It's too rational, worked-out and dayglo?
3 Comments:
Those writers, those brilliant writers, are still telling the old story of ‘the battle between good and evil’, but deliberately in worlds without God or straightforward morality, and quite often about individuals rather than society. So quite often in place of God they put the healthy mind, and what their books share is the value of unreason, imaginative freedom. That’s why the best of these novels are also about landscape and myth; the imaginative power becomes a power of understanding – if you like, of reading – non-rational narratives and ideas of time, history, power.
Oops - trimmed down my rambles and lost my point - which is: that surrealism had a similar intention - to explore the positive power of irrationality and illogic.
Sorry.
I too, like a good, satisfying fantasy novel. As a published author of a fantasy trilogy, I welcome you to check out my latest book, The Magic of Fuller, book one, "Keeper of the Stone". http://www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/TheMagicofFullerBookOne-KeeperoftheStone.html
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