When reading for pleasure my top genres are: 1) literary fiction, 2) science/speculative fiction, 3) literary memoir, and, finally, 4) fantasy. (I have many genre blind spots, including mysteries, spy novels, romance novels, historical fiction, celebrity memoir, and military thrillers; I exhausted my appetite for horror when I was a teen.) Fantasy books are a somewhat recent addition to my library hold list. It’s a genre I am particularly selective about. Like many children of the pre-Potter generation I grew up with The Chronicles of Narnia and The Hobbit. As a teen I was excited for the Lord of the Rings movies but ultimately had trouble connecting with them. At that point in my life fantasy stories seemed a bit goofy and simplistic. I could not get into some hero restoring a “true king” to the throne. I didn’t care about knights or wizards going on quests. Why couldn’t these people invent democracy? Why didn’t the peasants go on strike and form anarchist communes? And why did no one have a girlfriend? I also resented how deterministic so many of the stories were, with their Chosen Ones and prophecies. Personally, I like free will, or at least the convincing illusion of it.
I became more interested in fantasy largely because of Ursula K. LeGuin, whose science fiction novels like The Dispossessed and Four Ways to Forgiveness had a profound effect on the way I understand the world. LeGuin might be most well-known for writing the young adult Earthsea novels, classics of the fantasy genre that laid the groundwork for J.K. Rowling’s books. In the midst of my obsession with LeGuin I picked up The Wizard of Earthsea, expecting it to be basic kids stuff—a late-60s version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Instead I found a short, wonderfully strange little book where magic is all about knowing the “true names” of things, a conceit that reflects the magic of storytelling itself. In it, the young mage Ged goes to wizard school and accidentally unleashes a shadow self he spends the rest of the novel reckoning with.
Like the best fantasy premises, this one is both highly specific and richly interpretable. LeGuin had a long-standing interest in Taoist philosophy and Jungian psychology, and both strains of thought are woven into this first Earthsea book. Ultimately the novel is not about becoming a great hero and saving the world. It’s about reckoning with who you have always been, or integrating different parts of yourself, or reaching maturity (or any number of other things—the opportunity for interpretation is great). Like her other books the writing is fairly simple and direct—while a very good writer she wasn’t much of a stylist. What interested LeGuin was ideas, and the subsequent Earthsea novels go in weirder and more ambitious directions, culminating in a subversive feminist critique of the fantasy genre and its (until then) mostly male heroes. I found these novels—which were written for kids, mind you—just as profound and inventive as the works of Kafka or Borges. I started re-thinking my attitude toward the genre.
Around this time my friend Naomi and I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant out loud to each other. Some of Ishiguro’s most popular works, like Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun, are speculative stories that nonetheless sit in the Literary Fiction section of a bookstore. I suppose it’s because they are so extremely moving it would be an insult (?) to categorize them under one of the less “serious” genres of Science Fiction or Fantasy. This is dumb. Yes, Ishiguro is a Nobel laureate and one of the great English-language writers, but he’s clearly a huge nerd who loves imagining the future and/or a magical past. Put him where he belongs and give genre writers the respect they deserve!
The Buried Giant follows an elderly couple wandering through a mythical England that has recently been ravaged by a brutal Saxon-Briton war and is beset by a plague of forgetfulness. Like LeGuin’s fantasy novels rich ideas are coupled with the many pleasures of the genre: adventure, monsters, magic. Radically, our heroes are not a young man coming into his powers to vanquish a great evil, but a husband and wife at the very end of their lives, struggling with their memories. Like many of Ishiguro’s novels the reveals come slowly, and the ending hits incredibly hard. Even now, many years after reading it, if I think too much about this novel I get emotional.
Ishiguro and LeGuin are great novelists and fine writers. Angela Carter was an okay novelist and a truly sublime writer. She’s mostly remembered for The Bloody Chamber, in which she retells several fairy tales in diamond-sharp language, getting to the violent and erotic nerves at the centre of “Bluebeard,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and others. I’ve read this slim collection of stories a number of times, and often reach for it when I need a crowd-pleasing gift. Carter is the third in the triumvirate of writers who made me fall in love with fantasy as an adult. While her novels are imaginative and vibrantly written, the plots and characterizations feel a bit thin. Fairy tales are a much better container for her talents. Relieved of the need to express psychology or develop much of a plot, Carter can focus instead on excavating, through words and symbols, our primal fears and desires. Her genius is her ability, through her singular style of writing, to reinvigorate these old stories with fresh terror and excitement. There’s also, like LeGuin, a feminist slant to some of them that feels refreshing when compared to the boyish power fantasies you see in so much fantasy writing.
There are two competing impulses in the fantasy genre. The first is an interest in symbols—the shadow self, a plague of forgetfulness, monsters in the woods—that reflect a primal element of human experience. The second impulse is toward detailed world-building and lore, where authors sketch out a place, a people, or a cosmos in painstaking detail. This latter impulse central to the success of Game of Thrones (the TV show), which is heralded for its more grounded depiction of the fantasy kingdoms found in its antecedents. The creators of the show wrote characters who possess a credible psychology, and legible desires (for domination, sex, wealth, and revenge) that are recognizable to a contemporary audience weaned on Hollywood movies. These characters are placed in a vividly realized world with a complex politics and history. While I enjoyed the first few seasons, I found the political machinations ultimately a bit tedious. Perhaps George R. R. Martin’s novels are more engaging, but if I’m going to get into the weeds of a nation’s politics, real history is sitting right there! And if I want to do so with fun characterization there’s a large body of historical and literary fiction waiting for me. If there’s going to be magic and monsters, I want them to tell me something about who I am!
J.R.R. Tolkien is generally considered to be the father of modern fantasy. I think this is because he was able to balance both impulses remarkably well. The Lord of the Rings is, on one level, about an ordinary boy’s attempt to destroy a magical ring that both empowers and corrupts whoever wears it. This is a great symbol! The friendship (or fellowship) of others, particularly his friend Sam, is what is able to ultimately save Frodo from the lonely, degraded fate that befalls Gollum. (That Frodo is also, by extension, able to save all of Middle Earth is a bit of juvenile fantasizing that unfortunately recurs often in this genre. Why isn’t it enough for Frodo to simply save himself or his friends? Why must he be this totalizing Messianic figure all the kingdoms of Middle Earth depend on? Grow up!)
On another level, Tolkien’s novels (and their related compendiums of history and mythology) are an exhaustive collection of lore some fans study with Talmudic dedication. While this is of little personal interest to me, I have to give the man credit for brute-forcing all by himself the kind of mythology entire civilizations spent centuries developing piecemeal. (Yes, he borrowed liberally from these other cultures, but there was nothing quite like Middle Earth, just as there’s nothing quite like Westeros or Hogwarts.) The result is a literary universe that feels extremely legit, and writers like LeGuin and Ishiguro are no doubt great because of the intense rigour Tolkien brought to the genre. Ultimately, though, I am more interested in the stories that inspired Tolkien—myths and fairy tales with no definitive version, just fragments told and re-told to suit whatever historical moment the teller is living through.
I’m writing this reflection on fantasy because, after a bit of a dry spell of good books this summer, I read Kelly Link’s White Cat, Black Dog. The first story in the collection is a contemporary re-telling of a fairy tale, “The White Cat,” that I had never heard of. Like all such stories, it feels like something I’ve been hearing my whole life. Initially I thought Link’s trick was this: using contemporary language and references to do jokey riffs on old fairy tales. And indeed “The White Cat’s Divorce,” as she titles it, has a Shouts & Murmurs energy to it. A wealthy man sends his three sons on three impossible quests to determine who will inherit his vast fortune. The youngest and most loving son, on his search for the most beautiful, perfect dog, gets lost in a blizzard and stumbles into an enchanted settlement run by cats who help him fulfil the father’s requests. These cats live in Colorado and run a cannabis grow op. The father’s plan is created by a team of consultants, and he says that when he retires he will cryogenically freeze his body “as well as the body of my current wife until such a time when medical advances can resurrect me into some unknown hellish future in a body that can satisfy more than three women at a time while also battling apocalyptic mutant lizards and conquering whatever remains of the New York Stock Exchange.” Reading all this I thought, “okay Kelly.” I liked the recognizable, deeply satisfying structure (three sons, three quests) and the use of dream logic (a cat that transforms into a woman when its head is chopped off with a sword). But when I looked up the original fairy tale I wondered if I was simply responding to a durable story. Fairy tales are weird and fun, and a welcome respite from the psychological realism found in most contemporary fiction.
Then I read the second story. “Prince Hat Underground” is presented as a retelling of another fairy tale but is in fact an original creation, about an average man named Gary who must rescue his longtime lover Prince Hat from The Queen of Hell. This story is also full of wry, contemporary observations (Hell is depicted as a suburb), but there’s a level of invention and playfulness in this story that blew me away. It’s also, clearly, about something real and emotional—what it means to know and love someone, the personal toll this knowledge and love can take—while also being full of eerie images and surprising twists. Reading it, I thought, “okay Kelly, you have my attention…”
Then I read “The White Road,” ostensibly a riff on the Brothers’ Grimm’s “Town Musicians of Bremen.” This one also has almost nothing to do with the original fairy tale, following instead a troupe of actors moving through a post-apocalyptic landscape. At night the remaining human settlements are haunted by terrifying monsters that travel along a mysterious white road you can only see out of the corner of your eye. The only way to keep them away is to mourn a lost loved one. Most people keep a corpse on hand to help with the ritual, but the actors find themselves stranded one night in an abandoned town, and put on a fake funeral to ward the ghouls off. It’s spooky and touching and weird. There are, again, some truly mischievous twists. It combines well-worn elements into something wholly original. By the end of it I thought, “you’re crazy for this one, Kelly!”
The fourth story is basically realistic, only at the very end gesturing to a fantasy trope. The last story in the collection is a ghost story that gave me full body chills. The remaining stories are just as varied and just as wonderful. I loved this book, and am convinced Link is a genius (she has, in fact, received a MacArthur “genius grant”). What she’s done here, to tremendous effect, is mint a fresh batch of fairy tales in varying tones and styles that feel contemporary and timeless all at once. And she’s done so while injecting them with the kind of emotion and thematic richness you want from the best fiction. She risks looking kind of silly with all these big genre swings, but in my opinion she knocks every one of them out of the park.
Other fantasy books I’ve enjoyed:
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
The Song of Achilles by Madeleine Miller
Wicked by Gregory Macguire
The Odyssey by Homer
Great fantasy films:
The Green Knight (2021)
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)