Fantasy and literature: A genre grows up
July 16, 2006 | 12:00am
In today’s literature and contemporary fiction scene, the fantasy genre often gets a bad rap, dismissed as a fanciful version of adult writing for impressionable adolescents, or for a niche audience that’s weaned on magic and mythology. In some quarters, it’s even considered as science fiction’s poor sister. These two novels, written in the tradition of such masterful fantasy authors as Neil Gaiman, Graham Joyce and Audrey Niffenegger, prove the genre has much to offer. That beyond first impressions, the genre has grown up, and on literary merit, can stand on its own two feet.
The Stolen Child
by Keith Donohue
Jonathan Cape, 321 pages
Available at Fully Booked
One can deconstruct this first novel of Keith Donohue and say it’s just a modern retelling of the changeling legend, and that would be like saying a Ferrari is just a car, or that Barcelona is just any football team. What Keith Donohue has accomplished with this novel is to breathe new life into the legend: to utilize the legend to expose primeval fears about loss of identity, of the unknown, and to explore the antipathy between what is modern and technological on one hand, and that which is primordial and of nature on the other hand. And he accomplishes all of this while giving us a gripping yarn that’s creepy, yet always compassionate.
Henry Day is your regular seven-year-old boy. With younger twin sisters who get much of the attention of his parents, Henry finds himself brooding over the lack of attention and affection he perceives is being laid on him. One fateful day, he packs cookies into a paper bag and decides to give his parents a scare by running away from home. Unbeknownst to him, Henry has been watched daily by a group of changelings who live in the forest nearby. Working like a crack commando unit, they abduct Henry, and Aniday assumes the role of Henry when the search party stumbles upon the child and restores him to the family hearth.
In alternating chapters, we follow the lives of both Henry and Aniday, changeling as normal child, and normal child now forced to live in the forest as the newest addition to the band of changelings. As the legend goes, the changelings stop aging, and it can take up to a hundred years before the next likely candidate comes into the picture and he can once again enter the real world.
To his credit, Donohue exhibits strong sympathy for his two main characters. In different ways, both never quite fit in their respective worlds. Memories and snatches of their previous lives keep filtering in. In the case of the "new" Henry Day, there are even memories of the child he was in the mid-19th century (a Gustav Ungerland), before he was himself abducted, memories that were submerged, and eroded while he was a changeling. That this Gustav was something of a child prodigy on the piano is mirrored, as Henry also takes to the musical instrument. With the "new" Aniday, snatches of his life as Henry continue to rise to the surface, triggered by the most seemingly unconnected things, like a brush with a woman in a red jacket.
The wonderful thing about Donohue’s book is the very easy suspension of disbelief it encourages. Even if we know we’re on some fantasy ride, we are more than ready to be led by his hand and enter this world he has conjured up. As progress and real estate development encroach on the domain of the changelings, we share with them the anguish they feel as an endangered species. There is even serendipity coming in the form of the collusion of circumstances that lead to the two encountering each other towards the end of the novel, the new Henry as a middle-aged man, with wife and child.
It would be too facile to dismiss this book as a modern-day fairy tale or mere fantasy. What Donohue has created is something truly special. The universal and very human pains and alienation of growing up, of belonging, the sense of reincarnation and past lives, the belief that the unknown is out there at our doorsteps, all of these come to the fore in the course of reading this novel. Highly recommended.
High John the Conqueror
by Jim Younger
Jonathan Cape, 320 pages
Available at Fully Booked
In the case of Jim Younger and High John the Conqueror, his foray into the fantasy genre is to dream up an alternative universe, a 21st-century dystopian London. In this version of London, the King of England has converted to Catholicism, abdicating the throne in favor of his younger brother, Andy One. Thanks to a succession of pathetic presidents, the United States has petitioned Andy One to rule sovereign over what is now known as the Anglo-American hemisphere. Survivors of the former Government of Christian Coalition Socialists have gone underground, with High John leading a group of paramilitary sado-masochists. Before he does this, High John (or Organ McWhinny) fakes his own death, leaving a bewildered and motherless son, Lingus McWhinny, the novel’s central character.
If all that sounds warped and psychedelic, but your cup of tea – very strong tea – then step into Jim Younger’s world and enjoy the ride. The depiction of this world, the atmosphere created, is highly textured. Whether present day or near future, it does not matter. What is bizarre is how Younger mixes elements that suggest an Elizabethan or medieval world with that of the present day. There are mummers and grand spectacle performance art, camps where they eat dog regularly, cults with leaders who exercise free sex over the women members, gay poet laureates, courtly intrigues and a king who goes in disguise to mingle with the citizenry (à la "The Prince and the Pauper"), heavy metal rock bands and cell phones, heavy artillery and cells of rebels, all part and parcel of this crazy world that Younger sets in the path of 16-year-old Lingus.
And Lingus is himself a fallible guide as he worms his way through adolescence and all the intrigue. Younger’s writing style and imagery is vivid to the max! As when Lingus picks up his female taxi driver and takes her home for the night: "Jenny squatted above me and screwed herself on to my shaft, an inch, two inches, all the way down, until I was thrusting up underneath her belly, a blind fish in the ocean trench, squirming in Creation’s cleft, pickled in the briny, oozy weeds twisted about my gills." Or when after a night of debauchment, Lingus recalls how he felt the following storm-tossed morning: "I staggered up, a gangling shambles of protein jury-rigged into humanity by some primaeval joker. Rain played bongos on the tin roof, thunder rolled and skybursts of blue fire raked the walls."
High John the Conqueror may not be to everyone’s taste. While I would presume that readers and fans of writers such as Neil Gaiman would appreciate this novel, one can’t but admire the chutzpah and brio Younger brings to the literary table. Seamlessly, he creates this world out of his own imagination, and bestows it with characters that sustain our interest. If Mad Max was 16 years old and his Thunderdrome world collided with the world of Blade Runner and was transported to merry olde England, it would look, sound and feel like High John the Conqueror.
by Keith Donohue
Jonathan Cape, 321 pages
Available at Fully Booked
One can deconstruct this first novel of Keith Donohue and say it’s just a modern retelling of the changeling legend, and that would be like saying a Ferrari is just a car, or that Barcelona is just any football team. What Keith Donohue has accomplished with this novel is to breathe new life into the legend: to utilize the legend to expose primeval fears about loss of identity, of the unknown, and to explore the antipathy between what is modern and technological on one hand, and that which is primordial and of nature on the other hand. And he accomplishes all of this while giving us a gripping yarn that’s creepy, yet always compassionate.
Henry Day is your regular seven-year-old boy. With younger twin sisters who get much of the attention of his parents, Henry finds himself brooding over the lack of attention and affection he perceives is being laid on him. One fateful day, he packs cookies into a paper bag and decides to give his parents a scare by running away from home. Unbeknownst to him, Henry has been watched daily by a group of changelings who live in the forest nearby. Working like a crack commando unit, they abduct Henry, and Aniday assumes the role of Henry when the search party stumbles upon the child and restores him to the family hearth.
In alternating chapters, we follow the lives of both Henry and Aniday, changeling as normal child, and normal child now forced to live in the forest as the newest addition to the band of changelings. As the legend goes, the changelings stop aging, and it can take up to a hundred years before the next likely candidate comes into the picture and he can once again enter the real world.
To his credit, Donohue exhibits strong sympathy for his two main characters. In different ways, both never quite fit in their respective worlds. Memories and snatches of their previous lives keep filtering in. In the case of the "new" Henry Day, there are even memories of the child he was in the mid-19th century (a Gustav Ungerland), before he was himself abducted, memories that were submerged, and eroded while he was a changeling. That this Gustav was something of a child prodigy on the piano is mirrored, as Henry also takes to the musical instrument. With the "new" Aniday, snatches of his life as Henry continue to rise to the surface, triggered by the most seemingly unconnected things, like a brush with a woman in a red jacket.
The wonderful thing about Donohue’s book is the very easy suspension of disbelief it encourages. Even if we know we’re on some fantasy ride, we are more than ready to be led by his hand and enter this world he has conjured up. As progress and real estate development encroach on the domain of the changelings, we share with them the anguish they feel as an endangered species. There is even serendipity coming in the form of the collusion of circumstances that lead to the two encountering each other towards the end of the novel, the new Henry as a middle-aged man, with wife and child.
It would be too facile to dismiss this book as a modern-day fairy tale or mere fantasy. What Donohue has created is something truly special. The universal and very human pains and alienation of growing up, of belonging, the sense of reincarnation and past lives, the belief that the unknown is out there at our doorsteps, all of these come to the fore in the course of reading this novel. Highly recommended.
by Jim Younger
Jonathan Cape, 320 pages
Available at Fully Booked
In the case of Jim Younger and High John the Conqueror, his foray into the fantasy genre is to dream up an alternative universe, a 21st-century dystopian London. In this version of London, the King of England has converted to Catholicism, abdicating the throne in favor of his younger brother, Andy One. Thanks to a succession of pathetic presidents, the United States has petitioned Andy One to rule sovereign over what is now known as the Anglo-American hemisphere. Survivors of the former Government of Christian Coalition Socialists have gone underground, with High John leading a group of paramilitary sado-masochists. Before he does this, High John (or Organ McWhinny) fakes his own death, leaving a bewildered and motherless son, Lingus McWhinny, the novel’s central character.
If all that sounds warped and psychedelic, but your cup of tea – very strong tea – then step into Jim Younger’s world and enjoy the ride. The depiction of this world, the atmosphere created, is highly textured. Whether present day or near future, it does not matter. What is bizarre is how Younger mixes elements that suggest an Elizabethan or medieval world with that of the present day. There are mummers and grand spectacle performance art, camps where they eat dog regularly, cults with leaders who exercise free sex over the women members, gay poet laureates, courtly intrigues and a king who goes in disguise to mingle with the citizenry (à la "The Prince and the Pauper"), heavy metal rock bands and cell phones, heavy artillery and cells of rebels, all part and parcel of this crazy world that Younger sets in the path of 16-year-old Lingus.
And Lingus is himself a fallible guide as he worms his way through adolescence and all the intrigue. Younger’s writing style and imagery is vivid to the max! As when Lingus picks up his female taxi driver and takes her home for the night: "Jenny squatted above me and screwed herself on to my shaft, an inch, two inches, all the way down, until I was thrusting up underneath her belly, a blind fish in the ocean trench, squirming in Creation’s cleft, pickled in the briny, oozy weeds twisted about my gills." Or when after a night of debauchment, Lingus recalls how he felt the following storm-tossed morning: "I staggered up, a gangling shambles of protein jury-rigged into humanity by some primaeval joker. Rain played bongos on the tin roof, thunder rolled and skybursts of blue fire raked the walls."
High John the Conqueror may not be to everyone’s taste. While I would presume that readers and fans of writers such as Neil Gaiman would appreciate this novel, one can’t but admire the chutzpah and brio Younger brings to the literary table. Seamlessly, he creates this world out of his own imagination, and bestows it with characters that sustain our interest. If Mad Max was 16 years old and his Thunderdrome world collided with the world of Blade Runner and was transported to merry olde England, it would look, sound and feel like High John the Conqueror.
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