So, I'm a little late coming to it, but I did want to address Paul W's query a few weeks back in which he queried the absence of four specific authors from my Classics of Fantasy / Suggested Reading List:
I've praised them before, but I wonder that Mary Stewart,
Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, or Mary Renault didn't make your list.
Admittedly, Renault's works might be considered historical fiction
but they all have magic in them to one degree or another.
Of these, I haven't read much Renault* but rate her highly based on what I have read. But, as you suggest, I think of her more as a writer of historical novels than as a fantasist.
The same holds true for Mary Stewart. I have a high regard for her earlier Arthurian novels (THE CRYSTAL CAVE, THE HOLLOW HILLS), not so much for the later ones. In her case the fantasy element is there, but it's not what the books are about. I can see the argument for considering her a fantasy writer but somehow I can't quite make myself believe it.
With Lloyd Alexander and Susan Cooper's quintologies there's no doubt they're fantasy, and good fantasy at that. It wd have been no great injustice to have included them. It's just that I don't, in the end, think they hold up. Alexander I realized at the time I first read him wd have meant more to me if I'd read him before Tolkien rather than after. I still liked them well enough right up until I read THE MABINOGION (in Patrick Ford's transation). I've found that when it came to Welsh myth and legend the real thing spoiled just about all the adaptation for me --with the exception of Morris's THE BOOK OF THREE DRAGONS, which did make the original column.
In the end I think fantasy's defining characteristic is the present of magic. It is the literature of the impossible. And without the impossible, for me it's just not fantasy.
Hence after much debate I omitted Daniel Pinkwater's THE SNARKOUT BOYS AND THE AVOCADO OF DEATH (1982) when I started putting together my recommended reading list because in the end it seems to me that while this book comes as close as possible to the line where a book gets so weird it crosses the line to become fantasy, in the end I'd say Pinkwater stays on the not-yet-quite side of the line.
--John R.
7 comments:
I loved Alexander's books growing up. I may have liked the Westmark series even more than Prydain, although it seems the former is very little talked about. It also might not count as fantasy per your definition.
Growing up I did read Prydain before The Hobbit, specifically The High King, I then went back and found the others slowly (finding books was more difficult in the late '70s/early '80s, especially for 5th or 6th graders in Ohio :)). But I think you have a point there.
Tolkien apparently had a high opinion of Renault himself, IIRC.
I'm curious about this "I find some aspects of how her 'good guys' behave appalling" - which parts appalled you? I can't think of anything that quite fits, except perhaps the treatment of The Walker? Hmmm. I need to ponder more why that hasn't bothered me, beyond the fact that i was more accepting of such things when I first read these works, as a teenager.
The four have all made my "reread" list, and Cooper, Stewart, and Alexander have absolutely shaped my thinking a great deal frowing up, as much as Tolkien. I found it interesting that fantasy is so often accused of being a "boy's club" but many of my favorite fantasy authors are women.
Dear Paul W.
--The Alexander books were in more libraries than most fantasy of the time because one volume in the series won the Newbery, making it a book (and the series it belonged to) priority orders for most public libraries.
--re. Tolkien's high opinion of Renault: yes, and well deserved too.
"I'm curious about this "I find some aspects of how her 'good guys' behave appalling" - which parts appalled you?"
--I discuss this in my Classics of Fantasy column on McKillip's FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD. If you can't find it there I cd recap it at some point, but it's too weighty a topic to do justice to here.
"The four have all made my "reread" list, and Cooper, Stewart, and Alexander have absolutely shaped my thinking a great deal frowing up, as much as Tolkien. I found it interesting that fantasy is so often accused of being a "boy's club" but many of my favorite fantasy authors are women."
--Yes, and many wd add Chant, LeGuin, Mirrlees, et al.
--JDR
Ed Pierce said...
"I loved Alexander's books growing up. I may have liked the Westmark series even more than Prydain, although it seems the former is very little talked about. It also might not count as fantasy per your definition."
--Sorry to say that I haven't read much of DWJ's work --only a half-dozen of her books, and the Westmark books weren't among them. Though they lurked for years on my secondary books//need to read or re-read down in the box room for years. Any particular title you'd suggest?
--John R.
I actually first encountered Alexander through one of those ubiquitous school book fairs, I don't recall which other books I purchased, but I still have that paperback copy of The High King, purchased in 1979.
Are you referring to Dianne Wynne Jones? I was actually referring to the Westmark books by Lloyd Alexander: Westmark, The Kestrel, and The Beggar Queen. They take place in an imaginary world, but there is not much about them that may be considered fantastic; they deal a lot with war and political machinations, and the kinds of moral/ethical choices that one faces when confronting such things. Westmark, the first book, is probably the lightest in tone, and The Kestrel is probably the heaviest. A lot of Alexander trademarks are present (I must admit he had the habit of recycling the same character types in most of his books, as entertainingas those types could be), but the tone is probably more serious and on the adult side than many of his books. I haven't read them in 30+ years, so I'm not sure if I'd appreciate them as much now as I did when I was young, but I'd like to think (or hope) that I would!
Dear Ed Pierce:
--Yes, I was confusing WESTMARK, which is Alexander, with DALEMARK, which is Jones. Sorry about that.
--John R.
--still reading on the Flann O'Brien
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