THE ANGRY COLUMN – AUGUST 2007

By Adrian Fry

Dudgeon and Dragons

Listen, I’ve had this fantastic idea for a new fantasy novel.

Well, when I say novel, I naturally mean trilogy. And when I say trilogy, I’m naturally leaving the exact number of books open ended for the story – by which I mean market forces – to dictate.

The story? I’m surprised you feel the need to ask. Basically, it’s about this yokel farmboy – I haven’t chosen a name yet, but it’ll be something vaguely humiliating, perhaps suggestive of a regional dialect term for dog excrement. Whatever his name, he’ll be handily unencumbered with family or serious career commitments so that when a bearded old man with a wizardly twinkle in his eye suggests he go on an extended orienteering holiday with the aim of finding, else losing, some magical bit of bling I haven’t quite figured out the nature of yet, he jumps at the chance. Naturally, knowing nothing of his own world and requiring some pretty heavy duty passages of exposition along the way, he doesn’t go alone. A fey elf, a beery dwarf and a gnome (for comic relief) join the quest. Together they go through mountains, a forest, a desert and an inexplicably adjacent Land of Ice, forever pursued by a bestiary of Things with an unlikely number of heads or eyes or spectacular powers, each in thrall to a supernatural villain with a name like an Anglo Saxon coughing fit and the good manners to dress in robes the colour – well, shade, since we’re inevitably talking black here – of his schemes. . .

Yes, it’s easy to mock fantasy as a genre and very nearly a moral duty. Because fantasy – the genre in which anything can happen and where the only limit is the imagination of the author – is the most miserably conservative of them all. Standing in a bookshop waiting to be told yet again that Robert Aickman’s short stories are out of (affordable) print, I always seem to be queuing behind some troglodyte in a baseball cap asking when book thirty-umpteen in the Discworld series will be hitting the shops. The British television dramatist Dennis Potter once observed that we should regard our younger selves with tender contempt. The tenderness is no business of this column but the sight of another reader supersizing his order of sub Arthurian blockbusters certainly induces the contempt.

There was a time, you see, when I loved the genre perversely called high fantasy. I devoured Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings at school and felt literally bereaved at its end; no other book has ever left me feeling so utterly bereft. Tweedy old Tolkien could write admirably, though The Silmarillion and all subsequent volumes of his contextual riffings dispense with character and plot to ape the portentousness of a religious text. Like many others, I made the mistake of reading every writer who wrote in the mumbly old boy’s shadow, forgetting that nothing much grows in the shadows and thereby wrapping myself up in an unending series of increasingly threadbare comfort blankets. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery (it isn’t), Tolkien ought to feel quite uncomfortably embarrassed by now.

Just what were the pleasures of fantasy? I’d like to say they were all tied up with the strangeness of other realities and the playful allusiveness of world building but it just wasn’t so. There was the crass pleasure in reading a fat book, not unallied to the pleasure of reading a whole series of (hopefully) equally fat books. There was the obsessive cataloguing of strange names, places and honorific titles – I used to read them backwards in case of the sort of concealed jokes or messages heavy metal bands went in for. Not to mention the pleasure taken in the hyperbolic Top Trumps style ranking of powerful figures and the cod Wagnerian excess of backstories which forever hinted at more exciting tales than the one you were actually reading at the time. Numbering, naming, ranking and cataloguing; with hindsight I can almost see the symptoms of Aspergers Syndrome in the fantasy reader I once was.

The problem was that it was precisely such dubious pleasures that prevented me developing any sort of literary appreciation for half a decade. With 1001 pages of Doodoo’s battle with Mrogrogoth to devour, I was hardly going to pause long enough to spot a well turned sentence, even had one been there to find. This might have been forgivable had the books I was reading explored moral dimensions sufficiently complex to justify the page count. But in every case, Good and Bad were distinguished with an almost pantomimic crudity and even the Princesses managed the neat trick of being beautiful without ever allowing eroticism to rear its paradoxically ugly – and therefore interesting – head.

The greatest crime of which high fantasy is guilty, however, is lack of imagination. Given an entirely free hand, everyone came up with something more than a little like Tolkien. They may have been building worlds, but the fantasy writers were clearly getting their bricks and mortar from the same supplier. It’s difficult to say what might have been possible had real imagination been exercised – like trying to guess how Beethoven’s Tenth might have sounded – but you can feel the yawn of the chasm by the excitement generated whenever China Mieville and the other luminaries of the New Weird pushed the envelope an inch in any direction..

In the end, I graduated to science fiction, horror, literary fiction and the classics. In realising that it was a graduation and not merely a change of subject matter, I further discovered that I was an unashamed literary snob. Tolkien was objectively better than Terry Brooks and William Trevor better than either of them. Of course, there’s schlock in all genres, but few have forgotten quite so completely that the job of fiction is to be well written and – no matter how symbolically – about ‘real life’ and the human reaction to it.

I want them back, the good years of adolescent reading time I squandered in the novels of Piers Anthony and his ilk. Because I won’t get them back, and because that troglodyte mainlining Pratchett wouldn’t listen to my hectorings even if I directed them at him, this column remains resolutely angry.

Go here to tell Adrian how eager you are to read his new fantasy series and compare notes on your fantasy reading experience.