Eros and Thanatos in Dark Fantasy

This week, I read Roshani Chokshi’s novel The Last Tale of the Flower Bride, a contemporary fairy tale for adults that includes a different slant on the theme of “kids doing magic.” When I started reading it, I wasn’t sure I’d like it, despite the siren call of fairy tale and mythological subject matter and the author’s darkly seductive storytelling voice. Actually, it was probably the latter that put me on my guard, along with the rapidity with which one character, an expert in the history of mythology, falls under the spell of an alluring but clearly dangerous woman, Indigo Maxwell-Castenada. Her name, if not her proclivities, places her in the category of things that are both very much what they seem and more than they seem.

Against a backdrop of glittering wealth and luxury, the two main characters conduct a cat-and-mouse courtship and are soon married. The Bridegroom—as the character is known throughout—agrees not to pry into his bride’s mysterious past, much in the manner of other mortals who married mermaids or selkies without fully understanding the risks involved. In this case, the bride, clearly no stranger to dangerous games, is in the role of Bluebeard to her handsome but somewhat overmatched husband. “Love is blind” is a saying that here is both metaphorically and literally true.

When Indigo gets word that her aunt is dying, she and her husband visit her childhood home, an island mansion off the Washington coast. As the house begins to reveal its secrets, voices from Indigo’s past insert themselves into the story, and we learn of another doomed relationship in which Indigo played the dominant role. As the Bridegroom searches for answers to memories he can’t explain from his own childhood, he picks up the thread of the story of Indigo and Azure, who were inseparable childhood friends until the day Azure dropped out of the story.

It would be easy to condemn Azure for falling under the sway of Indigo’s manipulations except for the fact that she’s not so much gullible as needy (and essentially orphaned). The two girls share a strong bond based on a belief in magic and the faerie realm, which they are able to indulge in Indigo’s home to their heart’s content under the eye of Indigo’s loving but indulgent aunt. The idyll the two girls share is tested as they grow older and Azure begins to feel the pull of the actual real world as an alternative to the Otherworld the girls have created in secret and which they plan to inhabit permanently one day. The descriptions of the girls’ beautifully conceived private realm, their revels, their play with costumes, hair, and makeup, and the luxuries with which they surround themselves have a seductive glamour that—at least in Azure’s case—feeds a nurturing sense of imagination. Her imaginary (and perhaps not-so-imaginary) world helps her survive adolescence.

Although the story is steeped in the seductions of Aphrodite (and Hecate), it becomes clear that the glamour, in Indigo’s hands, is more a snare than a gift. The Otherworld is really an Underworld, and Indigo is the Hades to Azure’s Persephone, a poor girl who keeps trying to return to her mother. The novel is rich in references to European and Middle Eastern mythology and folklore as well as fantasy; the girls have a special affinity for The Chronicles of Narnia (as does Indigo’s Bridegroom) and early on are determined not to meet the fate of Susan Pevensie, one of the siblings who visited Narnia and became a Queen, only to be later barred. (This apparently for the sin of growing up.)

To speak of the novel as Freud might, it’s only Azure who is really ruled by Eros and a lust for life; Indigo, whose main goal is to never grow up, is ruled by Thanatos (the death wish). For every impossibly lovely (and unsustainable) faerie feast of champagne, cake, and crushed pearls there is its dark counterpart, a still life of heavy foods surrounding a dead bird or beast. This story cleverly turns the idea of Eden on its head, suggesting that growing up and out of childhood is really the happy ending and that trying to remain in a state of stasis—no matter how agreeable—beyond one’s natural term is the true horror. This, of course, is a message one often encounters in fairy tales, in which one youth or another is being shown the way to adulthood.

The Last Tale of the Flower Bride also marks the second novel or series I’ve encountered recently in which Narnia plays a significant role, the other being The Magicians series by Lev Grossman that I recently discussed. In Mr. Grossman’s novels, Fillory is a magical world that students from Brakebills sometimes find their way into. In some particulars, Fillory pays homage to Narnia: the Neitherlands is something like The Wood Between the Worlds; some of the people from Earth who go to Fillory end up as Kings and Queens there; and the passage between the two worlds is sometimes dismayingly abrupt (you might go there or come back without really meaning to). While characters in The Magicians books sometimes make nerdy references to The Lord of the Rings, their fantasy destination of choice actually resembles Narnia, a more markedly childlike world of storybook castles and talking animals than the more mature-toned LOTR.

While I don’t think it can be said that C.S. Lewis ever really went out of style, it seems noteworthy that his work is having a bit of a run in the dark fantasy of current pop culture. Several films of the first books in the series were completed in the 2000s, and there have been other adaptations in the past. In both Flower Bride and The Magicians, Narnia or a Narnia-like world seems to me symbolic of a place of “stuckness” that adults or young adults are continually longing to get to: the fixation on a fantasy world can be either a dangerous obsession or a necessary detour to recovering something lost. Narnia is a more primitive place than Middle-earth (and so, more dangerous, I would argue), so whatever the problem is, it must be buried pretty deep.

Getting Down With Alice

Author Gregory Maguire can usually be relied upon to spin entertaining novels with his clever, offbeat versions of fairy tales and children's stories written for grown-up children.  He has outdone himself with his novel After Alice, which I cached in a recent visit to the public library (yes, we're still in literary form this week at Wordplay). Mr. Maguire leaps fearlessly into Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, managing not only to land in the right "neck of the woods" (located near the tops of the trees, as one particularly harried bird in the story is careful to explain) but also bringing some wry modern humor with him.

I had a sense, while reading this story, that I was almost as perplexed as Ada, Alice's friend, who, in this telling, has stumbled down the rabbit hole after her, losing a jar of marmalade in the process (so that's where it came from). The novel is full of what appear to be in-jokes, allusions to things that you feel you ought to be able to figure out if you only think about them hard enough. However, like the mysterious key that remains stubbornly out of Ada's reach, this strange and surreal underworld doesn't give up its secrets easily. That you are having an underworld experience is the one thing that is clear; even Ada, who compares Wonderland to a Doré illustration she has seen of Dante's Inferno, soon realizes that.

Of course, you know that Wordplay always has your best interests at heart--and that is why we read After Alice twice in our resolution to be responsible and give you an accurate account of it. My assessment at this point is that while I got the gist of it, it has more in it than any one person can fully unravel, so I invite you to read it for yourself and see what you make of it. I feel sure you'll be entertained. If parts of it seem oddly familiar to you, I won't question that, because I had a similar experience. It wasn't merely the fact that I had read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland previously but also a feeling that, yes, something like that happened to me one time, too, and yes, that character reminds me of someone--even though the characters in this novel have the fluid identities of people in a dream, seeming to shift and reappear in multiple guises. Even the Jabberwock has a hidden identity.

While the geography of After Alice is firmly in Lewis Carroll territory, with many characters from both Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass making an appearance, Mr. Maguire brings a number of tangential characters fully into the story and introduces new ones. Ada, not Alice, is the focus of this story, and Alice's sister Lydia becomes a flesh-and-blood character in the upper world, carrying on a somewhat less-than-thorough search, along with Ada's governess, the highly strung Miss Armstrong, for the missing children. A visiting American has brought with him a freed slave boy, Siam, who makes his own way into Wonderland through the looking-glass in a closed-off parlor.

By turns, this underworld journey is topical, surreal, disturbing, amusing, and sometimes touching. Siam's worldly-wise outlook and American dialect introduce a New World rawness into the somewhat grim rectitude of Victorian Oxford, and some of the denizens of Wonderland express themselves in surprisingly modern though not always fully straightforward quips. "I stole a glance at her," says the March Hare. "So shoot me." And how about this from Humpty Dumpty: "I adore salt. Salt completes me." Ada is repeatedly admonished, "Don't look up," and, while frequently the recipient of advice, is also warned not to take it.

Crippled by a back brace and socially awkward, Ada is perhaps the only character who seems to gain by her underworld experience, which becomes somewhat of a hero's journey (though unacknowledged by anyone else). In Wonderland, she loses her brace and becomes surprisingly sure-footed amongst all the hucksters and dangerous characters she meets, though at the outset she would seem to be no match for them. By the end of the story, I was eager to find out what would happen when Ada returned to the upper world and was sorry when the novel ended, as I would have loved to follow her subsequent career. The final page definitely came too soon in this case.

Kings, queens, duchesses, knights, and other courtiers abound here, including Queen Victoria herself, who somehow makes her way to Wonderland in a bathing machine. Charles Darwin is a guest of Alice's father, Mr. Clowd, a failed scholar, and they discuss evolution and theology over light refreshments, oblivious to the three children who have gone missing in the neighborhood. The book Lydia was reading, "with no pictures or conversation," is revealed to be an essay on A Midsummer Night's Dream. Miss Armstrong has the hots for her employer but transfers her affections rather easily to the interesting American, Mr. Winter. The story begins and ends by a river.

That may seem like a disjointed way to summarize the novel, but the story itself flies about with great flapping wings, changing direction unexpectedly, which is only natural in a story in which the "surreal" and the "real" are tangled up so closely. Mr. Darwin poses a scientific question to Mr. Winter that you will have to answer for yourself, which may or may not sufficiently explain the reason for this novel but will in any case leave you feeling quite thoughtful.

True story: I once had dinner in a chocolate bar in St. Louis. Yes, there is such a thing--they even had chocolate martinis. When I visited the ladies' room, I had to descend a stairwell that was decorated with an Alice in Wonderland theme. On another occasion, while attending a conference in Southern California, I stayed at an Alice in Wonderland themed inn in which my room was named after the Queen of Hearts. It was a bit more room than I needed, but the inn's atmosphere was suitably whimsical and certainly carried out the theme. While either or both experience may have some bearing on why I related so much to Mr. Maguire's story, they don't explain it entirely. At least, I don't think they do.

The Moonlight Hour

It's not unusual at any time for city streets to be crowded, noisy, and full of people in too much of a hurry for civility, but in the Iron Age this is especially true. A person could resort to such judicious responses as blogging, making rude faces, and other instances of patriotic civil disobedience--but getting away from it all is also, occasionally, the best option. An instance of the latter occurred once upon a late winter day when Emma, the protagonist of this tale, had had enough of being harassed, bumped into, and shouted at for the time being, and ducked in from the sidewalk to the Moon and Stars Cafe just in time to avoid being run over by a mother with a stroller and a cell phone.

Respite, of course, is a relative term, especially when you're talking coffeehouses. You are probably imagining Emma ordering a latte and collapsing into the nearest open chair to catch her breath as an antidote to the zeitgeist, but that won't do. No. In fact, she did walk up to the counter, and she did order a mocha. And given no other choice, she might have taken the nearest seat, which is what she did most of the time, despite the fact that the cafe itself was a breeding ground for wanna-be-world rulers and the poorer class of law students. (In a totalitarian age, the government left nothing to chance, not even espresso.)

Today, however, she glanced at the back corner, in which, always without warning but often enough to make it worthwhile, the outline of a slim doorway, invisible to the casual observer, would on rare occasions appear. Emma was aware that she was in full view of the cafe's patrons as she walked up to the door and said the secret word (it was "chocolate," but she never said this aloud), but she also knew that no one else, for reasons that remained a bit cloudy, ever followed her. As soon as she passed through, the door closed behind her, and the noise of the cafe was instantly shut out. She was now in a dark tower with a faintly luminous staircase that rose before her, first in a smooth spiral, and later in exuberant zig-zags as it neared the top. This she began to climb, with a tight grip on her mocha.

The tower had windows that opened onto a velvety black sky pierced with stars. There was also moonlight, so that finding her feet was not a problem. Despite the steepness of the climb, and the distance, she was never out of breath when she reached the top. At the very end, the stairs broke free of the tower entirely, with a doorway on the left leading to a small platform and another short hop of steps, broad but crystal-clear, so that one saw through them entirely. At the top of these steps, like a cardboard cutout at a fun fair, hung the moon. There was actually a bit of a jump at the end, but one always landed smoothly, gliding onto a window seat perched on the very edge of la luna, behind which was a small room with a table and two chairs (in case of inclement space weather, though it had never yet been necessary to use it).

Michael was already there, as usual. He occasionally brought his own cup of coffee, but more often it was a beer. They had sat that way, feet dangling into space (and an occasional passing cloud) numerous times over the years. There had never been a time when she had arrived and not found him there. They never talked much about their respective ways of getting there or how it was even possible. It very obviously was possible, so that was that. (When she had told him that her access was via a hidden staircase from a coffeehouse, he had grimaced a little and said his route involved "Kind of a wormhole." He hadn't seemed to want to say more.) In fact, their conversation was usually interspersed with large gaps of silence, for who, faced with such a prospect before them, would want to waste time in talk. And what, in fact, was there to say?

Below them is the earth, resplendent in blue and green. It has the appearance of a cartoon earth, or earth as seen in a child's picture book, with landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall, and the Golden Gate Bridge clearly visible, as are the occasional toy airplane or ocean liner passing into view. Despite dominating the foreground, the globe as a whole is somehow comically foreshortened, so that everything appears much closer together than it actually is, entire countries taking up no more room than a large park. Aside from that, stars twinkle all around them, and they are occasionally treated to the sight of a passing comet or a planet hoving into view.

It was not as if a visit to the moon made one forget anything. With the earth so insistently present, it would have been impossible to forget anything no matter how hard one tried. But the distance gave one perspective, the quiet was a relief, and it was a heady experience to find oneself sitting companionably on the edge of the moon with such an entertaining panorama on offer. Even the mocha tasted better there, Emma's opinion being that the altitude cleared her sinuses. And it was not quite true to say that space was completely silent. At times, there was a low-pitched humming and sometimes a faint sound of a high, distant voice, which reminded Emma of Dawn Upshaw singing Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.

Aside from the rareness of the occasion, the brevity of each visit also ensured that every moment counted. Half an hour? Forty-five minutes at most? Each visit was a jewel of such clarity and beauty that its memory was sustaining for months at a time. Breaking free of gravity for short periods was enough to help you get through tax season, the end of Daylight Saving Time, pap smears, and Vitamin D deficiencies in winter. You carried the view from that window seat around with you like a locket with an unfathomable secret folded deep inside.

Tonight, Michael looked at her, and she could tell by his brief but searching glance that he knew she had had a tiring day. But why ruin a nice evening by talking about it? She kicked her legs back and forth and watched a developing supernova overhead; Michael sipped his beer and followed a wandering planet with his eyes. In the background, that angelic voice was singing, "Ah, ah, ah . . ." It was celestial relaxation at its best. It was also over with all too soon.

The upper end of Michael's wormhole suddenly yawned, like a cave opening, to their right. Michael and Emma both got up, standing at ease on a wispy but otherwise quite substantial cloud. "It's been real," Emma said. Michael smiled. "Till next time," he said, with a tip of his hand. And then he was walking away, disappearing into the mouth of his tunnel, which instantly dissolved. And here goes Emma, jumping lightly from the cloud and landing on the crystal stair, descending slowly, and climbing into the tower once again for the long walk down.

It's a thing she has often noticed, the different quality of the return trip. The closer one gets to the bottom the more one notices chips at the edge of the stairs and cracks in the walls of the tower that never seemed to be there on the way up. At the bottom of the tower, the stairs are worn; one notices a coffee stain and a bit of dust on a windowsill. Then the outline of a door appears, and you are somehow through it and back in the noisy environs of a crowded coffeehouse. No time seems to have passed while you were gone. Despite a sense of residual sadness, though, there is something else. The sunlight seems brighter than it was, and the aromas of freshly brewed coffee and baked croissants, which now come through with a sharp intensity since your sinuses are clear, are heavenly.

Emma takes her cup to the counter for a refill, sits down, and finds a newspaper someone has left behind. She unfolds the front page and scans the news of the day. "So the world is still here," she murmurs to herself. "And honestly, how glad I am. Even if it is the Iron Age."

This is the latest version of a story I've been writing for a number of years. Originally, it involved two children; then, a single child. This is the first time the story has featured two adults.

Mayhem, Murder, and Magicians

Yesterday I finished Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a novel about dueling English magicians in the Napoleonic era. It took me more than two weeks to read it, which tells you something about the length of it (782 pages). It's wonderful when an engrossing story is also a lengthy one so that you can stick with it for a while . . . if your budget doesn't allow for vacations, isn't a good book a great alternative? Wasn't it Emily Dickinson who said, "There is no Frigate like a Book, to take us Lands away"? (Yes, it was--I just looked it up.)

If you saw the movie The Prestige (which was also a book), you have a little of the flavor of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, though Clarke's book is comical, and The Prestige, in my memory of the film, is rather grim. Strange & Norrell is recommended by my local library for readers who enjoyed The Night Circus, which is how I came across it. Some reviewers have said it combines high fantasy with the drawing room humor of Jane Austen. Certainly the social contretemps endured by Clarke's characters seem more in keeping with the brightness of Austen's world than with the deadly earnestness of The Prestige, despite all the magic and references to Faerie.

Personally, though, I can't imagine any of Austen's people holding much truck with the spell-strewn, whimsical characters of Clarke's book, though I see what reviewers mean about the society humor. The book is funny as well as fantastical, and the humor is a nice balance to the dark twists the story takes. I don't think the book would be as effective without the sniping social climbers, jealous rivals, mystified government ministers, and long-suffering servants who inhabit its pages and counteract some of the eeriness. There are many good fantasy writers, but the ability to seamlessly combine wildly imaginative plotting, alternate worlds, wit, history, and satire is rare, I think.

I would compare the tone of the book to Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising, with its sense of menace and otherworldly mayhem, crossed with the quirkiness and dark humor of Sadie Jones's The Uninvited Guests, with some Neil Gaiman-style chaos, a la American Gods, thrown in. This description is not to detract at all from the author's originality and sheer imaginative brilliance, but it does give you an idea of the territory the novel occupies.

The genius of the story lies in the characterization of the magicians as just another species of "gentlemen scientists," men of standing who happen to have chosen the art of magic for their profession instead of law, the military, or the Church. They approach the most arcane and fantastical of tasks--walking through mirrors, bringing someone back from the dead, moving a city across the ocean to affect the course of a war--with the matter-of-factness of scholars; they study, hoard books, publish, curry favor, seek publicity, become arrogant, and jockey for position. Historical figures, including George III, the Duke of Wellington, and Lord Byron, mingle easily with the book's characters, exhibiting none of the artificiality of "cameo" appearances. They are just a few more well-drawn personages in a large, sprawling, and lively cast.

In one of my favorite scenes, Strange, the bolder and more adventurous of the contending magicians, has feuded with Lord Byron, whom he encounters while traveling in Switzerland. The two men share the same publisher, who receives letters from both of them, each complaining about the other, on the same day. The publisher, Mr. Murray, decides that although it's too bad his clients don't jibe, it really isn't surprising, "since both men were famous for quarrelling: Strange with Norrell, and Byron with practically everybody." In a footnote, Clarke has Byron use Strange as the inspiration for the magician in his poem Manfred.

I don't know if Ms. Clarke intends ever to revisit these characters; the story's conclusion seems to leave the possibility open, since the end, though satisfying, doesn't tie all the loose threads up neatly. While this may have been simply a nod to complexity and a refusal to go with a predictable ending, it makes for an easy segue into a sequel if it ever comes to that. I wouldn't count on it, but I wouldn't rule it out either. The trickster spirit of the novel, of taking characters and readers places they didn't expect to go, is evident even in the closing sentences. I turned pages anxiously to see how it would turn out but was obstinately sad when it was all over.