We Interrupt Our Programming on Dark Academia to Bring You . . . Two Families

Wordplay has published a number of book reviews recently, but it turns out that a week sometimes isn’t long enough for me to finish a book. This could lead you to believe that Wordplay is just a lazy bum who doesn’t care about disappointing its readers. This isn’t true, and that includes all six of you! To make it up to you, this week I have two books to share, both of which, as it turns out, deal with the subject of grief and loss in a family context. I didn’t know that’s what I was getting when I started reading them; it was probably NoveList that put both of these books on my reading list when I decided to take a break from Dark Academia for a little while.

Sue Miller’s Monogamy (2020) is a story of a happy marriage that ends in grief with the death of the husband. Graham and Annie have been married for decades when Graham’s unexpected death leaves Annie devastated. She slowly recovers from her loss with the support of a large circle of family and friends; it’s months before she suddenly realizes that Graham had been having an affair with a woman of their acquaintance just before he died, a realization that turns sorrow into rage. What had been a deep but fairly uncomplicated grief is transformed into a second loss as Annie struggles with feelings of betrayal.

The background to all of this is that both Graham and Annie had been shaped by the sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s and had each enjoyed casual sex. Graham’s first marriage was an open one in which he thrived but his wife did not. Graham had had another brief affair early in his marriage to Annie, and Annie had had a brief adventure of her own with another man while already married to Graham. Thus the use of the word “monogamy” is a bit relative as applied to their marriage: it was mostly monogamous. 

Annie and Graham move in sophisticated Cambridge circles; dinner parties, art shows, and author readings are part and parcel of their world. Theirs is the East Coast intellectual version of what I think of as the “Santa Barbara” lifestyle, ruled by Aphrodite, the goddess of gourmet sensibilities, wine, good food, and sexual love. Graham is a bit of a Dionysus character, with a large frame as well as large appetites—always the life of the party, generous, gregarious, and loving—which is exactly what draws Annie to him in the first place. Her only reservation is a fear of being “swallowed up” by his larger-than-lifeness. Her character is cooler than his, as she tends to observe and record life. Both of them are “nice” people, but they are in some ways opposites. I suppose the main question the novel raised for me is, can you live in a world of Epicurean appetite and not be tempted to indulge those appetites in more than one direction? Another question would be, is monogamy possible for a Dionysian personality whose very lust for life is what’s so attractive about him to begin with?

Probably, I am reading this novel wrong. I found the story compelling, but perhaps there is some working-class snobbery in me that made me a little less sympathetic than I was supposed to be to Annie’s predicament. Annie and Graham had an idyllic life together, an existence of relative ease and comfort, fueled by doses of hedonism. They are interesting people, but perhaps a bit self-absorbed, taking all of the wonderful things in their lives as simply their due. It didn’t seem surprising to me that monogamy wasn’t quite possible for them.

On the other hand, I was unexpectedly blown away by Alison Espach’s Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, a 2022 novel about a family trying to hold themselves together after the death of one of their daughters in a tragic accident. The story is told from the point of view of the younger daughter, “ugly duckling” Sally, who idolizes her older sister Kathy even as she suffers in her shadow. Both girls are fascinated by the athletic and charismatic Billy Barnes, who becomes Kathy’s boyfriend while Sally lives out her crush vicariously. The Holts are a typical American family with a comfortable but not luxurious Connecticut life that’s turned upside down by Kathy’s death. What saves them is quite simply the fact that they stay together and tough it out.

One of the things I liked about this novel was the fact that it refused to sugarcoat the horror of the accident and its effects on the survivors but also maintained a sort of effervescent sense of humor on the part of the narrator. Events in the novel can be both terribly sad and funny at the same time, and they often are. There’s a messiness to the emotions in the novel and at the same time an honesty about them. Nothing is going to resolve what’s happened, and there’s no pretense that the family isn’t struggling, even years later. They’re almost destroyed by grief. 

Sally slowly comes into her own as she grows to adulthood but realizes that her life, successful as it seems from the outside, lacks authenticity. Sally’s mother tries to console herself with wine and regular visits to a psychic (who may actually know more than Sally gives her credit for); Sally’s father simply refuses to give up on his family even in the face of overwhelming pain and unforgiving anger. The needs of the family members clash at times, and they often fail to support one another, but they hang on.

It’s difficult to write about this novel without giving too much away; there is an emotional drive to the story that carries it forward. I admired Sally’s authenticity and humor, which persist in spite of a difficult adolescence and young adulthood. Although the financial circumstances of the Holts are probably not that different from those of Annie’s and Graham’s family, they seem worlds apart. The Holts seem more of a functioning family; you see how the tragedy affects all of them separately and all of them together. The novel is really a portrait of the family’s dynamics. In Monogamy, Annie and Graham seem more like ambitious people who just happened to have children; everything that happens with this family seems to happen to each of them individually, as if they never quite coalesced. It is a portrait of individuals.

Aside from that, there is an anarchic bedrock of truth in Sally’s narration that I found irresistible. In such an ordinary life, you would perhaps not expect to come across such extraordinary emotional courage, but there it is, right in the midst of high school Latin club, visits to the dentist, and dead trees that need to be removed lest they fall on the house. I actually gasped once or twice while reading this novel, a little in awe of how persistently it aimed straight at the heart of things.

How Much Will You Take for That Mermaid?

This week, Wordplay is once again visiting the topic of mermaids. You might recall my review of Imogen Hermes Gowar’s slinky and mysterious The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock (2018) on the Wordplay Facebook page last year. This time, it’s Julia Langbein’s serio-comic American Mermaid, a 2023 novel about mermaids, the creative process, matriarchy and patriarchy, world domination, Hollywood, and the ways in which the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious inform and reflect one another.

The two novels are very different in tone but somehow share an underlying sensibility: both acknowledge the danger of trying to capture the natural forces moving freely through the world and trying to use them for mere profit or selfish ends. Ms. Langbein’s book made me laugh out loud several times while Ms. Gowar’s book was wreathed in watery darkness, but both novels have something to say about the sexual allure of the mermaid and female commodification. While the allure is natural, the failure to understand the power it represents is the real culprit. 

In Gowar’s book, a dead mermaid “specimen” put on display for exhibit-goers is an evil-looking creature with sharp teeth, and a living mermaid turns out to be impervious to attempts to hold it against its will. In Langbein’s book, men who succumb to the sirens’ song quickly find that is they who are being used and that the mermaids are indifferent to their fate (though they will do the men the honor of naming their progeny after them). An attempt to bring the mermaids into a corporate scheme to re-make the world through a planned global disaster backfires due to their ferociously independent nature. But it would be reductionist to say that both novels are simply polemics about the foolhardiness of failing to respect nature, in the same way it would be to say that of Moby-Dick, which in some ways is their spiritual forebear. All three novels paint a complex portrait of nature, including its destructive side: nature is ultimately creative, mysterious, spiritual, conscious, and very much alive.

One of the most interesting aspects of Ms. Langbein’s book, for me, was her depiction of the creative process of her heroine, a high school teacher and writer of fiction named Penelope Schleeman, whose first novel draws the attention of Hollywood filmmakers wishing to turn it into popular entertainment. Penelope’s novel draws heavily on her own life experiences, and because it’s an honest attempt to work through issues important to her, it simultaneously offends her family and catches fire with the world at large. Penelope’s adoption of a mythological creature, a captured mermaid, to stand in as a sort of alter ego, whether simply a fortuitous choice or not, actually invites the eventual intervention of real-life mermaids (yes, they turn out to be real) who subvert attempts to turn Penelope’s novel into a fatuous screenplay.

As with The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, American Mermaid paints what I think is a true portrait of the protean nature of mythology. Mythology is a human construct that reflects our understanding of the world around us but ultimately springs from a deep, indeterminate place where the human and non-human meet and are not so distinct from one another. Penelope’s writing draws from the collective unconscious, and she, in turn, has an effect on it. It’s both painful and hilarious to watch her struggle with the Hollywood handlers who love her book but want to turn it into something trivial. Once she begins to realize that her main character, Sylvia, has a life and power of her own, she becomes less and less bankable and can only watch as her subconscious/alter ego unleashes chaos to save her novel.

Personally, there are a lot of things I like about Los Angeles, but the novel’s description of the film business and Hollywood people rang true based on the little I know about it. I imagine it would be painful to see something you created turned into something completely different than you intended. At the same time, money and flattery are great temptations, and film is a business like any other. People are in it to make money. In American Mermaid, a sort of clash of the titans occurs when the honest businesspeople of Hollywood invite the wrath of the mythological world by attempting to use it in a bland moneymaker that won’t challenge anyone. In the end, this novel says, the mythical world will always win in a battle like this.

Matriarchal and patriarchal values are both given a place in American Mermaid, and if the matriarchy eventually has its way, that isn’t to say she is more benign. She can be cruel and heartless, too, even if in service to the continuation of life, which might give you an idea of the reason the patriarchy tries so hard to keep her down. Better for both to live in harmony with one another if only they could figure out how, but that is one of life’s continuing unresolved stories.

A Bunch of Magicians Gathered in a Manor House, and . . .

It took a while, but I finally finished Olivie Blake’s The Atlas Six, and let me tell you, people are throwing around the term “Dark Academia” pretty loosely in applying it to this book. From what I’ve seen, the genre has some very indeterminate edges to begin with, but usually some combination of a Gothic setting, exclusivity, occult knowledge, and sinister happenings need to occur in proximity to one another to qualify. In The Atlas Six, the exclusivity is there, but by the book’s own logic, magical knowledge is really just a form of super-advanced scientific acumen that some savants (“medeians” as they are called in the novel) have the ability to wield according to their specialties. They are basically physicists, naturalists, telepaths, and even psychopaths, if you will; they are simply way ahead of the general population in their knowledge of how the universe functions and their ability to manipulate it.

In most of the other Dark Academia novels or TV series I’ve come across, the question of what magic is isn’t nearly so cut-and-dried as it is here. Magicians may be quite skilled at casting spells and capable of doing spectacular things in the wider world of D.A. without really being able to pin down what magic is . . . there is some mystery to it, something that defies explanation. Magic is often set in opposition to the normal, everyday world, and the people who practice it do so on the fringes of society or in some secret corner of it, as if there has to be something a bit wrong with them to give magic the ability to leak through. 

To say that The Atlas Six doesn’t fit this pattern isn’t a criticism of the novel, but I think it reads more like a quirky sort of science fiction crossed with a bit of Agatha Christie than Dark Academia. Magic is a commodity in this novel, something to be used, bought, and sold, so that skilled practitioners essentially rule the world in a very hard-headed, unsentimental way. While some of the characters are fighting their own demons, the main characteristic nearly all of them share is being highly competitive.

I had difficulty relating to the characters throughout the first few chapters, as none of them were particularly engaging or sympathetic. But once the novel takes off, it really takes off; I have to give the author credit for taking a group of prickly, somewhat self-absorbed magical geniuses that I didn’t especially like and placing them in circumstances that suddenly became compelling once I realized what they were actually up against. The novel has a few English “murder mystery” tropes in it, with its small group of oddballs tripping over one another in a manor house setting and matching wits to survive what only appears to be a genteel competition. The weapons at their disposal—the ability to alter time and space, disappear into one another’s psyches, and alter the perceptions and thoughts of their fellow initiates—make for a very lively academic year.

Miss Blake followed this novel up with its continuance, The Atlas Paradox, which I haven’t yet read; a third novel, The Atlas Complex, is expected next year. In the way of a cliffhanger, The Atlas Six ends in the middle of an action-packed sequence in a somewhat different manner than the reader has been led to believe is possible, but OK, yay for that! This popular series takes the magical academia trend in its own idiosyncratic direction with a group of somewhat disaffected characters who practice magic not for personal reasons but for professional ones, with all the competitive edginess found in any highly selective academic program with a limited number of seats. Imagine an English graduate department with a prestigious fellowship program and only a few open slots and picture the chaos when the applicants can see around corners, read one another’s minds, perform battle magic, and contemplate murder to achieve their goals. 

Come to think of it, is this really that different from the actual real world? Doesn’t seem that different from some of the academic settings I’ve known. I often feel that someone is trying to read my mind or figure out what I’m thinking before I even know it myself, and I’m an independent scholar. Imagine the mayhem in the halls of academia, then, if someone were to throw magic into the mix. Oh, wait, they already have, haven’t they—it’s called technology.

How to Be a Magician

“Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.” —Lev Grossman, The Magician’s Land

After watching the Syfy series The Magicians, I started reading the novels from which they were adapted and just finished the last of the three, The Magician’s Land. In previous posts I discussed The Magicians as an example of the Dark Academia genre, but it’s also a little bit science fiction and a little bit urban fantasy. The TV series diverged in many ways from the books but is true to it in spirit. 

It was ambitious of Syfy to undertake an adaptation of this multiverse-spanning work, but they pulled it off, actually adding complexity to an already complex narrative. The author supplies transitions that help you, the reader, keep track of where you are in space/time with regard to the plot, but the TV series sometimes meanders without ceremony from one space/time labyrinth into another. I kind of liked that about it, the way it could jump abruptly from one world to the next by way of very shifty portals and occasionally leave you wondering where exactly you were. It was very existential, though it sometimes had me wondering if I’d missed something I was supposed to know about the transition. Well, haven’t we all been landed at one time or another in the middle of a world that looked like the one we’re used to but very palpably wasn’t the same thing at all? Of course we have. This series gets you to feeling that that’s just the type of thing a reasonably intelligent magician has to get used to.

In the novels, Mr. Grossman gives a more explanatory diagram of how various segments of the multiverse are enmeshed, particularly in the episode of the prank in which Plum discovers interconnected worlds behind the walls at Brakebills. In the TV series, it’s often unclear, especially later on, if the characters are in Brakebills (where they appear to be) or somewhere else, some anteroom slightly removed from current reality. In my mind, Brakebills serves as baseline reality, which is actually a joke, since Brakebills is itself separated—by a thin membrane only, but still, separated—from the actual modern world of the northeastern United States in New York State. The Hudson River is visible from the campus, but no one on or near the river would be able to see Brakebills; invisible wards shield it from the eyes of non-magicians.

Some of the characters in the TV series are exactly as Mr. Grossman wrote them, brought to life by a talented cast who seemingly stepped straight out of the pages. Some of the characters have been changed somewhat, or bear different names or roles than they do in the books. One character, Penny, bears only a modest resemblance to Penny in the novel, being much more compelling and dynamic in the series (and actually one of my favorites); I mourned his fate in the series and never really got over his separation from Kady. Penny eventually becomes (in both the books and the series) a Librarian-Magician, and although librarians are not as benign in The Magicians as many people think them to be in real life (having a rather complex relationship with magic that sometimes places them in opposition to magicians), Penny manages both roles, though more satisfactorily in the TV series, I thought, where he was quite a bit more manly.

In previous posts I talked about the idea of magic as psychological agency, and The Magicians is possibly the purest example of this idea that I’ve yet seen. This idea first came to me after I watched a filmed production of The Tempest some years ago, and to my delight, that’s the way Quentin Coldwater, The Magicians’ central character, also sees it: he thinks of the world he wants to create using magic as a kind of Prospero’s island, where he can arrange things to be safe and peaceful. If you ask the question, “What exactly is magic?” I would say, as I think The Magicians does, that it’s a lot like creativity, and not only the kind that spins fantasy worlds and creates symphonies and paintings. It’s also the kind you use in homespun ways when putting together a home or cooking a meal. It’s you putting your stamp on the world, taking what it has to offer and making something out of it that wasn’t there before.

Most, if not all, of the characters in The Magicians are broken in some way or another, and learning magic constitutes a way for them to heal themselves while they are trying to heal the world. They often make things worse, at least for a time, since magic is a messy business limited not only by the magician’s skill but by the material he/she has to work with and the fact that magic has a mind of its own. If you want to get Jungian about it (you may not, but here goes anyway), it’s like the conscious mind, the ego, working with the unconscious, the invisible place of power from whence spring all manner of things, both good and bad. Ever wondered why that spell you cast created a prison world instead of the paradise you wanted? Well, what about that leviathan swimming around down there in your unconscious that shaped your intent in ways you weren’t aware of?

Of course, even going off course with magic can be beneficial in the long run, as Quentin and the others discover. The cliche about the journey meaning more than the destination turns out to be true when you’re jumping worlds as well. You keep trying things out and learning until something sticks, and you suddenly realize you’re home. In the world of The Magicians, it’s only those with an aptitude who ever even learn that magic exists, but I’m not sure Mr. Grossman and I are in disagreement over this. A lot of ordinary people in our world never truly learn what they’re capable of, either.

Wordplay Goes to the Alamo

I’m back home after several days of pop culture immersion at the PCA/ACA conference in San Antonio. I hadn’t traveled anywhere since well before the pandemic, so this was a little bit of flexing my writing muscle, a little bit of pursuing various interests, and a little bit of finding my traveling legs once again. I loaded up with hand sanitizer, Clorox wipes, and face masks but discovered—to my surprise—that I seemed to be one of very few people bothering with extra precautions. I thought more people would use masks on the plane, to be honest, but I saw only one or two other people wearing one.

I had decided in advance that I preferred to divide my time between attending sessions and exploring San Antonio, a new city for me and one I was looking forward to seeing. The last time I attended PCA/ACA, I focused on fitting in as many sessions as I could (to get my money’s worth, I guess) but found that strategy to be pretty exhausting. It may be that when participants are representing an academic specialty, they simply go to the sessions related to their field, but my field is probably represented by at least half of all the topics offered, so I consider all of them before choosing. Sometimes I’ll attend a wild card session just to get out of my comfort zone, so the scheduling alone requires a lot of thought. The end result of all this was that attending fewer sessions this time made for a more enjoyable experience.

Unlike my last PCA/ACA experience (in Chicago), this event seemed friendlier and more relaxed. I don’t know whether to put this down to the conference itself being quite a bit smaller this time, to other people besides myself being overjoyed to get to travel again after several years of strictures, or to the location itself. I have always found Chicago to be somewhat chilly (literally and figuratively), though I know some people love it. I found that San Antonio both was and wasn’t what I expected before I arrived, and that I had to feel my way around a bit more thoughtfully than usual. My initial impression on arriving downtown was actually one of surprise that I felt such a sense of disorientation and a little bit of dismay. I wasn’t expecting San Antonio to be bland but the fact that it’s such a popular city for conferences and tourists hadn’t prepared me for an edginess I thought I perceived in my surroundings.

At the hotel, I asked if the surrounding area was safe at night and was told very definitely that it was. Because I was presenting on the first day, I spent my first night and most of the following day focused on getting ready and never really ventured outside the hotel again until after my presentation. I had a little bit of trepidation (that never fully dissipated) but found that, as is sometimes the case, things overall did look brighter with the sun shining and the wind in my sails as I went for a celebratory walk and discovered the Riverwalk, the Alamo, and other sights within walking distance. 

Personally, I found the physical environment to be an unusual mix of the graceful and historic along with the raucous and rough and thought it surprising that none of the guides I’d consulted ahead of time mentioned this dichotomy. In all my travels, I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced a place quite like San Antonio. My conclusions are based on the scant observations of a few days mostly spent downtown and don’t necessarily encompass the entire city, but I think at least a couple of factors account for the complex experience I had: there is a strong military presence because of both U.S. Army and Air Force bases in the area, and the Mexican culture is stronger in San Antonio than in any other place I’ve ever been.

I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say that both of these things lent a certain machismo to the atmosphere that I found daunting. I don’t take well to feeling that I have to curtail my activities or do things differently than I normally would to feel safe, but that’s what I did in San Antonio. One night only did I stay out after dark, and even though it wasn’t much past dusk when I got back to my hotel, some of the activity on the street had me feeling less than comfortable. On the one hand, I experienced an absolutely magical walk down Houston Street, with grackles clamoring overhead and colored lights in the trees lending an air of enchantment to the growing dusk. It was wonderful. On the other hand, there was crude shouting in the streets. I don’t think I’ve ever been so self-conscious about being a woman on my own as I was in those few days.

Most people I encountered were charming and friendly, and if any of them looked askance at this gray-haired lady in sneakers flitting around their city, few of them showed it, except for a surly bus driver or hotel clerk here and there. Some people object, I know, to applying archetypes like “masculine” and “feminine” to describe things, but that seems to me the best way to convey the city as I saw it. San Antonio itself, with its beautiful historical buildings and graceful winding river, seemed very feminine to me, but it has attracted a strong masculine presence. There are positives and negatives to both archetypal qualities, but the real crux is the way they interact. The feminine element certainly doesn’t have to be passive, but somehow it did seem to be in San Antonio, in deference to a sort of untamed, insistent masculinity. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that “boys will be boys” is the pervading but perhaps unspoken ethos in the city.

For a reintroduction to the world of travel, San Antonio was in some ways a bit of a challenge, and a bit of a contradiction. I had a better experience at the conference, where I felt an openness and friendliness that was lacking the last time I went. I enjoyed my explorations of the city, which boasts some pretty impressive efforts to revive and preserve its historical buildings and places. I also felt “out of my element” to a degree I wasn’t expecting. Of course, I wouldn’t say I felt “safe” in Chicago either, but it was in more of a “this-is-a-big-city-with-a-high-rate-of-gun-violence” way, not because I felt out of place. The dangers in Chicago wear a more impersonal face, perhaps, than they do in San Antonio.

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.

The Third Man the Second Time Around

I just re-watched Carol Reed’s The Third Man, a film I last saw 16 years ago and remembered mainly for its zither music and dramatic final scene. The film and I have both aged at least a little since then, and of course it’s always revealing to see how a film changes for you with repeated viewings. The first time I watched it, I think I was intent on the plot; this time, I was looking for what would stand out from an archetypal viewpoint. The setting in post-World War II Vienna, with its piles of rubble, shadowy corners, and air of disintegration, lends itself to a showdown between forces of good and evil, and that certainly figures largely in the story.

The British Film Institute voted The Third Man the greatest British film of all time, and I agree with its greatness, but I had forgotten how talky the first part of it is. Talk, talk, talk, as we are introduced to American pulp fiction writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) who has come to Vienna to meet his old friend Harry Lime to discuss a job offer—only to be greeted with news of his death. Martins conceives the idea of a cover-up when accounts of Lime’s demise don’t match up. Talk, talk, talk, some more. Despite being warned off by a British officer (Trevor Howard), Martins stays in Vienna and begins looking into Harry’s death while joining forces with Harry’s grieving lover, Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli). They seem to be the only two people who care that something untoward may have happened to Harry.

What struck me the second time around was how the film really came alive only when Harry (Orson Welles), concealed in the shadows of a doorway, is revealed to be alive. Although all of the actors in the film are wonderful, it’s as if all they’ve been doing is preparing the viewer for Harry’s return, and when light finally falls on his puckish face from an upstairs window, the action starts to move forward. Is there anyone nowadays who can match Orson Welles’ commanding presence? Nobody that I can think of. He relied on something other than good looks to draw your attention, a magnetism made up of an imposing physicality combined with an extraordinarily mobile face and an old-soul wisdom.

Major Calloway reveals to Martins that Lime had orchestrated a monstrous scheme involving doctored black market antibiotics responsible for killing and injuring many children. Although he initially refuses to believe this, Martins, now realizing Harry’s death was faked, arranges for Harry to meet him at a carnival. During this reunion, which I think is the best scene in the film, Lime reveals to Martins that not only is it true but that he has no remorse about it. He justifies his actions by telling Martins that the war itself revealed how cheap individual lives are held to be by those capable of making life and death decisions—why should it be any different for him? The two men are in a cable car looking down at the carnival from a great height when Lime admits the truth to his friend, attempting to bring him into the scheme, a moment reminiscent of Satan tempting Jesus on the mountain.

Martins finally agrees to help trap Lime and bring him to justice, which leads to an epic chase scene in the sewers beneath Vienna, a very Underworld image that is really the mirror of Vienna itself, in all its corruption. With the law finally closing in on him, Lime gives Martins one last chance to prove his friendship. The movie ends with Harry’s second and final funeral and the grieving Anna walking straight past Martins, who is smitten with her and would be much better for her than that rogue Harry Lime, but, well . . . what can you do?

The second time around, I thought the heart of the film was maybe not so much in the ultimate showdown as in the small moments, the intimacies among the characters. Harry is “wrong” for Anna, but he did her a great kindness once, and she loves him for it. There’s something tragicomic in the final scene and her single-minded march down the avenue, as if she could carry on her entire life blind to anything but her feelings for Harry. Martins, too, revealed that knowing the truth about Harry didn’t completely negate the meaning of their friendship. Far from condemning either Martins or Anna, I sort of admired their loyalty, the refusal to give up a human connection to Harry that each continued to honor, whether he “deserved it” or not. The real complexity of the film lies in the tangle of human feeling in the midst of moral collapse. It’s, ironically, in the grains of sand that Harry seems to have no use for, not the grand gestures.