Changes

I've been asked a lot, over the last few weeks, to make lists of my favourite childhood books. This is quite an odd thing to have to do, and prompted some memory searching and a few phone-calls to my mother (who originally supplied most of what I read back then). The picture that emerges is of a sort of prototypical fantasy novel enthusiast: books like [[The Dark is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper|The Dark is Rising]], [[The Hobbit by J R R Tolkien|The Hobbit]], [[A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin|A Wizard of Earthsea]], ''Pawn of Prophecy'' etc. And this is a trend that I've continued. Although I've abandoned the full-metal Swords n' Sorcery (where people smite fanged creatures with ancestral swords while calling out the long-forgotten runes of their ancestral whatnots) I now read a lot of books in which fantastical things happen, sometimes in a strange world. For example I love [[:Category:Haruki Murakami|Haruki Murakami's]] novels, and those of [[:Category:Neil Gaiman|Neil Gaiman]], and [[The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov]], and all for exactly the same reason. These books take the 'real' world and introduce odd happenings and inexplicable events until the main characters don't know whether they're coming or going. And then, when the characters are up against it, we learn something about the sort of people they are.

I've given quite a lot of thought to what it is that intelligent fantasy novels do – and here I'm drawing a distinction between those fantasy books that involve goblin smiting and little else, and those that also tell us something about humans and how we work. For me the key element is the one I described above, of putting characters that we identify with in difficult and unusual situations and seeing what they do. In A Wizard of Earthsea, for example, a young wizard inadvertently releases a creature that (spoiler alert, although the book has been published long enough, for heaven's sake) eventually turns out to be an incarnation of his own death. And only by embracing this creature is he able to become a whole person. So Ursula LeGuin makes a point about how we should live, using a completely fictional world, populated with wizards, dragons and odd, scary creatures as her tools.