fantasy, page 66 of 92

Classic children’s authors tend to acquire a mythic reputation, often a sort of shadow image of their most famous creation. Lewis Carroll and his desperate need for the friendship of little girls is the most obvious example, but J M Barrie comes a close second, being depicted as a man who couldn’t grow up, who turned his back on his own failed marriage to inveigle himself into a household already equipped with a gang of boys, thus allowing himself to both be, and not be, a sort of father without responsibilities and boys’ gang-leader — a view backed up by such books as Jackie Wullschlager’s (mostly disapproving) Inventing Wonderland, Humphrey Carpenter’s Secret Gardens, and the film Finding Neverland.

Loaded with these preconceptions, I expected Peter Pan and Wendy, Barrie’s 1928 novelisation of his 1904 stage play, to be a sort of manifesto of eternal boyhood, but it turned out to be a slightly more honest and self-aware examination of that inability/unwillingness to grow up. Peter Pan, though a hero at times, is also seen as a distant, strange figure, more like a fairy changeling than a human boy, several times being described as heartless, and quite capable of forgetting Wendy (and Tinker Bell) as soon as they’re out of his sight. But as Barrie doesn’t seem to have sufficient sympathy or understanding of the other character in his book’s title (the only other really interesting character is Hook), we don’t get a proper examination of the alternative to Peter Pan-ism, i.e., growing up. Wendy, though she does grow up in the book, is made to feel guilty for the fact, even though (I’d say) she gets the better part of the deal.

Peter Pan and Wendy is a strange reading experience (to me as an adult, anyway). There’s a feeling that this isn’t supposed to be your introduction to the story — at the time it was written, Barrie could be pretty sure of your having seen the hugely successful play first — and we’re not really introduced to the characters (Wendy and the other Darling children have already heard of Peter Pan at the start, and aren’t surprised when he flies into their bedroom looking for his shadow), nor are we at any point being convinced of the logic (or illogic) of the story. It all just happens, and it’s the fun in telling it that is the main point. The story itself doesn’t have much weight — it’s so full of playful make-believe, there’s no sense of it going anywhere, nor of its having any logic to adhere to — but Barrie keeps things alive by the occasional bit of storytelling brio, such as when, after introducing the pirates and Captain Hook’s way of keeping them in check, Barrie says, “Let us now kill a pirate, to show Hook’s method,” making the story seem a much more live, active experience than most books. Barrie also has his moments in dramatising what’s going on in his character’s heads — the scene where Hook, thinking Peter Pan to be dead, is unable to feel triumph because of hangups from his schooldays, really adds an unexpected dimension of character.

The bizarre thing about Wendy being made to feel guilty for having grown up, at the end of the novel, is that, while she was in Never Never Land, she did nothing but play at being a mother to the Lost Boys. Peter Pan, on the other hand, has no need to grow up, as he lives constantly in a make-believe world of instant gratification, with adventures (in which he always wins) in constant supply. He is not so much the image of eternal boyhood as an ideal of a non-existent sort of boyhood (though one that boys may wish they had) which doesn’t have any emotional attachments. No mothers, no fathers, and no need of friends. (The Lost Boys are a constantly renewing bunch; Tinker Bell, devoted to Peter Pan, dies of old age after a couple of years and Peter forgets she ever existed.) The Darling children, including Wendy, take on this heartlessness while they’re in Never Never Land, not caring how miserable they’ve made their parents by disappearing suddenly in the night. On returning, they’re instantly forgiven, and herein lies the book’s main need for its fantasy element. The best fantasies, though they start out as escapes, end up having to face the thing they escaped from. Never Never Land is an escape from emotional consequences, but this continues into the real world after the children return, making you feel you haven’t really returned, and that this isn’t a truly satisfying ending.

But although Peter Pan and Wendy only works because it ignores its own emotional implications, it can’t be because Barrie himself was unaware of them. His 1920 play Mary Rose could be seen as Wendy’s story with a more realistic twist, told from the point of view of those she left behind. In the play, Mary Rose is a woman who is twice in her life lost to a faraway fairyland, disappearing for years then returning having not aged, while those around her have. The second time, she disappears shortly after having given birth; when she returns, she pines for the baby she hadn’t finished nursing, but the boy is now a grown-up man, his mother all but forgotten. Here, then, the lack of emotional connection between a child and its parent which was, in Peter Pan, a result of a quite natural boyish retreat into imagination, is seen as the result of bereavement and loss, and so is perhaps that much more an honest expression of whatever it was that caused Barrie’s retreat from his own adulthood.

I’ve read somewhere that DC’s Sword of Sorcery was conceived as an answer to Marvel’s runaway success in bringing Robert E Howard’s most famous creation to the world of comics, with Conan the Barbarian issue 1 appearing in August 1970. DC dipped its toe by having Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser guest in Wonder Woman #202, in Oct 1972. I haven’t read this, so I don’t know how the two (to my mind, wholly separate) universes would have been brought together. I’d like to imagine a story featuring Fafhrd & the Mouser’s rivalrous attempts to woo the Amazonian Princess, while perhaps simultaneously trying to relieve her of her lovely gold wristbands and glowing lasso (which I can see the Mouser finding irresistible), probably only to be soundly and solidly put in their place — but I think, to judge from the cover, they just get into a fight.

Sword of Sorcery, a standalone title featuring Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser in their proper environment, the fantasy world of Nehwon, debuted in March 1973. In the first editorial, writer/adapter Denny O’Neil issues a pledge: “We’ll change Fritz’s work as little as possible, because we love it, because it would be silly to imagine we can improve on greatness, and because, for the first time in our comics careers, we’re approaching a project with genuine reverence.” But by the third issue (which mentions, in its editorial, that both Leiber and Harlan Ellison have complimented them on their adaptation) they’re presenting an original, non-Leiber story. I do have to say it sticks quite well to the feel of the F&GM stories, including in its cast a bird-woman (which fits in with the pair’s many dalliances with exotic, semi-human females), but this same bird-woman brings out an uncharacteristic note of sexism from Fafhrd (usually the more chivalrous of the two). Thinking themselves abandoned by the half-woman half-bird Lissa, Fafhrd says: “She could be of no help… and besides, what do you expect of a woman… even a woman half a nobler creature?”

In general, though, seen as a comics-of-the-time take on Leiber’s tales, Sword of Sorcery manages an okay series of adaptations. The stories have mostly been boiled down to centre on one big fight, but do include a smattering of the sort of wordplay & archaicism so characteristic of Leiber’s writing. One thing I forgot about this sort of comic (not having read any in ages) is just how much the characters love to talk during fights, and mostly about themselves. As soon as they whip out their swords, Fafhrd & the Mouser turn into a pair of gangsta rappers — “Hey, I’m great at this, I’m great at that, look at me, how good I am in a fight.” Fafhrd calls himself a barbarian rather a lot (and is “Fafhrd the Barbarian” in the titles); Leiber’s character wouldn’t do that — not as a boast, anyway, as he was more interesting in being civilised. It’s basically a shorthand way of getting readers to grasp his status as a Conan analogue. And I have to mention one truly awful thought bubble from a non-Leiber back-up strip in issue 4, about Fafhrd in his youth. Seeing his girlfriend snatched by a snow-dragon, the young Fafhrd thinks: “So… my blooming manhood is put to the test!” A letter from issue 4 says it all: “A splendid adaptation of ‘Thieves House’ this month. I wonder, though, why you retitled it ‘Revenge of the Skull of Jewels’. That’s laying it on a bit thick, isn’t it?” Laying it on a bit thick is what this sort of comic does.

Another thing I forgot from US comics of this era is just how crude the colouring technology was. In most cases, the splotchy, all-too-basic colouring detracts from the artwork far more than it adds. I would have preferred to have seen it in black & white just to get a better look at the linework. And I wasn’t 100% taken by the depictions of Fafhrd & the Mouser — mostly the Mouser, who, though properly short, still had the usual superhero proportions, making him seem like a 7 foot tall man shrunk in size, rather than a short man with a short man’s proper proportions. But, again, I suspect this is just one of the conventions of the time. One thing I would like to say about the art, though — and this isn’t at all intended as faint praise — is I liked the backgrounds. They really brought out the feel of Leiber’s Nehwon, particularly the city of Lankhmar, a lush mix of opulent Orientalism and Renaissance Europe:

And this panel is simply beautiful:

Sword of Sorcery died without an announcement after five bimonthly issues. It was an interesting run, but more for how Leiber’s work could be fitted into a medium or market that couldn’t properly deal with his attempts to rethink & out-think the clichés of a genre he’d helped define (even, to name).

Fafhrd & the Mouser would appear in comics again in 1990, this time from the Marvel-owned Epic Comics, where they distinctly benefit from being directed at a more adult market, and in a generally more mature (post-Watchmen) comics milieu. In a neat link, although it was drawn by Mike Mignola, this later series was written by Howard Chaykin, penciller for Sword of Sorcery. I’ll maybe cover it in a future Mewsings.

In Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale (published earlier this year), a teenage girl disappears into the woods only to return, two decades later, having aged a mere six months. In that time her parents have become OAPs, her brother has married and had children, and her ex-boyfriend, a once-promising musician (who was at one point accused of her murder) has seriously failed to live up to his promise. Joyce’s novel explores the impact of her return, and the sudden perspective it puts upon the passage of twenty years in each character’s life.

Ramsey Campbell’s The Kind Folk (published last month) opens with one of those “real people’s problems” tabloid-style talk shows, where the host, Jack Brittain, is poised to reveal the results of a DNA test that will prove if, as Maurice Arnold suspects, his grown-up son Luke isn’t really his son at all. Maurice suspects his brother, Terence, who has always been overly proud of the boy, taking him on trips to remote parts of the country and telling him odd little fairy tales. But despite a family resemblance, it turns out Luke isn’t related to either. Nor, even, to the woman he calls his mother. A stand-up comedian with an uncanny knack for imitation, Luke comes to suspect the truth about his origins by retracing, through his uncle’s tersely-worded journal, the odd places they visited, where they always seemed to meet with “kind folk”. Nice people? By no means.

Joyce’s novel uses a multiple viewpoint approach to work at two questions. One, the rational, is just what happened — is the returned Tara really Tara? And can she really still be a teenager, twenty years on? Or is it all self-delusion and an extreme case of arrested development? The other (and far more interesting) question, is how her disappearance and reappearance have affected the people who knew her (among which the most compelling stories are those of her ex-boyfriend Richie, to whom she was a sort of muse, and who, as a result, was left like the traditional fairy-thralled knight, bereft of his inspiration and life-drive; and of course Tara’s own, having lost twenty years’ worth of family life, and finding herself in a world with which she’s now two decades out of step). My one criticism of the book is that I didn’t think the two questions quite gelled. It’s interesting to compare it to Alan Garner’s Boneland, another Faerie-tinged book published this year which also dealt with the devastating, lifelong impact of loss, though in an even more intense way (perhaps because entirely focused on one character). Garner combines the psychoanalytic and fantastic threads of his novel into one meaningful narrative, whereas Joyce spends a chapter psychoanalysing Tara only to disprove it later, which left me feeling a bit cheated. But in Boneland, psychoanalysis, even if it has a dangerous air, is ultimately seen as an aid to self-understanding and self-healing, while Some Kind of Fairy Tale‘s take is more about the abuse suffered at the hands of the profession by people whose experiences have taken them beyond the norm.

For most of The Kind Folk, Ramsey Campbell takes a more traditional horrific approach to the presence of a race of half-seen non-human beings at loose in the world. As usual with Campbell, his novel is mostly about the isolating, destabilising effect of the supernatural on one man’s family relationships, identity, and sanity. But the end managed to step clear of the simply horrific to a glimpse of something a little more magical. A far more claustrophobic but focused novel, Campbell’s worked that little bit better, of the two, for me.

Both The Kind Folk and Some Kind of Fairy Tale are well-written, interesting modern takes on the traditional matter of fairyland. Cornered as it is by hordes of zombies, vampires and teen wizards, I’m wondering if Faerie isn’t becoming one of the last refuges of the fantasy novelist who wants to do something genuinely different. There’s something about these outward blasts of the irrational & incomprehensible, and how they impact on real-seeming human characters, that smacks of those areas of life that fantasy, perhaps, is the best way to write about. The loss of a loved one may have a rational explanation, but that goes no way to explaining or expressing the impact it has on the people who feel the loss. The fantastic can. Besides, there’s something about the Perilous Realm and its inhabitants that, however much they may be commercialised into butterfly-winged, tutu-wearing Tinkerbells, there’s always a dark underside that resists commodification, a marshy creature lurking in the weeds, a too-wild dance echoing from over the next mist-wrapped hill. All too often, vampires and zombies are more and more restricted by rules and behaviours as their literature grows, but Faerie only seems to increase in its ability, the more it’s written about, to be what you don’t expect it to be. (Which may be its defining feature.) Besides, I don’t believe in vampires or zombies, but can’t help being a little bit afraid that if I say I don’t believe in fairies, they’ll get me.