fantasy, page 90 of 92

I really liked M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. It was a genuinely spooky film that managed to be more than just spooky. Unbreakable seemed a bit too much like a short film idea spun out to feature film length. Signs was downright contrived, a major disappointment. The Village was good, but mainly because it worked as a drama, not because of the twist at the end which was surely obvious to anyone who’s read even a handful of science fiction stories. The Lady in the Water is his latest effort and, well, I was determined to give it a good go. I knew it had taken a critical mauling, but most of what I heard was, it seemed to me, simply down to embarrassment at the rather childish nomenclature the film uses — it’s about a man who discovers a narf (a sort of inspirational water nymph) living in the pool of the apartment block he caretakes. Narf is a naff word, as is scrunt, the monster out to get the narf, which seems to be a cross between a jackal and a patch of turf. But I thought I could overlook these rather clunky words — they were supposed to be from a child’s bedtime story, after all — because The Lady in the Water isn’t just about narfs and scrunts, it’s about the adults who find themselves caught up in this child’s bedtime story, and I thought that provided an opportunity for Shyamalan to say something interesting about the shape life takes.

Only, (to kill the suspense), he didn’t.

The film had its good points — mostly thanks to the acting, with Paul Giamatti (playing the caretaker Cleveland Heep), managing to bring his personal story to a genuinely emotional climax, and Bob Balaban, as the film critic, whose deadpan humourlessness was absolutely hilarious. Things started to go wrong for me near the start, though, when Bryce Dallas Howard’s tendency to deliver all her lines by in-breath alone meant I had to turn on the subtitles to understand what she was saying. (Thankfully, she later resorted to sign language, though only for reasons of convoluting an already over-complicated plot.)

What I really didn’t like about the film, though, was that Shyamalan failed to say that interesting thing I was expecting him to say. The possibility was there, I thought, that by bringing adult characters into a child’s bedtime story, he might say something about the gap between the meaningful form we expect life to take (as embodied by children’s stories) and the actual result we find ourselves living as adults — something of a mess, with hints of meaningfulness every now and then, but so much superfluity and inconsequentiality that we quickly realise life isn’t anything so simplistic as a bedtime story. But instead of raising the idea of story to the level of his adult characters, Shyamalan instead lowered his supposedly adult characters to the level of a child’s bedtime story by imposing on them a tremendously naive idea of what it means to have “a purpose” in life. Rather as in Signs, Shyamalan seems to think that having “a purpose” means that, at some point in your life, all your personal peculiarities and foibles will come together to make you play some perfect (though most probably minor) role in a story. But this, to me, is a horrible idea — that all your life is a preparation for some tiny part in someone else’s story, after which — what, you retire to the coast and take up gardening? Surely human life is more meaningful than that!

All the way through the film I was hoping its characters would wake up to how simplistic (and imprisoning, even dehumanising) their idea of “purpose” was. Instead, whenever anything went wrong they’d reshuffle their roles like a pack of cards, then try the same approach till it worked. In other words, they learned nothing.

I’ll probably still go and see Shyamalan’s next film. He’s at least creatively individual enough to be interesting, even if he doesn’t always succeed. It at least feels as though he’s trying, which is something Hollywood rarely seems to do.

UnLondon is an abcity, an alternate London where all the forgotten things from our world go. When schoolgirl Zanna begins to attract an unwanted level of reverent attention from wild animals, bus drivers and, even, clouds in the sky, she and her friend Deeba find their way to UnLondon, where they discover the city is awaiting the coming of the Shwazzy, the chosen one who will defeat the malevolent, sentient Smog, as foretold by the (speaking) Book of the Propheseers. But Deeba (who is, it turns out, the real hero of Un Lun Dun) soon learns that not all things go according to prophecy.

This is China Miéville’s first book for Young Adults, but it certainly doesn’t feel like an author jumping on the current YA bandwagon (as he says in a recent Guardian interview, “I’ve been accruing image capital for a younger book for a long time and then I coagulated it”). What made it so readable for me was the constant level and quality of invention. Almost every one of its 520 pages brings at least one fantastic image or witty idea, sparking off little scintillations of the sort of pleasure only fantasy can give: unbrellas and other animate pieces of rubbish dragging themselves through back alleys, fireproof red squirrels climbing the November Tree which blooms like a firework explosion every 5th of that month, killer giraffes, a forest in a house, the frightening arachnids of Webminster Abbey… Best of all, these aren’t just throwaway ideas providing a glamour of invention, but are often meaningfully (and ingeniously) integrated into the plot.

The story itself doesn’t disappoint. Readers already familiar with fantasy literature will appreciate Miéville’s revisionary riffing on the cliché of the Chosen One, the prophesied hero whose destiny it is to defeat the Dark Enemy, which often leaves you wondering if there was any actual danger at all. (This isn’t to dismiss the idea of destiny in fantasy altogether — every child is, after all, biologically destined to grow into an adult, and so, at that point in their lives, can often feel in the grip of destiny-like forces beyond their control. Once you’re an adult, free will generally returns and you can do your best to forget, for a good few years, all about that other destined event — you know, the one that goes hand-in-hand with taxes.)

The other great cliché of fantasy doorstop series (Un Lun Dun is a standalone book which, unlike so many other fantasies, has the grace to finish, within the same covers, the story it begins), the quest to find x-number of meaningless “key” items so as to gain a magical weapon (best relegated to fantasy games, where at least it’s fun), is also neatly handled by Miéville’s stuck-for-time heroine. The UnGun she finally gains has got to be one of the best fantasy weapons out there, both in terms of power, and the fun it contributes to the plot. (How do you defeat a monster made of animate fruit?)

Written in a clear, up-to-date (though not slangy) language that will appeal to kids (while still offering the occasional stylistic diamond, my favourite being: “It laughed again, with a noise like a sack of dead animals being dragged across coal and broken glass”) and illustrated by the author himself, Un Lun Dun is a hugely enjoyable book, certainly for not-so-Y, not-so-A’s like myself.

I’m thrilled to say I’ve got a story published in the latest issue of the British Fantasy Society‘s award-winning magazine, Dark Horizons, recently under the new editorship of Peter Coleborn and Jan Edwards. They’ve done a great job, and I’m really chuffed to be part of the line-up. I’m horrified, though, to realise that the last story I had published was in 1996! Largely, I’m ashamed to say, through lack of trying & general self-discouragement, but hopefully this will get me to put a bit more effort in that direction in future. I tend to fall into thinking, of the things I write, “Well I like it, but I can’t see how anyone else would.” — which is a surefire way of getting nowhere.

This story, “The Bookshop”, was basically inspired by a recurrent type of dream, in which I’d find myself in a wonderful bookshop full of all sorts of rare and interesting books, most of which don’t, in reality, exist. These dream bookshops would often be labyrinthine and ever-expanding, and I’d somehow never actually manage to make a purchase. One such dream was set in the upper levels of a real (but dream-modified) bookshop called, oddly enough, The Bookshop, which is on East Grinstead High Street. The Bookshop — the real one — has a wonderful secondhand section up some creaking old steps. It’s getting more and more difficult to find secondhand bookshops, it seems, so I count myself lucky to live in a town that has one. As wonderful as it is to find every book ever published via Abebooks or Amazon (I love them both), they can’t replace the surprise of finding the book you didn’t know you wanted, and would never have known you wanted, had you not come across it slotted unobtrusively on a shelf. When I think of the writers I’d never have read if it hadn’t been for old-style (non-internet) browsing: Ramsey Campbell, Theodore Sturgeon, Algernon Blackwood, Colin Wilson, E R Eddison, William Gibson, A E van Vogt (whose name I still don’t know how to pronounce), to mention a bare few — it’s not worth contemplating!