Once More With Footnotes

the other side of a door or the back of a mirror or even to be in here with us, numinous, unseen until you learn the gift. And this has been accompanied by an urge towards a sort of domesticity, an attempt to make gardens in the goblin-haunted wilderness, to make fantasy do something ... to, in fact, bring it down to Earth.
     
                  In the Poetics, Aristotle said that poetical metaphor and language involve the careful admixture of the ordinary and the strange. G. K. Chesterton said that far more grotesque and wonderful than any wild fantastical thing was anything that was everyday and unregarded, if seen unexpectedly from a new direction. That is our tradition, and it h as largely been kept alive by people writing for children.
     
                  Tolkien's great achievement was to reclaim fantasy as a genre that could be published for and read by adults. Traditionally, we had left the journey to the kids, who rather enjoyed it and found i t easy. Adults got involved only to the extent that some teachers carefully picked up any "escapist rubbish" the child was currently reading and dropped it in the bin. There are still, even now, some of those around — I believe a special circle of Hell is r e served for them. Of course fantasy is escapist. Most stories are. So what? Teachers are not meant to be jailers.
     
                  Escapism isn't good or bad of itself. What is important is what you are escaping from and where you are escaping to. I write from experience, since in my case I escaped to the idea that books could be really enjoyable, an aspect of reading that teachers had not hitherto suggested. The fantasy books led me on to mythology, the mythology led painlessly to ancient history ... and I quietly got an education, courtesy of the public library.
     
                  For me, E. Nesbit's young heroes flew magic carpets, travelled in time and talked to magical creatures, but they were still Edwardian children. C. S. Lewis' children certainly lived Here but went through a magic al door to get There. Magic doors are a huge part of the tradition. An enduring image, that symbolises teal fantasy far more than any amount of dragons and witches, is an early scene in Terry Gilliam's movie Time Bandits, where a mounted knight in full arm our gallops out of the wardrobe of the ordinary room of an ordinary boy.
     
                  John Masefield's Kay Harker, in The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights, did not even need a door just the vision to see the magical world intersecting with this one and the chara cters that lived with one foot in each. Writers like Diana Wynne Jones and Alan Garner let their characters wander in and out of a similar magical world — this world, seen from Chesterton's different view point.
     
                  The best fantasy writers don't write fantasy in the fluffy, hocus-pocus sense, they change the rules by which the world works and then write very carefully and logically by those rules. And it's no longer enough that there should be wizards and goblins and magic. We know about that stuff. Now we wa n t to know how the wizards are dealing with the challenge of genetically-modified dragons, and what the dwarfs are doing to stamp out racial harassment of gnomes. We're back to Chesterton again. Maybe a good way of understanding this world is to view it fr o m another one.
     
                  Joanne Rowling's Harry Potter is firmly in this tradition. In truth, the stories do not contain a lot of elements new to anyone keeping up with modern fantasy writing for children. Young wizards and witches have been to school before. But that really does not matter. Genres work like that; if they didn't, there would only ever be one book with a Time Machine in it. Most crime novels are full of policemen, crimes, and criminals, and most cakes contain pretty much the same sort of ingredient s . It's the cookery that counts. Cook it right, with imagination and flair and a good pinch of luck, and you have that rare and valuable thing — a genre book that's risen above the genre. And Harry Potter is beautifully cooked.
     

There's a lot more of this de ep on a hard drive somewhere. It may yet become a novel, but it started as a short story in Camelot, edited by Jane Yolen, in 1995. I'd wanted to write it for nearly ten years. I really ought to dig out those old discs again