Book Review: Rhetorics of Fantasy

Mendlesohn, Farah

In the book I've recently completed, Rhetorics of Fantasy, I suggested that there is a form of the fantastic which depends on our acceptance of liminality, of a point of equipoise or irony in which the fantastic both does and doesn't exist simultaneously, and which depends on that simultaneity to exist, a Schroedinger's cat of fantasy if you will; attempt to come down on one side or the other, and the text collapses. This notion of the liminal fantastic as moment and as comprised of tension and support between the fantastic and the mundane can work rather well as a metaphor for one way of understanding adolescence. It has drawn my attention to a small number of books that appear to be exploring this very thing, and in doing so twisting the way in which two elements of their books are written, specifically the writing of the children's "narrative game" of imagination, and the metaphorical uses of fantasy to explore the edges of childhood.

The "narrative game" is a practice familiar enough to most people that when in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Lucy returns with her tale, it is assumed that this is what she is playing. In children's literature the "narrative game" has high status as a facilitating device, sometimes leading into adventure as with Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons (1 930) or Katherine Patterson's Bridge to Terabithia (1977), sometimes into fantasy as in many of Edward Eager 's books. What all of these stories have in common is that they envisage a model of play that understands the primary and overwhelming purpose of play as the emulation or negotiation of future adult roles and adult relationships to the world - whether this is conformist as with Ransome's children and their boating holiday or subversive and challenging, as with the two adolescents in Bridge to Terabithia. These books are essentially about children playing in ways that are about negotiating the desired pattern of adulthood. These narrative games are very clear about what is, and what isn't reality, but this means that the games are exposed as "story-telling" and hence ground the characters within the emulatory position of the child. The game is doubly false, both fantasy and the fantastic translation of adulthood. The presence of fantasy in the narrative game confirms the non- adult status of the protagonist (and note that Peter and Susan are cast out of Narnia because fantasy and adulthood are not deemed compatible even by C. S. Lewis). At the other end of the spectrum, in full secondary world fantasies where magic is part of the atmosphere (in, for example, A Wizard of Earthsea or Justine Larbalastier 's Magic or Madness) the acquisition of magic and the negotiation of magic lever children firmly across the portal into adolescence and on to adulthood.

What I am interested in is those books which use the narrative game structure but resist its association with childish things best left behind, and which also accept magic but refuse to see the magic in itself as indicative of adulthood. They are books which see magic, narrative and adolescence as belonging to an in-between space with structures of its own, liminal and deeply unnerving places which are not preparations for anything but themselves, and exist precisely in the space created by the pressure of both childhood left behind, and oncoming adulthood. They are moments rather than paths - or if they are paths they are into adolescence itself as a space.

This is a relatively short article, and I cannot cover many books, so I want to focus on three: Diana Wynne Jones's Time of the Ghost (1981), Rhiannon Lassiter's Bad Blood (2007), and Steve Cockayne's The Good People (2006). Each use the liminal quality of narrative games to manipulate the reader position with regard to both the fantastic and the nature of adolescence: rather than chart a clear path from childhood to adulthood they focus on the hazy complexity of adolescence and then re-figure this in ways which inform the structures of fantasy they then deploy. In these texts, we are supposed to consider the nature of reality, but there is an interaction between the uncertainties of adolescence and the elisions of reality and fantasy that create a structure "weird and wavy."1

I'm going to cluster these texts as fantasies of elision in which the common narrative goal is to construct a perspective in boundaries of the real and of the fantastic become porous. This is not something that can be equated with either Todorov 's ideas about hesitation or my own arguments about liminal fantasy because in only one case is the issue about doubt in the fantastic, in Steve Cockayne's The Good People, and it does not fit either the model that Todorov provides, which relies on an anxiety about the real and a constant absence of evidence, or my own arguments for the liminal in which the construction depends on the reader's knowledge of fantasy structures and the text itself exists in a space supported by that knowledge. In The Good People, the construction of the fantastic is absolutely clear to the main protagonist, and that we should not believe him is absolutely clear to his family; the book is an argument, not a balancing act. Elsewhere, in Rhiannon Lassiter 's Bad Blood, the fantastic is absolutely real but the issue is how it affects the world. In Diana Wynne Jones's Time of the Ghost, the participants think it is not real when it actually is and the book hews very closely to the rhetoric of intrusion fantasy which I have outlined elsewhere.

Time of the Ghost

Of the three books I want to examine, Diana Wynne Jones's Time of the Ghost is the least obvious choice because it ends with four girls in adulthood and can be seen, therefore, as a rites-of-passage tale. The reason I'm going to suggest seeing it instead as an argument for the moment of adolescence, is that its conclusion does not present the four women taking on the responsibilities of adulthood, but rather rejecting the pathways laid out for them by their well-meaning mother, and however late that this moment of rejection occurs, it can be considered the essential adolescent moment. So the story might be read - and I offer such a reading here - as an argument for that adolescent moment, and for its importance and its power.

Time of the Ghost is a story of four sisters, the children of adults whom to the outside world would seem exemplary: head teachers of a boarding school, deeply caring of other people's children, but inclined to think that their own children are "lucky" in comparison. In consequence the parents abandon their own children in a kind of bohemian neglect. The parents exist in a "narrated" world which is as much fantastical as is the world their daughters create: Phyllis (the mother) demonstrates her affection for her daughters by planning their futures. Insisting that Imogen will become a pianist and Charlotte a teacher is part of the entire narrative that Phyllis tells herself about how well she knows her children and how central they are to her life. For Phyllis, despite her Bohemianism, childhood is a rehearsal for adulthood. Part of the process of this novel is as much about the girls unhooking themselves from Phyllis 's controlling narrative as it is about defeating the goddess they have either evoked or (perhaps) created, the Monigan, and hence a process of challenging one model of childhood play.

The sisters respond to parental neglect with a pattern of outrageous behaviour intended to attract attention (it mostly fails). Like many lonely children and also children in large families, the girls generate a conspiratorial game with two of the boys in the school. With very little power or autonomy (despite their neglect) the sisters set up an altar and turn an old rag doll into a god-figure. They and their friends bring it gifts, create a book of worship and inadvertently either create a god, or channel an old god into the doll. But the Monigan is powered by misery, misunderstanding and the desire to escape so that the more the sisters try to pull away from her later in life, the more embedded she is in their individual narratives. Furthermore, in her plans for their future, the Monigan becomes a greater control figure than their mother, in one of Jones's classic doublings of parent/supernatural figure (the best known is Iris/Laurel, mother/Queen of the Faeries in Fire and Hemlock).

The status of the game is held in tension throughout the book: the girls both know it is a game, and believe fiercely that it is not. At some moments they play, and at other moments they take it deadly seriously, a fair reflection I feel of the structure of adolescent concern. The Monigan exploits this ambivalence, using it to trick them into promises and sacrifices that they take lightly. The "plot" of the novel revolves around one such promise - a life seven years hence - which has landed Sally, one of the older sisters, in hospital after an appalling car crash. Sally (the ghost) finds herself both seven years in the future stranded in a hospital bed and also a ghost in the past, watching everything unfold but unclear as to which of the children she is. One of the tricks that Jones pulls however is to begin in the past with a very clear sense of it as "the present." The game itself is liminal, full of moments at which the girls acknowledge the illusion, punctuated with other moments of intensity of belief. It is one of these moments of intensity that the ghost will eventually manipulate in order to save herself.

One of the ways that the Monigan will be tricked is through an intensity of belief in time, all times are "now" but the past cannot be changed, only the present. The game is played back and forth in time, but the Monigan seems to be experiencing time in a more linear fashion so that the whole is one of those tectonic folds beloved by flood geologists. The game is also played with the game itself as the girls begin to unpick it and become players rather than pieces, so that the doubling of the game is interwoven with a doubling of time.

Childhood and adolescence in Time of the Ghost is neither a specific moment nor a passing phase. I've talked elsewhere about Jones's narrative use of time travel physics and this is one of the texts in which a specific conceptualisation of time travel - that all times are everywhere around us - is used to contextualise an understanding that we are all the ages we have ever been or will be. This in turn means that one does not have to stop believing in the game to grow up, rather that one's belief in how the game works, and crucially perhaps, who is in control of the game, is part of an on-going negotiation with adulthood.

What Jones seems to be arguing both through the manipulations of the Monigan and the attempted "friendly" coercion of the girls' mother is that it is a mistake to think of adolescence as a route, to think of any part of life as a stage. By doing so, we render ourselves vulnerable to a belief that somehow the now is never real - it is this that both the Monigan and Phyllis seem to believe with their constant emphasis on the future at the expense of the present. Instead Jones suggests, childhood, adolescence, adulthood stay forever with us, they are the potential we always are, the people we left behind. Although the book does end with an apparent "leaving behind" when Imogen rejects the career her mother foisted upon her this is better read as a recovery of her true self and adolescence, a ripping away of an imposed identity than as a change in character. Growing up seems less a departure than - as we see personified in Charlotte whose rather blurry looks have resolved into very definite beauty - a resolution into focus.

Bad Blood

Although the game in Bad Blood creates a traumatic rupture with childhood, there is an unlikely synthesis with the idea of "the game" as an on- going part of one's adulthood. Bad Blood begins with the tale of a blended family: two adults, each with their own two children: Roland and Catriona; Katherine and John. All second families have adjustment issues but the four children get off to an explosive start when Catriona and Katherine discover that both of them are using the nickname Cat. Catriona - the more dominant and dramatic as well as the elder of the two - appropriates the name. Poor Katherine can't even persuade her own father to continue using it.

Lurking in the background of the story is the fate of Katherine and John's mother Anne. A country girl, happy and intelligent, she fell victim to Alzheimer 's in her early thirties: Katherine is recovering both from the trauma of those years and the pressure and pleasures of being the woman of the house. Katherine is not wholly pleased by the acquisition of a stepmother and her own relegation to child-to-be-looked-after. Of the children only Roland and John take any pleasure in the new arrangements: Roland rather likes being a big brother and uses his new feelings to try to efface "RoIy," the unassertive person he has been. In turn, John unequivocally likes and admires his new older brother.

Although the parents, Peter and Harriet, are quite unlike Jones's parents being concerned and attentive, they do resemble them in their desire to impose a comforting narrative upon reality. Peter just wants peace and quiet and copes mostly by ignoring the dramatics and comforting Katherine every time Catriona rides roughshod over her - not once does he stand up for his daughter. Harriet on the other hand actively tries to improve matters, but does so by dismissing the issue of names as trivial, and insisting that there is wrong on both sides. Harriet's insistence on being fair, combined with a belief that if they all tried harder things would work out, become a "story" in which every actor is expected to play his part. This matters because the game the four protagonists get involved with has pre- destined parts for each of them, and just as Harriet misunderstands the roles (and hence the personalities) of the players in her family drama, so each of the adolescents (and it is significant that John is not yet an adolescent) misunderstand their role and to an extent, even their own personalities.

All four of the children are taken to Katherine and John's mother's old home, a large manor house isolated on the edge of a village: Harriet's idea is that this will be a family bonding exercise, but Catriona's discovery of "Delilah and her drones" triggers an old story and a haunting. Delilah is a doll with long hair that seems to be both real and from a number of different dolls, the scalped and naked "drones" of the label.

Katherine and Catriona are both seduced (in the emotional sense) by Fox, an enigmatic character who appears at the edge of the wood. Fox, it emerges, is a character in a set of stories created by three girls who once all lived in the village: Anne, Katherine 's mother and her two friends, Emily and Charlotte who are now the parents of the girl Alice with whom Roland becomes friends (and hopes to become more).

Not unlike the game in Time of the Ghost, the game that Katherine and Catriona in particular are drawn in to turns out to be a game of sacrifices and pagan goddesses. Anne, Emily and Charlotte (who themselves drew on the power of their own names and their Bronte namesakes) have created a fantastical world, which they have powered through sympathetic magic: names from books are ritualistically scored out, obliterating them from the book and also - as the three players later discovered - from their minds. Anne's illness may have been caused by the game. The haunting focuses on Catriona (who found the doll Delilah) but it is Catriona's reaction that draws in Katherine, Roland and John who have meanwhile discovered what at first appear to be more benign versions of the game. When a final row sends both Cats into the night, the game takes advantage of their blind distress and traps them into sacrificing each others' names. Fox turns out not to be a friend, but a priest of the game.

Catriona and Katherine will eventually be rescued but not until Roland too has become embroiled in the game, and with him Alice, the daughter of Emily and Charlotte. It is Alice who turns out to be the focus of the game, the four "protagonists" only bit players. Alice is the daughter of Fox (it is unclear if his encounter with Emily was consensual or rape) and it is Alice who Fox wishes to protect. The two Cats are his sacrifice, and Fox tricks Katherine and Catriona into erasing parts of each other's names so that both are conjured into physical cats. As cats, they discover things about their step-parents they didn't know: Harriet turns out to be very motherly, Peter very tender. Significantly, while Roland is able to rescue himself, it is John who rescues the two Cats.

Although Alice and Roland both feel John to be unusually wise and oddly adult, John is the only true child in the book; he has yet to experience the confusions of adolescence. Unusually, this seems to allow him to hold apart from the game in away in which none of the other four can. This game is very tightly tied precisely to the turmoil of puberty and specifically the conviction of adolescence that one is the centre of the universe. To move out of the game, these teenagers must move beyond that point, but also return to the lessons of childhood. I think it is no coincidence therefore that of all the teenagers, Roland is the one to more or less keep his name because he is the one who has most accepted his adulthood, but also is least anxious to leave behind childhood: Roland seeks a melding of all the times he has ever been, where Catriona in particular is seeking a route to adulthood through absolute rupture with the child she once was.

Throughout Bad Blood the fantastic remains at arm's length. The game as it is played was invented by a very different set of people than the ones whose tale it is: the game is a wild- wood, fey fantasy but our protagonists are and remain trespassers. It is not their game and until John "inherits" its keys they are essentially trapped within someone else's rules. With the exception of John - who is not yet adolescent - none of the protagonists ever really comes close to the fantastic as anything other than victims. Alice does come to realise that she is tied tighter to the story than she might wish, but she too remains essentially separate. None of them become magic users, they are pieces in the game. This is highly unusual in a children 's/YA fantasy where the acquisition of power and agency frequently run as a parallel purpose in the fantastic and mundane elements of the novel. In this game there seems to be no power to either acquire or relinquish, and while those who pass through have clearly become more adult, there is no "token of adulthood" for them to collect or display. Yet one of the strangest aspects of this book is the disorientation felt when we begin to read the first conversations of "Erin" and "Iona," the two Cats given their new names by John, names carved out from the body of their old selves. It is truly as if we are reading new people. These are not Katherine and Catriona. Their voices have changed, and they seem to be several years older.

At the end of the game and the book all four of the protagonists will have had to change their names in order to escape the game, which is structured to empower words as referents to the world. Only by changing their names can the protagonists unhook themselves from the referent-sacrifice they made when they inscribed their names on the altar of the game, and in the girls' case, changed their very nature by partial erasure of their names. The name change is presented as deeply traumatic, with the implication that it is traumatic because it represents a much more severe break with childhood than is somehow right and proper. But Roland's change is a reversion; it is precisely the time dependent, childish name of RoIy he discards, in favour of a name that has been his since birth and will be his unto the grave. Roland's route to adulthood is essentially internal.

The inescapable need to change names in order to escape the referent based enchantments cements a belief in the game that has mostly remained ambiguous until quite late (when the girls are turned into cats): adolescence becomes entwined with an acceptance of the fantastic, rather than an abandonment of such, and with a relinquishment of identity rather than the claiming of it per se. This is a story about living as adolescents. Although there is a passing through, it is not into adulthood but further into adolescence.

The Good People

The book that got me thinking about all of this, and how the fantastic can represent adolescence, is Steve Cockayne's The Good People. The Good People begins as an Arthur Ransome-ish story about two boys living in a country house, playing games in the woods on the edge of their garden. Robert, the sensible, practical one, is the elder. Kenneth is dreamier and there is some talk of his delicacy and his tendency to nervousness. By the start of the book he is already evading school and will eventually drop out. Robert and Kenneth's father owns one of the local factories, and their mother was an actress who may have a history of mental instability. She has "good days" and "bad days," and much of their care falls to their maternal grandmother.

Each day the two boys set off into the forest (and who calls the place a forest, and who calls it a wood is highly indicative of their relationship to the fantastic) and into Arboria, a world of Arborians and Barbarians perpetually at war over the bridge and the lake. In Arboria Robert is the High Lord and Kenneth the Keeper of the Lore. From the House in the Air (a treehouse suspended by ropes) they keep watch on the doings of Arboria and plan campaigns.

Our very first impression of Arbor ia is of a game: "It was my brother Robert who first showed me how to get into Arboria. All you had to do was to step through the garden gate" (8-9). Our second impression, in the very next line, is something else:

"Good morning, Master Kenneth! Lovely morning, don't you think?" It was the thin, husky voice of Tommy PeIIing. My first job when I arrived in Arboria was always to say hello to Tommy. Tommy was in charge of the log store, and the log-store stood just on the other side of the garden gate, on the left-hand side against the wall. . . . The inside of the log store was Tommy's private domain, and neither Robert nor I would have dreamed of venturing inside without an invitation. (9)

Furthermore, Tommy is described in intense detail:

Tommy himself was a small, slight creature with thin, wispy hair and very large ears. His clothes were ragged and worn, and his toes peeped out through gaping cracks in his large, flat feet. It would have been very hard to say how old he was. He was one of those people who always seem to have been the same age. (9)

It is a shock when later we discover that Robert can't see Tommy. Is Tommy a fantasy? But Robert seems to value what Tommy says. And there is never any suggestion that the bows and arrows they carry are mere fancy. Is this a game or full other- world fantasy? The water is muddied further when both Robert and Kenneth see Barbarians lurking by the other side of the lake.

Up until that day, Robert had always been the leader in our Arborian adventures. Robert had been the one who worked out the plans, Robert had been the one who made the decisions. I, on the other hand, had been the one blessed with the power of imagination. I had been the one who heard voices, I had had been the one who saw things, I had been the one who knew what sort of clothes the Arborians and the Barbarians wore, what sort of weapons they earned. (26)

Is this a boy writing about what he makes up - "the power of imagination"? Cockayne is very careful to leave it ambiguous whenever Kenneth instructs Robert (and later the evacuee girl Janny) on the lore and geography of Arboria as to whether he is making it up, or drawing from his memory. Kenneth is brought up mostly by his grandmother and

I would listen entranced to everything she had to tell me. I didn't learn anything about exothermic reactions or inegular verbs. . . but I heard a lot of stories about Lower Helsing and Upper Helsing, about the Saxons who used to farm there, and about the Romans who built the Tollcester Road. ... (51)

He also reads a great deal of fantasy including, by implication, Carroll, MacDonald, Nesbit and B arrie. But Kenneth understands these books as factual. "It seemed that other children, too, had their own secret, magical places" (53), and he records his narrative of Arboria in terms that imbue the ordinary with a mystique.

Within the cold walls of Hedley House, Janny remained a sickly creature. . . . Passing through the garden gate, though, into the brighter, sharper air of Arboria. Janny seemed at once to be transformed into a different being. ... In the forest of Arboria, Janny blossomed. (62-63)

As the book progresses, we realise that if there is a truly fantastical world, different members of the family are immersed in it - in a quite literal fashion to different degrees. For Robert Arboria is always on the edge of a game, only occasionally does he truly see Arboria. Kenneth and Kenneth's Grandmother (as we shall see) are the two most fully immersed in Arboria, but it is Janny who thickens the game in the reader's mind. One night Janny wakes Kenneth and asks him to go down to the forest: there, they are witness to Lord Owen and Lady Margaret of the Good People, and the wild dance of the Good People. Janny joins in, but Kenneth cannot bring himself to. But the crucial moment in this scene is the moment at which Tommy greets them, and Janny realises that she can see him, and that he is real. It is also the moment at which it is easiest to lose sight of the fact that this is Kenneth's narration. Later, when Kenneth is sucked into the world of the Good People and lies in a coma in his house, he will record that people are baffled by the clay and dust on his feet. Once more this will seem like corroborative evidence, but once more we need to keep in mind that we have neither supporting nor contrary voice.

The visit to the Good People is repeated rather later in the book, but this time Kenneth is ready to dance, and to do more with Janny, for Janny, moving into adolescence, is a disruptive force in the fantasy/game world of Arboria. And here is where it becomes complicated because Janny 's relationship with Arboria is not severed by adolescence but rather mutates as she becomes involved with Davy Hearn - a gardener's assistant/Pan Figure who may be of Arboria, or may not, and through this relationship is reconfigured within the world of Arboria.

But we need to take a step back: the game seems to be very old, it has belonged to the children of Hedley House for generations, and while we need to be cautious when we assume Kenneth to be a reliable narrator, he claims to have been gifted by his grandmother with a chronicle of Arboria, a scroll going back so far that its early sections are written on hide, and its earliest in runes. Grandmother's complicity in the "game" is vital to Kenneth's and our understanding. Cockayne has constructed this elided fantasy by keeping the focus resolutely on Kenneth and Kenneth is curiously uncurious. Kenneth lives in a world of the literal, and this coincides with his grandmother's aphoristic literalism to create a world imbued with meaning. Grandmother draws Janny into this: several conversations she has with Janny are reported to Kenneth obliquely, heightening the mystery of Arboria rather than using the authority of adulthood to dispel it.

The position of the other children to Arboria shifts: when Kenneth's older brother goes to work in his uncle's factory, Robert resolves Arboria into a fantasy land. When Janny and Nadia pass into puberty, Arboria becomes very real, but once through to the other side of puberty, it seems as if they too have left Arboria behind, although in her relationship with Davy Hearn, who may be just a gardener's boy or may be Pan, it is also possible to see Janny as completely absorbed by the Land.

Cockayne is focused resolutely on Kenneth, and Kenneth's narrative filters the events through his increasing belief in the reality of Arboria. This is difficult to describe: there is no one moment when Kenneth shifts from an awareness that his imagination is doing the work to actual belief in the existence of the fantasy land. Instead, it is that Kenneth moves deeper into the mystery in much the way that committed role players do so that to an outsider the role player who may or may not believe in the reality of the game, speaks of it in ways which convince the observer that they do. There are several key moments in the novel which focus on this disturbing position. All of them involve Janny and Kenneth and all of them also involve the heightened tension of adolescence, filtered through Kenneth's lack of understanding. Deprived of both parents and with his older brother away from home, Kenneth is left to deal with his emerging physical response to Janny on his own. Without practical guidance, Kenneth weaves his visceral responses into the myths of Arboria: the almost consummation with Janny in the height of a mystical frenzy figures becomes an (interrupted) epiphanic moment, interrupted by older brother Robert himself safely past Arboria and snug in grey war-time adulthood. Janny is thrust outward, away from Kenneth and on to an adult relationship with Davy Hearn (the gardener's boy and something of a liminal figure in the fantasy). Kenneth is thrust back to the cusp of adolescence. Childhood is no longer an option - as his grandmother fades Kenneth becomes more caregiver than cared for. No one offers him a pathway through the hedge which surrounds Arboria, so he stays, continuing to "play the game" for the rest of his life as the house crumbles and Robert makes his life elsewhere.

At the last, the liminal moment is held for a lifetime, adolescence becomes not a road passed along, but a hilltop from which the rest of the world is scanned, and the fantastic far from thinning, becomes increasingly dense.

Arboria exists in a permeable parallel to this Kenneth's primary world. This clear positioning of Kenneth serves as a tool to reconsider both Bad Blood and Time of the Ghost because both Jones and Lassiter construct similar situations in which the fantastic and the real lie along side one another but protagonists never quite move fully into the fantastic and the fantastic never quite moves fully into the real. As I've already suggested, this leaves the fantastic slightly "out of grasp" but it also says something about childhood, adolescence and adulthood.

Conclusion fantastic in each of these three books takes an odd position off to one side of the stage: in none of the books is the fantasy wholly metaphorical or symbolic, but in each case the engagement with the fantastic is part of a larger element, which emphases the porous nature of both the real and the fantastic. In The Good People, only those who completely abandon the fantastic will make it into full adulthood, yet remaining in childhood and the fantastic is not an option. Kenneth gets stuck in the in-between place. So too do the sisters in Time of the Ghost, but it is the embrace of a genuine adolescence that frees them. The end of the book, in which the girls' mother arrives at the hospital, seems like a throwaway, but it is actually a moment of resolution in which the sisters shift their understanding of where and what the real world is. In Time of the Ghost, the fantasy game remains real because it must be rejected to make the next step. Finally, Bad Blood offers in place of a sense of loss, or departure from childhood or adolescence, a process of re-evaluation in which the "childish things" of parental comfort and family structures remain an essential element of the world.

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