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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com Feature [published October 2002] The Modern Fantasy Diet Seán Harnett argues that fantasy fiction has become a bloated, pretentious caricature of its own possibilities It’s like looking at Marlon Brando as he is today and remembering what he used to be: he used to be slim, man. He used to be dangerous. He used to mean something. Heroic fantasy used to be slim, once. Goddamn but it used to be lean and muscular, like the heroes and swordsmen it celebrated. It used to be dangerous. It used to tell us stories about ourselves that never appeared in the pages of respectable literary journals (with their stories of divorcees and martinis and quiet, stately dysfunction) but were nevertheless more truly a reflection of the times in which we lived, and the yearnings that impelled us. No longer: heroic fantasy has grown fat. Bloated. We’re not talking a few extra pound around the waist, here: we’re talking serious glandular problems, shopping at special stores for the larger individual. We’re talking about Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin and David Eddings, with their three or five or ten book series, each volume in the series containing seven or eight or 900 pages of plodding prose, dull exposition, unresolved plot threads and attempts to conjure up a sense of wonder so badly executed as to signal the final, BUY fantasy books online from and lingering demise of the genre. If we can’t get your daily requirement of wonder from fantasy then we might as well go back to reading those tales of quiet despair (or is it quiet tales of despair? Despairing tales of quietness?) for our fictional sustenance. It’s customary, of course, to blame J.R.R. Tolkien for this state of affairs. The Lord Of The Rings. What more does one need to say? The page count, they say; the cosily familiar setting, the bad prose, the dreary exposition: the family resemblance between Tolkien’s work and the substandard fiction that pads out the fantasy/ science fiction section in your local bookstore is clear. So, yes, an obvious accusation, but a wrong-headed one. Tolkien is no more to blame for modern fantasy writing than Jane Austen is to blame for Mills and Boons novels. Consider the facts: Tolkien wrote just two books in his lifetime that could be classified as ‘fantasy’ a la the modern definition, and one of those, The Silmarillion, was released posthumously (The Hobbit should be classified, properly, as a children’s book). More importantly, Tolkien was not trying to write a novel 342 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com in the pulp tradition of fantasy: he was trying to write literature. However you might feel about the degree of his success, it’s hard to deny that there’s something rather appealing about his stubborn attempt to re-create something old when all around him were attempting to be ‘modern’. He did not really belong in the 20th century, did dear old Ronald Reuel. He was a man more comfortable with the past, and the forms of the past; he wrote his fiction at least partly as an exercise in creating a saga of an imaginary past that might live in the present century. And that’s the crucial difference: Tolkien’s models were the Kalevala and the Icelandic sagas. Although modern fantasy may tip the hat to ancient myths or medieval sagas, borrowing images here and situations there, its real antecedents lie in the pulp fictions of Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, Clarke Aston Smith and Robert Howard: the masters. Whatever you may say about their prose (and it was often dull and frequently hilariously bad), these writers nevertheless told stories with leanness and bravado and imagination, qualities sadly lacking in most of today’s writers of fantasy. How did we get from there to here? How did we get from writers who could pack a punch in the space of ten pages, to writers who can’t seem to tell a story in ten books, let alone one? That’s a whole other story but, in the Reader’s Digest version, one writer stands out as having acted as the bridge between those pulp masters BUY fantasy books online from and and the current spate of fantasy writers. That writer is Michael Moorcock. There’s no denying that Moorcock has written some excellent heroic fantasy. The first few books in the Elric series, The First Chronicles Of Corum and Gloriana (especially Gloriana) are all magnificent novels. Yet side-by-side with those fine works one must set the substandard epics he has been churning out in parallel since the 1960s, in which character names and settings change but essentially the same story is told, over and over again. Given that he did invent Elric and Hawkmoon, it is regrettable that Moorcock’s career in heroic fantasy is strewn with such rubbish as The Second Chronicles Of Corum. Like so much of his later work, these three books each begin with an identical account of the callto-arms and kitting out of the hero, continue with a quest narrative that is remarkably similar in each book, and end with an identical climax and denouement. The series is the same story told three times. Moorcock tries to justify his cynical treatment of the reader on the grounds that the novels record the ceaseless struggle of the Eternal Champion, when really they are the efforts of a hack writer trying to pay the mortgage. In retrospect, such contemptuous treatment of the reader of fantasy has done as much to set the standard of contemporary mass-market fantasy as anything Tolkien ever did. Moorcock has convinced a generation of 343 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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