The Misuses of Fantasy

Henry at Crooked Timber points us to "The Uses of Fantasy," a review by Jennifer Howard of Susanna Clarke's novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell that appears in the December 2004/January 2005 issue of the Boston Review:

But aren’t the showier sorts of magic – magic that battles for the soul of the world – exactly what we need, now more than ever? “There are people in this world,” says one of the fairy gentleman’s human favorites, “whose lives are nothing but a burden to them. A black veil stands between them and the world. They are entirely alone. They are like shadows in the night, shut off from joy and love and all gentle human emotions, unable even to give comfort to each other. Their days are full of nothing but darkness, misery and solitude.”

This sounds very much like a description not of enchantment but of clinical depression. Throughout Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, wondrous if familiar conceits fight to break through the tangles of literary reference Clarke has planted, yet she cannot, or will not, free her story from its many progenitors. Clarke’s novel doesn’t parody the genre; it displays in a lifeless cabinet of wonders all its elements – every element, that is, but the epic sense of Good and Evil, of things larger than ourselves, that makes the best fantasy so powerful and so necessary.

If a writer of epic fantasy isn’t willing to trust her imagination and her story – is afraid to let it matter – can a salve for the troubles that afflict us still be found in books? There was a time when one could turn to fantasy, if not for escape, then for a working-out, a cathartic reimagining, of the world’s crises. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell takes epic fantasy down a road that leads away from large moral conflict and instead doubles back on itself and the reader. There is no help and no escape for any of us in a story that can’t escape its own bookishness.

Howard seems to believe that it is the the job of fantastic fiction to provide escape from the sorrows of the everyday world. I wonder whether her reaction to, say, Isak Dinesen would be to disparage her because her protagonists are not cut from the cloth of Allan Quatermain or Lord Greystoke, on the grounds that these are the sort heroes about whom readers of African adventures wish to read.