Great Fantasy

I

‘ve been craving some George MacDonald lately. I’ve scoured all the best used bookstores in town over the last week and have come up essentially dry. I did find an old illustrated hardback copy of At the Back of the North Wind, but it was illustrated by Jessie Willcox Smith, and I guess anything illustrated by her is semi-precious, out of my price range at least. I found a slim copy of MacDonald’s The Fisherman’s Lady too, which I’ve never read and never heard of and so consequently wasn’t craving. Really, I want to read Phantastes or one of the Curdie books or the North Wind thing again. I’ve got this overweening desire for superb literary fantasy right now, and clearly MacDonald is it. The man is one of masters, if not the Master himself, when it comes to crafting exquisite, meaningful textual fantasy. It is worth being enraptured by, it is great fantasy.

Why am I on the fritz about all this? What’s so imperative about mingling with faeries at the moment? I’m not quite sure, to tell the truth. I saw Pan’s Labyrinth a couple of weeks ago and walked out feeling alive; feeling pummeled and questioned and saddened, but alive and hopeful. Del Toro’s film was a masterpiece of design and storytelling, full of rich imagery and powerful imagination. It was great fantasy.

You see clearer than ever that death is imminent but not eternal.

Great fantasy walks the tightrope through a world awash in tension between two outcomes: desperate crushing death and its antagonist, exhilarating I-just-made-it sort of victory. Those two outcomes aren’t even all that clearly delineated at times, often they are mingled into a sort of “through this crushing death I have victory,” or a sublime “death hath lost its sting” sort of outcome. Donne knew the ending too: “And death shall be no more, death thou shalt die.” The best storytellers understand that. L’Engle gets it, Del Toro too, and of course MacDonald. The stories always hurt, but the pain reminds you that your nerve endings still work. You feel the tears start to gather in the corners of your eyes, but your heart is beating more fervently. You see clearer than ever that death is imminent but not eternal. Maybe you realize that fantasy is closer to reality than reality itself; that the double-helix comes full circle, and you realize that MacDonald is the perfect one to guide a weary soul further up and further in, he’s just a younger Virgil. And that, I think, is why I’m craving him.