John C. Wright's Journal

It is rare to follow up a review with an analysis, but PHANTASTES by Geo MacDonald merits the attention.

First, it is such an extraordinary book, quite unlike its precursors or epigones. It mimics carefully the characters and tropes of fairy tales, knights and spites and evils trees, goblins and living statues and wise old crones and so on, but uses them to depict psychological or metaphysical musings on the nature of art, imagination, and spiritual reality. Unlike a fairy tale, this work is not structured around a plot, but around a motif. Like its narrator, whose name means wayward, PHANTATES is a wayward book. None of those following his footsteps, nor Lewis, nor Tolkien, follow this waywardness.

Second, albeit often forgotten, PHANTASTES is arguably the father of modern fantasy genre. Geo. MacDonald predates Wm. Morris’ WOOD BEYOND THE WORLD by thirty-six years. To put it in perspective, ALICE IN WONDERLAND was published seven years after, and MOBY-DICK seven years before.

Third, the book is so odd that I cannot say I have read any other like it, albeit I boast a library of fantasy both wide and deep.

It is a not book I dare praise or dispraise to another, for I cannot tell whom it will fascinate and attract or bore and repel.

And, unlike every other thing I have reviewed, this is not a matter of taste or judgment. It is deeper than that. Some souls need baptism in such a work as this, and others simply do not. Those whom the horns of elfland faintly calling from the far hills must follow them: others cannot hear.

For these three reasons, the work merits more than a review. It merits profound study, but, alas, this critic is only capable of shallow and cursory examination, therefore my beloved readers must bring their own deeper wits to bear on my remarks below, should any venture into the wayward elfin forest of Fairy Land MacDonald reflects in his book.

The book is not meant to be open to analysis.

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Part II of an ongoing series reviewing fiction novels with metaphysical themes. The first installment is here: Moby-Dick

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Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women is an otherworldly novel by Scottish minister George MacDonald, first published in London in 1858.

Forgotten by critics, despite that it is the first fantasy novel properly so called of the modern era, it is recalled and reread these days largely, if not exclusively, by fans of C.S. Lewis, for whom the little book was the prime inspiration and polestar of his own immortal imaginative work.

I can neither recommend nor fail to recommend this tale of wonders. Too much depends on you, dear reader, to say whether you will find this tale too twee, archaic, fustian and labyrinthine to bother, or the most beautiful and profound you ever read, or dreamed you’d read.

The work seems, at first, as pathless and dreamlike as the tales of Lewis Carrol, MacDonald’s friend, and as full of strangeness — albeit of far more profound weight that the light nonsense of Alice.

(As an historical note, it is MacDonald who first urged Carrol to publish “Alice’s Adventures Underground” — as it was called then. Alice’s cat Snowdrop in “Through the Looking Glass” is named for the MacDonald family cat.)

Critics have sought for a structure, some finding none, some seeing it as akin to a spiritual coming of age story, some seeing it as a mirror labyrinth, a psychological dreamscape, or a pagan allegory.

But to those who see in this work a vision, a reflection, a dream, a poignant as the memory of paradise in worlds of flight children retain from the days before their conception, this book will be, for you, a voyage into Fairy Land in truth, with all its wonder and strangeness: forest flowers, deathly Ash trees, long-toothed ogresses, knights and beggars, wise old wives and evil nymphs, palaces of unseen dancers, secret doors, deep loves, noble deeds, self-sacrifice, visions and shadows, death and waking. And, above all, magic mirrors.

For those for whom this tale is penned, it will be as the Perilous Wood itself would be: confusing, soothing, wonderful, terrible.

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Here are some books which strike me as having metaphysical themes. The older works are in the public domain and readily available online.

• MOBY-DICK by Herman Melville (1851)
  https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moby-Dick_(1851)_US_edition
• PHANTASTES  by George Macdonald (1858)
  https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Phantastes
• VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by David Lindsay (1920)
  https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Voyage_to_Arcturus
• MANY DIMENSIONS (1931) by Charles Williams
  https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20110336/html.php
  DESCENT INTO HELL (1937) by Charles Williams
  https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20130912/html.php
• THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH (1945) by C.S. Lewis
• “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” (1972) by Gene Wolfe
• DECLARE (2000) by Tim Powers

I will discuss this other works in later columns, time permitting. For now, I wish only to mention the first, and that briefly. Read the remainder of this entry »