Children's Fantasy

I grew up in a time when children's fantasy was a very small part of the genre.  Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising Sequence (Published 1973), and The Chronicles of Prydain (Published 1964) were pretty much it.  Cooper's series combined elements of the children's pulp of an earlier generation, The Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew and mixed it with cultural references from an even older generation's fantasy, The Chronicles of Narnia and LOTR.  Both series were excellent, and moderately popular in their day, evidenced by the fact that Disney made a film of The Black Cauldron.  These were the books that opened my mind to fantasy.  But the step from those children's books to adult fantasy was a steep one: go for the Once and Future King, or risk drowning in LOTR.  But the field has changed a lot since then.

There were many authors who revitalized the genre but the real break through came with J.K. Rowling's epic, Harry Potter.  I was a young man when these books came out, and I resisted for over a year before succumbing to Pottermania.  My feeling at the time was simply, these are children's books, I read adult fantasy.  And true to form, when I began to read the series, I was immediately critical of the simplicity of the prose.  It didn't take long for me to reform my views on the matter.  But even now, my attitude toward children's fantasy is slightly deprecatory.  I haven't read Percy Jackson and the Olympians and have absolutely no desire to do so.  Nor have I seen the movie, or read the books of The Last Airbender.  I do have in my collection, The Golden Compass, and though I've seen and enjoyed the film, I have yet to start the series.

So why the antipathy?  Well, for one thing, my first real adult fantasy book, after reading the book report worthy LOTR and Narnias listed above, was Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks.  I loved the original cover, pictured here.  Swords of Light derives half of its name from that pivotal moment in my life.  It was difficult, and over eight hundred pages.  But it was by reading adult fiction that I learned to write and speak as well I have.  I never needed to study the GRE, GMAT, or LSAT vocabulary modules, 800 page novels are not models in brevity.  They require a significant range of word choice.  Descriptive passages need more than words like dark and dirty.  For example:

The elf walked down the dark hallway, ready to fight.

The elf crept down the dank passageway, arrow nocked and half-drawn.

or

The elf lithely skulked down the corridor, cedar bow drawn and tipped with venom, arms tense, eyes sweeping the crumbling path before him.

Sometimes the best way to learn is to dive into the deep end, not continue skimming the surface.  I'm not a teenage girl, and so I have limited utility for vampires, but I do make an effort to be au currant, and so I read the first book of The Twilight Saga, Twilight.  Unlike Harry Potter, I was not convinced.  This was an atrociously written book, incredibly boring and a bit like eating uncooked tofu, tasteless and devoid of substance.  You want Vampires?  Read Ann Rice.  I didn't mind the Christian messaging in the book, both Tolkien and Lewis were hard-core Christians.  Christ imagery abounds in both.  I minded the poor quality writing and the utter boredom.

My other critique of children's fantasy, particulary in its more modern vintage is its tendency to protect and pull punches.  Though the evil vampire is eventually pulled limb from limb in Twilight, there is no description, no gore.  The young woman never has sex with her man.  That's fine, but at least let her have dirty fantasies.  Christianity is rife with rules about sex and sexuality, if you're going to use it, you should be torturing the reader with temptation, not regurgitating apollinian fantasies about love. 

Fantasy is about real life.  By creating realms that can't possibly exist, we transcend believability and are able  to examine relationships that might otherwise be obscured by traitorous thoughts like "oh, that's not realistic!"  That possibility is dimmed when the lewd and the tragic are ignored.  Harry Potter's saving grace is that the teenagers are teenagers, death is death, and loss is inescapable.  These were how the original fairy tales educated.  Think "ashes, ashes we all fall down," that hoary old children's chant that describes Europe's time during the Black Death.  Think Jack and The Beanstalk.  Jack kills a giant after stealing his wealth.  Not pretty, not nice, and above all, completely unsanitized.  Think Rumpelstiltskin, a beautiful girl about to be raped by a lord, she tricks a gnome, who ultimately pays for her deception with his life.

You see where I'm going with this.  Fantasy is vital to children's development.  It teaches them ethics, right and wrong, about caring, duty honor, and love.  But sapped of life's tragic realities, it's just a desensitizing Hallmark card.