I. So many times I have sat down at my laptop (or typewriter) recently and found the words I wish would flow just do not emerge in a fashion I would like. Esoteric poetry, snippets of my next novel, a bit of dialogue for a screenplay, but not the words that I need to write to maintain my position as a semi-professional wordsmith. I could only write the former, little bastard phrasings from the dredges of my head, pretending to be cleverer than they are. This was because I was fighting what I needed to write, which is the following, a series of little vignettes like snowflakes, which – though on their own make little sense – come together to form a mound of snow I hope to be quite poignant.
As I write these words I have on beside me the movie The Soloist, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx, and apart from the fact it is a movie about an attractive journalist – something I myself, in a similar field, can definitely get behind – it reminded me that fantastical occurrences are not to be only found locked in the pages of a G.R.R. Martin graphic novel adaptation, or an Iain. M. Banks philosophical debate, but can be discovered on a street corner too. That wonderment is kind of everywhere.
The movie follows Steve Lopez, who meets Nathaniel Ayres, a homeless man who can play the cello with amazing skill. He promptly writes about the man, and changes both Nathaniel’s and his own life. Though this website is about fantasy novels, I could not help but feel the same enlightened clarity you sometimes find when you meet your first dragon as a child in the pages of a book. I could not help but feel that The Soloist, though entirely based on factual events, was a fantasy film. It was a film about that feeling of the impossible being real, something that every fantasy and sci-fi reader craves.
Recently, I published my first novella, Spectral Fathoms. The process of actually creating my first text from scratch – from those empty pages – and building a microcosm for characters and audience to play in alike, felt a little like a fantasy. To be in a position to say that I was an author, felt as ungraspable at one point in my life as it would to ride a dragon, or have my own panel at Comic Con (though, I suppose, the latter is always still on the cards. The former less so). But I have done that now, irrefutably; I even paid homage to the sensation of completing your first text with the acknowledgement that reads, “I would like to thank everyone who said I would never do this; I win.”
So here I sit, without the right words for an article I have to write, watching a movie about a journalist discovering something impossible, after I myself have achieved something that people regard as difficult and unlikely.
II. In the book Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, we meet two impossibles: a scarab-beetle headed sculptress working for a diabolical client and a rogue scientist trying to unlock thaumaturgical secrets for a truly fantastical beast. And yet, throughout the whole novel (or, more accurately, throughout the novel I have read so far), we see how these two are feeling the same conglomerate of emotions that all creatives face when presented with projects incandescently unique: fear, lack of self-belief, excitement, obsession, love… We relate to Miéville’s world because of how we recognise that, in all people, no matter the gender, race or – in this case – species, we fear and love (usually) the same things. And if we don’t, if there is some magickal difference between us, that is equally as exciting and enriching and normal.
Therefore, so many articles easily delve into how the works of the fantastical only function because of how they relate so gorgeously to reality. The reason we can accept a tale as bizarre as one of Miéville’s – or even Asimov, Kafka, Hideaki Anno – is because, amongst the aliens, giant robots, trials without cause and bird-people are nuggets of emotion and soul that we feel every single day. But that is a story told a hundred times. What about the flipside? Is another reason we enjoy fantasy stories so much because our reality does in fact contain the magic we need so much every day?
There are religions and belief systems in this world that still practice divination, and who is to say they can’t tell the future. There are moments in a student’s lifetime when they discover alcohol for the first time, and their fresh-faced, pedagogic bacchanalia leads them to finding the love of their life. People have written century lasting concertos, invented falsities that have turned out to be real sciences, and found themselves by travelling the world. All of these things are comparable to the fantasy novel. The “getting wasted for the first time” is comparable to the heroes journey arriving at a tavern. Immortality is found in characters in a book, and in this world it lasts in the work of what people make. Perhaps our world is not as normal as we think.
Perdido has insectile artistes worried about their work. Our world has a journalist and a man who hears voices. In both instances, in all realities, there is the “normal” and the “miracle”, and in neither is one more rare or abundant than the other. Always the same.
III. The Soloist is not a fantasy story. Perdido Street Station is not reality. And yet, the reason both stories work is because they contain the opposite of their genre. Perdido excites us because we can place ourselves in the fantasy, by relating to the motives of the characters, which seem all too real to us. The Soloist gives us the same excitement – the same vivre – because it reminds us that our day to day lives are so full of wonder.
I work in a Burger King, to make sure I have a roof over my head. Yet, I still call myself a writer before I call myself a burger-flipper. This is not out of pride, or because I wish to hide my occupation (contrarily, I just mentioned it here). In fantasy stories, the down on his luck farm boy still calls himself a dragon tamer. On paper, he’s a soldier, or a stagehand, or a tavern-boy, but on the page of the book, the audience recognises he is more than that. Some prophecy or priestess told us so.
I call myself a writer because that is who I feel to be, in the same fashion as there are sculptors, artists, musicians, accountants and chefs all feeling the same as they work in a job ‘not quite them’. I have published a book, albeit in a roundabout way, and feel proud of this accomplishment. And it reminds me how many other people should feel the same.
We write so often of how we wish our lives could be better, and how the fantasy novel helps us escape the drudgery of our existence to let us breathe. How the Lord of the Rings or Eragon or The Culture are all worlds we can live within for a brief moment to forget how our lives are so mundane. I want to usher in a new ideology. Perhaps, when you sit down with your favourite elf, or have a cup of tea with your loveable dwarf companion, you should consider how your life is perhaps not all that different. How you may have finished your latest masterpiece, or met the boy you dream about. How that thing you saw out the corner of your eye may actually be real, or that a homeless man somewhere has just been offered a second chance. That you smiled broader today more than you thought possible.
More than you thought possible.
It is a phrase like this I think the fantasy novel allows us to hold dear; every day there are miracles. Let us not get lost in the need for normality and stability, and embrace the fact we can all do quite awesome things. After completing something in my life I didn’t think possible, I thought it important to tell you all to feel the same. And after watching a film as moving as The Soloist, I just had to spread the word that good things happen every day, as well as bad, and that wonder is an integral and unavoidable part of our lives.
There is magic in every single one of our ‘day to days’. Look out for it. It isn’t only in the pages on your bedside table.
Richard Marpole
Jennie Ivins