Pop Fantasy
Jul. 5th, 2008 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselMar 2008
Magic for Beginners - Kelly Link - Harper Perennial, 2007
* * * *
Before we begin, I hope you will forgive a small digression on the topic of classical and popular music. The difference, for me, is one of journey. A pop song typically tries to create and hold a mood for four minutes and there is rarely a sense of change (though of course there are some fine exceptions: Bohemian Rhapsody, Yes' experiments in the 70s and the gradually accumulating instrumentation of Kate Bush's "Cloudbusting" spring immediately to mind). By contrast, classical music reflects the second-by-second developments of thought and feeling that we all experience all the time. Just try counting the number of mood-shifts in the four-minute overture to Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro", for example (good luck). Most pop songs are snapshots of our emotional world, often powerful and beautiful but static. Classical music pieces are movies of it, often stylised and simplified but capturing the dynamics of our thoughts and feelings in a way that pop does not.
So to Kelly Link, another good writer of whom you have probably never heard. Like Ted Chiang, her metier is short stories, which is part of the problem. This is compounded in her case by the problem of defining the genre in which she writes. Her stories feature fairies, zombies, ghosts and witches but also student parties, convenience stores, television series and other paraphernalia of modern American life. Present-day fantasy with a twist of magical realism is the nearest I can get to a description, though that fails to capture some of the darker elements that infuse her work.
Her style may be off-putting to some. It's feather-light, semi-humorous, jumping from idea to idea, rarely stopping to express a profound thought. It would be easy to dismiss it as whimsical or twee, and that may be correct. But something is going on underneath, and for all their lightness and inconsequentiality several of these tales leave an indelible mark on the mind.
Not all, however, and the first two,"The Faery Handbag" and "The Hortlak", may be enough to put you off. Both are based around interesting ideas - a village that decides to hide from its enemies in a handbag and a convenience store built next to a chasm that is inhabited by zombies - but once the situation is set up, the stories don't really go anywhere and don't really resonate. Persistence will however bring you to my personal favourite, "Stone Animals", and it's at this point that you realise how clever some of her ideas are. It features a situation familiar from many a horror story and film, a young family moving into a house that is haunted, but twists it in a completely original way. Similarly, "Some Zombie Contingency Plans" (Link clearly has a thing about zombies) manages to say something new about that old movie cliché. "Magic for Beginners" concerns a surreal fantasy soap opera called The Library that appears at unpredictable times and which has plots that make Buffy and Dr Who seem drearily conventional. The teenage friends who are obsessed with it also have fairly extraordinary lives - the protagonist, Jeremy, has inherited a Las Vegas wedding chapel and a phone booth - and it's not surprising when he is contacted by a character from The Library and asked to steal a book for her. Once again the story rather peters out, but the soap opera does sound wonderful. I also liked the nasty "Catskin", though it's definitely not for ailurophiles.
The other stories - "The Cannon", "The Great Divorce" and "Lull" - have good original metaphors for human relationships but no plot development as such, which is a consistent problem with the collection as a whole. I can sort of understand why; after all, there are only so many denouements to a short story that you can use and constant twist endings can become wearisome. But judging from this collection it's hard to imagine Link ever writing a longer piece that requires sustained thematic development. Her stories are, in short, the literary equivalent of good pop music; they surprise and delight with their wit and ideas, but don't, in most cases, develop in plotting or resonance. Which is not to denigrate them, but simply to warn those with more classical expectations that they may be disappointed.
Magic for Beginners - Kelly Link - Harper Perennial, 2007
* * * *
Before we begin, I hope you will forgive a small digression on the topic of classical and popular music. The difference, for me, is one of journey. A pop song typically tries to create and hold a mood for four minutes and there is rarely a sense of change (though of course there are some fine exceptions: Bohemian Rhapsody, Yes' experiments in the 70s and the gradually accumulating instrumentation of Kate Bush's "Cloudbusting" spring immediately to mind). By contrast, classical music reflects the second-by-second developments of thought and feeling that we all experience all the time. Just try counting the number of mood-shifts in the four-minute overture to Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro", for example (good luck). Most pop songs are snapshots of our emotional world, often powerful and beautiful but static. Classical music pieces are movies of it, often stylised and simplified but capturing the dynamics of our thoughts and feelings in a way that pop does not.
So to Kelly Link, another good writer of whom you have probably never heard. Like Ted Chiang, her metier is short stories, which is part of the problem. This is compounded in her case by the problem of defining the genre in which she writes. Her stories feature fairies, zombies, ghosts and witches but also student parties, convenience stores, television series and other paraphernalia of modern American life. Present-day fantasy with a twist of magical realism is the nearest I can get to a description, though that fails to capture some of the darker elements that infuse her work.
Her style may be off-putting to some. It's feather-light, semi-humorous, jumping from idea to idea, rarely stopping to express a profound thought. It would be easy to dismiss it as whimsical or twee, and that may be correct. But something is going on underneath, and for all their lightness and inconsequentiality several of these tales leave an indelible mark on the mind.
Not all, however, and the first two,"The Faery Handbag" and "The Hortlak", may be enough to put you off. Both are based around interesting ideas - a village that decides to hide from its enemies in a handbag and a convenience store built next to a chasm that is inhabited by zombies - but once the situation is set up, the stories don't really go anywhere and don't really resonate. Persistence will however bring you to my personal favourite, "Stone Animals", and it's at this point that you realise how clever some of her ideas are. It features a situation familiar from many a horror story and film, a young family moving into a house that is haunted, but twists it in a completely original way. Similarly, "Some Zombie Contingency Plans" (Link clearly has a thing about zombies) manages to say something new about that old movie cliché. "Magic for Beginners" concerns a surreal fantasy soap opera called The Library that appears at unpredictable times and which has plots that make Buffy and Dr Who seem drearily conventional. The teenage friends who are obsessed with it also have fairly extraordinary lives - the protagonist, Jeremy, has inherited a Las Vegas wedding chapel and a phone booth - and it's not surprising when he is contacted by a character from The Library and asked to steal a book for her. Once again the story rather peters out, but the soap opera does sound wonderful. I also liked the nasty "Catskin", though it's definitely not for ailurophiles.
The other stories - "The Cannon", "The Great Divorce" and "Lull" - have good original metaphors for human relationships but no plot development as such, which is a consistent problem with the collection as a whole. I can sort of understand why; after all, there are only so many denouements to a short story that you can use and constant twist endings can become wearisome. But judging from this collection it's hard to imagine Link ever writing a longer piece that requires sustained thematic development. Her stories are, in short, the literary equivalent of good pop music; they surprise and delight with their wit and ideas, but don't, in most cases, develop in plotting or resonance. Which is not to denigrate them, but simply to warn those with more classical expectations that they may be disappointed.