This week I'm joined on the blog by Bryan Wigmore, not just one of the best fantasy writers I know, but also one of the most astute readers. Here, he talks about what the world in a story means to him. He also quotes Chief Wiggum. What's not to like?
‘We gods are only masks,’ Mictlantehcutli says. ‘Who wears us? Find it out!’
‘We gods are only masks,’ Mictlantehcutli says. ‘Who wears us? Find it out!’
Grant Morrison, The
Invisibles
‘What is your fascination with my forbidden closet
of mystery?’
Chief Wiggum, The
Simpsons
I’m going to write about mystery. Not the kind of mystery of
who shot who (at the Copacabana or elsewhere) but the deeper mysteries that for
me are an important part of an interesting story-world. A story depends on its
characters, but its characters in turn depend on their world, are formed by it.
A world that differs fundamentally from ours can be interesting in itself, an
intellectual curiosity, but it comes to life when it gives birth to characters
who do or think the unexpected because their world has given them a culture and
mindset outside our own. It’s the fascination with the alien, even if that
‘alien’ is as human as we are.
A story-world is a mask worn by
its history, and we all like to know what lies behind a mask. But barring a massive front-end
infodump, we can’t see behind the mask except by exploring the world through
the story. Luckily, we don’t have to equip ourselves for an expedition; an
author will lead us from the comfort of our chair or bath. In a fantasy, that
exploration might take us to meet the gods that kicked the world around in the
beginning and continue to affect its people. We might delve even deeper to
where the gods come from. We might find they are fakes. We might meet the
fakers. We might go back to the very beginnings of the universe.
Or
there might be no gods involved. We might discover that the political and
cultural flavour of the world came about when an Emperor went mad a thousand
years ago and began an age of chaos. We might begin to piece together how that
happened. We might meet characters who know more about it than they first let
on, who know that the emperor’s madness was brought about on purpose. Secrets
that changed the lives of everyone.
For me,
this is a large part of fantasy’s appeal. I like the broad canvas of a big
military conflict, a clash of empires, but if it digs into the roots of those
empires too and finds something fascinating there, I’m in heaven. Stephen
Donaldson’s The Illearth War, one of
my favourite fantasy novels, successfully marries two very different plotlines
– an army’s flight and fight for survival, and the quest of a small party into
the very roots of the Land’s existence, in the company of a strange figure
created by an ancient High Lord as an expression of Lore. That very satisfying
two-arc structure mimics that of The Lord
of the Rings, to some extent – Frodo and Sam’s lonely quest into the
mystery of the Ring’s origins at Mount Doom, alternating with Gondor’s military
struggle. For me, in both books, the war alone would be much less interesting.
Of
course, mystery doesn’t have to span hundreds of leagues and thousands of
years. Sticking with Tolkien, my earliest memory of exposure to the excitement
of the unknown in fantasy came from his cover design for The Hobbit. I pulled the hardback off my school shelf at the age of
ten or so because of the spine image: a road leading to a dark doorway in a
mountain. Who wouldn’t be caught by that? (Who has seen a far-off cave on a
videogame map and not hungered to get there?) And within, the maps, the
drawings, the ‘evil look’ of the old castles on the hills they pass (never
mentioned again) — everything about the book encourages the urge to explore, an
urge Bilbo Baggins ironically lacks. And what is the purpose of exploration? To
solve the mystery of what lies ‘over there’. Which, if we’re lucky, leads to
more mystery: turtles all the way down. We’re probably best off when we believe
there to be an end without ever reaching it.
For me,
the best mysteries in fantasy suggest connections with some of the big
questions about our own world, which is possibly why I enjoy them so much. Like
many fantasy readers, and doubtless many sci-fi ones, in my younger years I had
a strong interest in the psychic and the paranormal, which made the range of
possible origins for the world, and my own place in it, so much larger and
wider. This is probably why I read more fantasy than sci-fi. Sci-fi tends to
look towards possibilities, and fantasy back to origins. My favourite SFF does
both: fantasy that suggests a future direction for humanity, or sci-fi
concerned with ancient alien artefacts (Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, Dan Simmons’s Hyperion) — for where an alien race has its origin, might not
humanity have that same one?
So, is a story-world incomplete
if it lacks such mysteries? I can only say that most of my favourite SFF
stories have contained them. But what I am sure of is that they’re worth
including only if they lead somewhere interesting.
I’ll
return to Tolkien for the end, and the warning of Gollum. Given that Tolkien
seemed so in tune with the urge to explore, it’s perhaps surprising that he
gave the most extreme expression of that urge to such a villainous character.
For Gollum was fascinated by mysteries, and that fascination (along with the
hatred of sunlight) took him deep beneath the Misty Mountains. ‘There must be
great secrets buried there which have not been discovered since the beginning,’
is his thought according to Gandalf. But in the end those secrets turned out to
be ‘empty night.’ And this is the risk. Interesting-sounding mysteries without
interesting answers are counterproductive: the mask would be better left on.
Better to ignore mystery in that case, and concentrate on other story elements
(which for many readers are the draw anyway). But for me, following a character
on a quest for the meaning of their world, rather than solely revenge or gold
or a roll in the castle stables with someone presentable, and discovering
something eye-opening, is what reading fantasy is all about.
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