Horn Book Fantasy Roundup

This month the Horn Book's website added a selection of fine essays on fantasy from issues past.

I particularly enjoyed Lloyd Alexander on E. Nesbit's narrative voice in a 1985 essay:

A lot of Victorian children's writers give off a sort of mealy-potato quality: much rolling of eyes heavenward; children dying beautifully of some unidentified (but not messy) ailment. But E. Nesbit has a freshness, tartness, without gushing or talking down. Today's writers owe her a debt. We are modern thanks largely to her. As much as anyone, perhaps more, she helped us to find our twentieth-century voices.

Interesting samples of that narration posted here and here.

Arkadians lives and legends

Lloyd Alexander tends to take his inspiration from the mythology of different cultures, and in The Arkadians he draws on the legends of ancient Greece. However, his inspiration is equally the anthropological explanations for those legends that have taken hold over the years, such as saying that people imagined Centaurs after mistaking mounted riders for man-horse combinations (as if horse heads are easily concealed or ignored).

Thus, the Arkadians episode in which characters must wrestle bulls gets yoked both to the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, and also to the bull-leaping tradition of ancient Crete, known through archeology. The novel implies that the maze Theseus must traverse is inspired by the crooked and winding streets of an unfamiliar town, and so on. Some characters have classical names, such as hero Lucian. Others are literal translations of Greeks names, such as his love interest Joy-in-the-dance (Terpsichore).

A few recognizable Greek legends appear as stories: moral tales, after-dinner entertainment, tribal self-justifications. Fronto the poet responds to these storytelling episodes with the sort of nitpicky criticism we now usually find in blogs like this one, and (nonetheless?) protagonist Lucian decides that his role in life will be that of storyteller.

This can't help but have a debunking effect on the book's fantastic elements. When the Odysseus archetype speaks of a one-eyed blacksmith and we recognize that anecdote will be transmogrified into the horror of the Cyclops, we naturally worry less about actual monsters threatening our growing group of travelers. When characters justify stories by their entertainment value rather than as truth or even routes to spiritual truth, then the ancient Greek legends seem to hold no more weight in this novel's universe than the novel itself has in ours. Most of the “magic” we see in The Arkadians appears to be hypnosis or wishful thinking.

And yet that poet Fronto has been turned into a donkey. A talking donkey. The character who most promotes the idea that Greek myths have been puffed up by audience-pleasing storytellers is also the novel's one undeniable example of magic. And magic based in an overweaning supernatural/spiritual force in the world. It feels like Alexander wasn't sure which approach to Greek mythology pleased him more, the replication or the unmasking.

Black Cauldron ever to bubble up again?

Entertainment Weekly has a periodic little item called "Remake This!", urging Hollywood executives to remake movies that could actually be better or more relevant the second time around, rather than only those that are already excellent. The magazine's latest issue gives the remake nod to The Black Cauldron, Disney's animated adaptation of Lloyd Alexander's "Chronicles of Prydain" series.

Of course, the magazine isn't suggesting that cartoon is worthy of imitation. Back in 1998, EW's critic Ty Burr (now reviewing for the Boston Globe) called Disney's Black Cauldron videocassette second worst release of the year--"Shoddily animated, charmlessly written, too creepy for small fry." The only place you'll hear worse words about the Disney version is at Disney itself. The Black Cauldron movie has become a corporate scapegoat--the poor animal that symbolizes the animation studio's pre-Katzenberg doldrums and must be driven away. (The movie was actually released the year after Jeffrey Katzenberg arrived at Disney, but had been in development for years before. Since it was a huge flop, he was especially eager to distance himself from it.)

There's plenty of untapped potential in the Prydain series. Not only are there four other books, but Disney didn't even really tackle The Black Cauldron. As Alexander said in an interview with Scholastic-selected schoolchildren, "I have to say, there is no resemblance between the movie and the book." And now that Hollywood has discovered the money-coining power of fantasy series, screenwriters might be able to map out more than one movie.

In comparison to other fantasy series, however, the following for Alexander's lacks breadth and fervor, with a few fan sites here and there. It also lacks a genuine British genesis; though Alexander was inspired by Welsh mythology, he's a Pennsylvanian. With the cost of entry for a fantasy movie these days in the low nine figures, given the cost of CGI, it may be a while before studio executives decides Taran's saga is worth that big a gamble.