Guest Blogger Mark Charan Newton on "The Mystery of Fantasy"
The novel has already received its fair share of good review in the UK, and on this side of the Atlantic, Publishers Weekly gave the book a starred review, writing, "Newton opens a complex epic fantasy series with this impressive debut. The ancient fortress city of Villjamur is filled with human and nonhuman inhabitants, many of them refugees seeking shelter from a predicted decades-long ice age...Newton handles his multilayered world and diverse cast of characters with the assurance of an experienced author and balances his fantasy tropes with elements of horror and political commentary in vividly descriptive, compelling prose."
All of this week Mark will be guest blogging. Here's the second of his entries. (Click here for Newton on the transition from bookseller to book writer.)
The Mystery of Fantasy
by Mark Charan Newton
Mark Charan Newton was born in 1981, and has a degree in Environmental Science. He has worked in bookselling, in editorial roles for pulp horror and medial tie-in fiction, and then original science fiction and fantasy, helping set up the Solaris imprint. His first novel is Nights of Villjamur, published by Ballantine (Random House). He now lives and works in Nottingham, England.
Taxonomically speaking, we could go back all the way to Poe in order to witness a well-executed combination of both these genres. For me, fantasy and mystery are still today so intrinsically intwined, but not in obvious ways. In both genres, the reader surrenders their mind, escaping into a fairly improbable scenario. In both genres there is a local environment (geography and community) which needs to be explored for the novel to work. Much of modern crime fiction thrives on exotic flavours--see the Scandinavian crime movement, taken to its current apogee by Stieg Larsson--and readers enjoy experiencing these unfamiliar locations. And some might argue that fantasy is itself a form of mystery, though one of aesthetics--there is much that the reader desires to investigate in a bizarre world; and surreal images can be so very alien to us that they provoke our most primitive senses of exploration, of discovery. Of needing to understand what is going on.
It is worth mentioning current successful combinations of mystery and fantasy, such as China Miéville's The City and The City, but secondary world fantasy has not all that often embraced crime noir. I can think only of a few examples: Richard K. Morgan's The Steel Remains contains such a mood, as does – and he needs no introduction to this site, Jeff VanderMeer's Finch--where much entertainment is to be found using core elements of a detective novel.
And that's what I wanted to celebrate - the effectiveness for a fantasy writer of combining the two genres at their most distilled points: those of the detective, and of a secondary world.
In Nights of Villjamur I also wrote about an Investigator. Jeryd, a non-human, rallies against demons in his own life as well as being embroiled in political skullduggery. He's deliberately not a very good investigator, either, which I think adds to his miserable charms, but he's been useful for a number of reasons.
The detective opens the reader's eye to another world with great ease. In my case, Jeryd was a perfect guide to the city of Villjamur. With him, the reader can explore those places off the beaten track, can explore the factors which really make the city tick – just like a detective would in real-world fiction. As Henning Mankell's superb, morose detective Wallander maps out a particularly bleak Sweden, Jeryd can--and must--interact with the community, with local characters and high-ranking politicians, and he permits the reader quick access to them, too.
The detective also forces the writer to consider realism. There's been much discussion of violence and swearing creating more realistic fantasy fiction recently, but that's not especially the realism I'm interested in here. The detective forces the writer to consider truly representing a world's social hierarchy and politics. Because you're forced to look at the underground culture, too, you get a sense of the real communities - the real people, who aren't the stars going off on epic quests, whose quotidian existence is often overlooked in search of great big wonders. And the detective is useful for entertainment and sheer narrative drive, adding the element of a thriller.
Ultimately, the detective role provides an alternative trope the fantasy genre, which is constantly having to reinvent it's own tropes. Here, then, is a new dimension, and one with great wealth ready to be tapped. I believe writers and readers can have a lot of fun when fantasy and mystery are combined.
vial labeling machine on July 01, 2010 at 09:24 PM
I have read this novel before few months and also likes it very much. I am glad that you have written information about it on your site so that people can know about it because it is really nice.
David on July 01, 2010 at 10:32 PM
Good post. It's a fascinating point to connect the two like that. Michael Chabon has talked about a reasonably similar association between genres before, and it's something I'd like to see more of.