Concerning Magic

“I need a little magic in my life,” said a friend to me over lunch, after our depressing political discussion had segued into my interest in epic fantasy.

 Don’t we all. 

 But how much magic? 

 Magic to me is like the white icing on top of a cinnamon bun. If the baker sloshes it on too liberally, she drowns out the taste of the cinnamon, raisins, butter, and the fluff of the pastry with too much cloying sugar. If she gets the right amount, the sweetness on the top brings out and enriches all the other ingredients and complements the swirling structure.

So, although I don’t personally care whether magical elements are ordered into a logical “system” or not, I do appreciate fantasies in which the unearthly works within limitations. Kristen Cashore’s Graceling series, for example, endows only certain characters with circumscribed powers. In Connie Willis’s The Doomsday Book, the only aspect of the story that is fantastical is the Oxford historians’ ability to time travel. No one has miraculous powers of healing or telepathy. The characters are frustrated and defeated by the same constraints that affect us all, such as communication difficulties, material shortages, petty vanities, and disease. 

Too much magic throws me off the plot and characters, because there’s no rhyme or reason to what can happen in this world. In Game of Thrones (books and tv), I accepted the white walkers and the dragons without difficulty and I could stretch to the Faceless Men of Braavos, but once we got to Beric Dondarrion’s multiple resurrections, R’hilor’s intermittent interventions, and the three-eyed raven’s baffling powers, I started rolling my eyes.

 In Lord of the Rings, Tolkien uses the modest and earthy hobbits as foils against the extraordinary elves, wizards, and Númenóreans. Nonetheless, my brother told me he had “outgrown” Tolkien when he realized that throughout The Hobbitand LOTR not a single character ever urinated. (Dan, I made sure to include peeing in The Nine Realms, partly to make my characters more grounded in real life, and partly because I found that basic biology can be used to reveal character.) 

 Despite having chosen fantasy as my genre, ironically, I suspect that deep down I am . . . a realist. The offspring of a scientist and a lawyer, I like facts, proof, and social constraints. I so admire Middlemarch, The Grapes of Wrath, The Age of Innocence, or Empire Falls, novels about normal people coping with the pressures of their milieus. I’ve always shied away from surrealism or abstraction in fine arts. Let’s go look at Rembrandt, please, rather than Picasso, Dali, or even Chagall.

But balance is everything. Perhaps I should have chosen a more prosaic food than cinnamon pastries in the metaphor above. Unfortunately, meat and potatoes wouldn’t add surprise and unexpected pleasure to my lunch companion’s life. I yearn for a harmony between the fantastic and the mundane. The world is too much with us late and soon, and we ache for something more, something special, something that will give us joy. The perfume of miracle that elevates Shakespeare’s TheWinter’s Tale and The Tempest, such that these plays are separated from the rest of his corpus under the label “romances.”

 A note, literally, of grace.

This is the quality many people find in French Impressionist art. The Rouen cathedral or the everyday haystacks are recognizably there, right there, without distortion, but Monet’s brush trembles at their beauty and the light around them becomes luminescent. The Impressionists didn’t need to paint mythological, religious, or classical subjects; through their eyes, we see normal life but through a glass, brightly. 

This shimmering brings out the beauty that was always there but overlooked. Which, to me, is magical.