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My last panel this weekend at Orycon was actually more like a roundtable discussion, and it was about magical realism. I'm no kind of expert on the subject--really, the best I was able to come up with was a definition that makes sense to me, and a couple of names to throw into the discussion. Still, it was a fun panel.
Then this morning I was reading the paper and found the name that had been rattling around in the back of my head. John Fowles, the author of The Magus, The Collector, and The French Lieutenant's Woman. Was Fowles a magical realist? Maybe not; he was less likely to embellish his work with fantastic elements as way of metaphor or emphasis, but what did draw me to his work was a kind of dreamy quality--even in a work as grounded in solid Victoriana as French Lieutenant's Woman. The first of Fowles's work I read was The Collector, when I was probably too young to get the full meaning of the work (I think I was fourteen). It's a stunning book, deeply creepy. Then I found The Magus for the first time; I'd never encountered a book that kept changing the rules, pulling the rug out from under me, or perhaps more justly peeling off layers of reality to reveal different and unsuspected layers. Later, when I was in college, we used the book in a class on speculative literature and I got to learn some of the philosophic underpinnings of the book, which didn't change my opinion of it, just made my head explode more. Since then, I have always treasured work that pulled up the rug and made me wondering what I was standing on. I don't think that's magical realism, but I do think they're cousins of some sort.
Fowles's last published book was A Maggot, which was published twenty years ago. Apparently he said, when interviewed a few years ago, that he was working on a new book. I'll bet it was interesting.
Then this morning I was reading the paper and found the name that had been rattling around in the back of my head. John Fowles, the author of The Magus, The Collector, and The French Lieutenant's Woman. Was Fowles a magical realist? Maybe not; he was less likely to embellish his work with fantastic elements as way of metaphor or emphasis, but what did draw me to his work was a kind of dreamy quality--even in a work as grounded in solid Victoriana as French Lieutenant's Woman. The first of Fowles's work I read was The Collector, when I was probably too young to get the full meaning of the work (I think I was fourteen). It's a stunning book, deeply creepy. Then I found The Magus for the first time; I'd never encountered a book that kept changing the rules, pulling the rug out from under me, or perhaps more justly peeling off layers of reality to reveal different and unsuspected layers. Later, when I was in college, we used the book in a class on speculative literature and I got to learn some of the philosophic underpinnings of the book, which didn't change my opinion of it, just made my head explode more. Since then, I have always treasured work that pulled up the rug and made me wondering what I was standing on. I don't think that's magical realism, but I do think they're cousins of some sort.
Fowles's last published book was A Maggot, which was published twenty years ago. Apparently he said, when interviewed a few years ago, that he was working on a new book. I'll bet it was interesting.