Fantasies

Eragon, my mind soaked deeply in different events where the story had been. Boisterous atmosphere; their deep-seated hatred for darkness. Their arduous journey; wars to be faced with a vengeance; the voice of victory as justice took in. A very hypnotic story indeed.

As each event of the story revealed, exclamations of admiration followed. Two thumbs up with the flawless collaboration of Adam Lambert's MAD WORLD.

I like the characters to spring to life as whole human beings, not puppets dancing to some author's pipe. I like action, but not gratuitously strewn; it has to make sense & reflect the characters' attitudes & needs.

I suspect such pat truisms rarely hold much truth. I began reading horror fiction and science fiction by 10, and "grew" into fantasy. What I read in between, as an adolescent, is something I cannot return to with nostalgic delight.

Heroic fantasy like Eragon first struck a note of harmony in me. Such harmony might be discovered at any age. Since most people have reached a high reading ability by age twelve or never, chances are good that readers will indeed hit upon their own magic genre at this time.

Whatever we prefer to read is connected to our lifelong experience. If our experience is varied, our reading tastes will be likewise. If our experience is narrow, we may stick to one limited area. Those who fixate on heroic fantasy to the exclusion of other books may indeed have done so because they found the genre at an impressionable age, or because their own lives weren't varied or evolving. But readers with far-ranging reading habits, who nevertheless hold a special place in their hearts for heroic fantasy — well, it could be we love the form with good reason. A distillation of our lifelong attitudes and explorations may well find special expression in heroic fantasy.

A personal relationship with heroic fantasy isn't likely to be born of a direct parallel between life & fiction, since some heroic fantasy readers have had swashbuckling adventures (though it doesn't apply on some novels). A very few have had direct adventures of the heroic kind. The comparison between the heroic fantasy reader's life and reading tastes is apt to be more along the lines of an allegorical comparison.

In my own case, that relationships with heroic fantasy stems from my sense of life's transience, the threat & quickness of death whether from an automobile collision or cancer or having yourself at gunpoint. I experienced much of abject evil and understand that there are absolute evil and absolute innocence at odds in this world. Life is short even if nothing happens to abbreviate it further.

Dangerous as life may be, there's yet a lot to be said for it, a fact that increases the tragedy of its brevity. Inherent in feelings of life's transience is a sense of its joy and beauty. Heroic fantasy at its best observes things to be as menacing, amoral, simple, and inevitable as dying.

Heroic fantasy is, for me, a celebration of life's brief, transient joys and sorrows. When it is done well, the language has a high level of beauty. When the writing is flawed but still capable of delighting, there are yet images of stunning beauty, not invariably of a grotesque kind of beauty either.

Excellence of writing certainly adds to my enjoyment of heroic fantasy, but I've been known to get by on some pretty feeble stuff as well. The point is that the emotions is where the reader responds, whether at a high or low intellectual level. We might be looking for something other than to be dazzled by an author's mastery of.

We're all looking for something of our own spirit in what we read. Fiction is a mirror. If what shines back isn't very attractive, well, that was worth finding out. It was even entertaining. Whether the soul is blackly smeared or polished bright as steel, it is less concerned with technique than it is with intentions and events. If such tales aren't always done with the finest of grace, who's to say the awkward fellow isn't of greater genius than some refined courtier?

The point is that some of us have good taste and like heroic fantasy. That's less a conflict than may at first sound likely. It only means that for many of us, there is something special about heroic fantasy. It's close to our truth and inner vision.