However derided by critics, fantasy novels remain best-sellers and may be of abiding importance to their readers. Some have become of real significance, commanding lifelong devotion from readers of successive generations. So what can fantasy do that realism can’t?
Dodgson’s Alice books were the first modern fantasy to gain a mass audience, and characters, songs, and incidents have become permanent parts of a common imaginary, appealing to all ages. But as a Christian mathematician, Dodgson confronted topics from evolution to new understandings of the mind, and wove through his fantastical worlds explorations of psychology, reason, and perception.
Peake’s imagination of Gormenghast and its bizarre inhabitants came out of his experiences of colonialisation, education, and the Second World War, and express his traumata and anger. However strange, Gormenghast’s denizens are recognisably British, and the plot pits amoral but energetic Steerpike, rising from abject servitude, against fetishised rulers and fossilised tradition, generating some savage satire.
Tolkien’s legendarium, best-known through The Lord of the Rings, was also in part a product of wartime experience. He survived the Somme to raise a family, only to see two sons serving overseas in the 1940s, the Blitz, and the V-1 and V-2 rocket attacks. Yet unlike other First World War poets and Second World War novelists, Tolkien did not become satirical or ironic, but imagined a world where action might through providence make a difference. Features of both wars stud his landscape and plot, from the carnivorous mud of the Dead Marshes to totalitarian Sauron using slave labour, but history is recreated to better ends than the real world ever managed.
Together these authors make a powerful case for the centrality of fantasy writing to modern literature. Seen in constellation with other fantasists denied the label – Orwell, Golding, Marquez, Rushdie – all emerge not as oddball escapists but as writers tackling head-on the most acute and terrifying issues of their times, and needing the rich space of the fantastical to do so.
