Black Heart by Holly Black
Request #304: This is how I believe it will end.
(SPOILERS alerts for Sarah Rees Brennan’s Demon trilogy and Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunter books*.)
~~~
I definitely think that playing with YA urban fantasy and modernism and the interplay between them would be interesting, if only because I know I’m writing Doom on the other side of a large modernist infatuation. And now I’m flashing back to watching clips from Metropolis in lectures and thinking about seeing the city, even then, as both an organism and machine…
Rambly thoughts on landscape-parallels:
Transitions from high to urban, introducing Epic to Mundane, and doing it well.
One of my favourite moments in the Demon’s Noun** series is when Nick battles with the magicians on the Millenium Bridge***. Sarah’s demons don’t do well crossing water: in order to battle, Nick first has to be weakened. Heroes often have to sacrifice portions of themselves to defeat evil****. This reminds me of a classic high fantasy situation - the Battle on a High Rope Bridge. I like this parallel; it fulfills, for me, a direct replacement of the High with Urban (whether intentional or not, and one day I’ll write an article about Author’s Intentions vs Reader’s Interpretations).
This idea of using an Urban replacement for a High feature is something which is pretty hit-and-miss in Cassie’s MI. In City of Ashes Jace and the others battle evil on a ship in the middle of New York: for me, this does not work because it feels like it is trying to mesh genres, to replicate instead of replace. This may of course be a personal thing - I have never lived in a city with large rivers and boats, so to me the idea of a large ShipBattle feels very High, not very Urban, and rather out of place in what the book is otherwise trying to do.
However, Valentine doing his evils on top of tower blocks is awesome, because it reminds me of Evil Towers of Doom from high fantasy: Evil Tower of Doom has been replaced by Evil Tower Block of Death.
I love that there is a lift in the institute in Cassie’s MI. It reminds us that the church is a castle and is not a castle: it is there in place of what would have been a castle in high fantasy, but it is an urban building in the 21st century in New York. Why wouldn’t there be a lift?
When it comes to setting I think Sarah is better at incorporating the urban into her storyline than Cassie is: whilst Clary obviously loves New York, and spends a lot of her time travelling round it, the urban feels a lot stronger in Demon, as if it is not only a tool for the story - around which fantastical things happen - but that it is the story.
Though, this is just one idea. And I probably could have written the same amount of stuff on why High Fantasy on a Ship in Urban New York is better than Same-Old Same-Old Pretending to be Urban Fantasy But is Just The Same Story.
~~~
*Yes, I do seem to mostly only ever compare Sarah and Cassie when talking about urban fantasty, this is because I think they are very good. :)
**I like it, I shall go with it!
***Correct bridge? I hope so. Rambly literary thoughts should not really be written at work, at lunch time, without a handy copy of text.
****I say this with absolutely nothing to back it up, but it feels true.
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
- G. K. Chesterton
Young Adult (a term which incorporates both those growing and those who do not yet wish to admit they are grown) is a term I am rather…
When we start talking about urban fantasy, I’m reminded of Diana Wynne Jones, Monarch Of All Things & All Round Good Egg* describing it as “bringing the magic in with the milk bottles”. It’s that emphasis on magic bubbling through into the mundane, clustering around council houses and the chaos of the city.* It’s trying to keep a very real unicorn with a weapon on its head in your bedroom, and when Elidor starts leaking through the ceiling. It’s…
…It’s where the worlds intersect. And perhaps that’s why it’s so prominent in YA, because everything about YA is intersecting worlds. Childhood and adulthood? Check. Home and School? Check. Normal and other? Check. Reality and expectation? Check and check again.
Even on a metafictional level, YA is the clash between cultures. Reading ages, endless genres, different lifestyles that, elsewhere, would be shelved seperately. I frequently share books with my neighbour, who is 11. Urban fantasy itself is the glorious conglomeration of different realities, and it’s wonderful and witty and I wouldn’t change it for the world.
I did get a bit carried away with this post though, when I really just wanted to post the Diana Wynne Jones quote. Soon I shall sit down and write my own ‘Why YA?’ post, but for now? I want to leave you with another thing I love about Urban Fantasy, the point where it touches fingers with the Gothic. And no, it’s not vampires.
It’s that, in urban fantasy, the city itself can feel like a character. And me? Well…
(reblogged from crazyboutjm)
______
*Including Homicidal Fairies. Fire and Hemlock remains one of the best books I have ever read, and I will insist on this until long after the cows have come home.
It might be interesting to compare city cross genre, eg Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent and Cassie’s Infernal Devices.
Except that I’m not sure you’d find anything interesting: Conrad’s London feels like a literary exercise (making the city a character) whereas Cassie’s feels more like a writer’s exercise (having researched London as an American, she makes sure she describes it lots).
On the other hand, maybe that’s not fair. The description of London evolves in ID, mirroring the way Tessa’s relationships change, in each case from suspicion, fear, wariness and unfamiliarity to intrigue and love and aesthetic appreciation! And perhaps to becoming a little too familiar… ;).
In Which Work Experience Made Me Too Tired to Blog
I am a very bad person. I have neglected you, darling blog of mine, after only one proper post. All I can think to say is “I SOZ” and hope that you can forgive me and accept my explanation.
The last month I have been at Octopus Publishing House, doing some work experience. Ace! I was in the Special Sales department for the first three weeks and am spending this week being shared between Editorial and Production. It is very exciting!
I have not posted because I’ve been out of the house between 06:30-20:30 every week day, and have been completely shattered the rest of the time.
I do have more things to say about work experience in a publishing house, however, and will write said things up soon, so wanted to assure you I am still alive!
In other news, I write this on my shiny new Samsung Galaxy SII. It is beautiful, people. BEAUTIFUL.
Spoilery Clockwork Princess fanart.
Don’t Tell Him by palnk.
(And a very funny follow-up cartoon here.)
Lovely piccie.
Young Adult Urban Fantasy /// or: It’s ok to like fairies
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
- G. K. Chesterton
Young Adult (a term which incorporates both those growing and those who do not yet wish to admit they are grown) is a term I am rather fond of, a Book Label of which I happen to approve. As a ‘young adult’ myself I can no longer read books written primarily for children for fear of being frowned upon, labelled as having some sort of Defection. This, of course, is nonsense: as a near-adult I have many times revisited the works of Jacqueline Wilson and found myself incredibly empathetic to Ruby and Garnet’s coming-of-age and growing-apart woes. As a child and teenager I had many friends but none of them really knew or understood me the same way that Anne Fine did. She would sit with me for hours in the darkness of my enclosed personal space just to have a chat. Why, though many years may have passed, should I now ignore her value for simply that reason?
Yes, the label ‘Young Adult’ is my friend, and allows me to continue to read stories about teenagers, though I no longer am one, without feeling at all creepy.
Urban Fantasy is a term which is just as self-explanatory as Young Adult, but I’m going to go ahead and describe it here in detail for you anyway. Urban Fantasy is fantasy which is set in an urban location. To make this clearer to those who are still fuzzy on the issue I will use a comparison.
Alan Lee’s vision of the Shire. A luscious image of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantastical, pastoral world. The Lord of the Rings is your traditional, exemplary, set-the-bar-so-High sort of Fantasy it made other writers of speculative fiction weep in shame*.
This is an example of not-pastoral-but-urban fantasy:
In which Nick, our protagonist, looks broody in front of a classic urban setting. (Look! His black clothes-and-hair-and-soul broodyness match the tall, dark and overshadowing towers of urbanity!)
Urban Fantasy is Good (in my esteemed opinion) because it combines two ends of the ‘REAL?’ spectrum (the best things always combine spectrum-ends). Magical realism is another favourite genre of mine because it proposes that Magic and Real do not have to be kept so stringently separate in our literature. (The canonical examples of magical realism are, if you are interested: Jorge Luis Borges and Angela Carter, particularly in this.)
Urban Fantasy is the same combining of real and not-real; of the dirty, difficult and damned** lives of the urban worker with the wonderful, fantastical and mythical lives of the fae.
In the pastoral works of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis there is an air of innocence throughout: we get scenes of beauty often to the point of unbelievability (which is partly the point) which are used to enclose the unbelievable fantastical world in comfort and familiarity. The setting here fits the characters; at the same time we are often hurt when the storyline takes a twist and not-so-beautiful things happen (see: White Witch in the Narnia series, or deaths-aplenty in Lord of the Rings) because we have been so well lured in by setting.
Urban fantasy does almost the opposite: it does not try to lure you in with a false sense of “well this looks nice!” It is open and honest with its portrayal of dank and dirty but very realistic and relatable settings. And then, suddenly: fae! The fae element is sometimes beautiful and sometimes ugly and comes in many guises (for example the magician, the vampire, the demon…). Often the writer juxtaposes a sense of beauty (often from a naïve protagonist) with a reality of ugliness. And thus we have: LIFE IS NOT SO GREAT SOMETIMES (see: life with the Ryves’ brothers in Sarah Rees Brennan’s The Demon’s Lexicon) with YOU KNOW, FAIRY LIFE NOT SO PRETTY EITHER (see: Unseelie Court in Holly Black’s Tithe).
Both urban and pastoral fantasy use setting to lure the reader into a false sense of security or reality. The difference, for me, is that there is no real in the classic fantasies exampled above: there is only unreal. Urban fantasy juxtaposes very real settings with very unreal activies: it takes what you think you already know and suggests that you might not. That suggestion, for me, is what makes it so addictive.
The point, perhaps, of the fairy element in young adult urban fantasy is often to give the teenage protagonist something to work with or against which will help to excel or improve the painful growing process; to give the protagonist a difficult situation which looks, to begin with, wonderful, but needs closer inspection. All good books have Difficult Situations, obviously, but also obviously those difficult situations are better if they are MAGICAL?
Harry “I love magic” Potter essentially has every kid’s dream life: he has the ability to do magic, great friends, a lot of attention, is protagonist of a world-famous 7-part series, not to mention has all that “you’re THE ONE! :o” pressure, is being stalked by an Evil Genius and the people around him keep dying… and… stuff… :(.
The magical darkness in urban fantasy is (often, and among other things) a metaphor for the very real difficulties of Growing Up, making Anne Fine and Cassandra Clare suddenly not worlds apart. Escapism used to hide from the problems of puberty. (I’m sure that Clary Fray would much rather take on a demon any day than relive the after-the-Greenhouse scene…) As 20-something year olds, perhaps it is easier to pretend that we are not reading coming-of-age novels when the coming-of-age happens not with overcoming an embarrassing first-bra-buying incident, but when the awesome female of the novel SLAYS SOMETHING.
To get to the point, let me tell you in short what I love about Young Adult Urban Fantasy***: coming-of-age meets magical realism in settings I can relate to (often, because I’ve been there). It’s dark, but it’s wonderful; it’s believable, but it’s magical; it can be heart-breaking, and it HAS FAIRIES IN IT.
And so, without further ado, I come to the end of a post which pretended it was going to be enlightening but actually was just a Things I Like and Why I Like Them post. I hope you weren’t too bored.
-*-
*I have no proof of the weeping.
**Alliteration! Pleased.
***I do hope you didn’t get too excited at this point…
The sorts of things wot I am going to be doing
Firstly, hello! And welcome to my BOOK blog. On this blog it is my plan to write things about BOOKS. I hope this is agreeable to your expectations.
I am going to post once a week, on the Sunday/Monday crossover in the hope that people will read what I do write and do like it.
Things I will write:
The ThreView!
- This is a title I literally just came up with; you can expect that sort of snazzy originality from me from time to time. The “ThreView!” will be a literary review of three books which share something in common, be that a shared genre, theme, time or space.
Advice!
- In which I overcompensate for insecurities by bestowing upon you my Knowledges. I have many knowledges, for examples: creative writing tips, the publishing world, and how
notto write a good literature review. - You can write questions to me and I’ll try to answer them, or to direct you elsewhere.
Other things!
Book reviews!
Literature essays!
(Different how, you ask?)
Articles! (Which will, for example, discuss the difference between reviews and essays and books and literature!)
Recommended reads!
And suchlike.
Another time, another day, I might write a better introductory post. Right now, I just wanted to get something out there that stated my plans for this blog, make it slightly more likely I might write something.
Expect a post on Sunday/Monday!
IF YOU MAKE IT, THEY WILL COME.
If you only ever read one book in your life, I highly recommend you keep your mouth shut.
