Broken English

In the first year of my MA, I remember a workshop discussion kicking off about whether the chapter I’d just presented was fantasy. People were using names like China Meiville and Michael Moorcock. It came as a surprise to me. I thought I was just writing fiction.

Perhaps I was naive: the chapter contained a time-lapse mirror, a mystical stream that animals refused to cross and a fob-watch made by Da Vinci.

I don’t read fantasy novels at all. Never have. The Hobbit was read to me at school, but I gave up 20 pages into the Lord of the Rings. I’ve never read Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams. When I’m in proximity to an adult reading JK Rowling, I become queasy.

I’ve always been aware of fantasy fiction. As a teenager I read lots of sci fi. I would buy yellowing short story anthologies from a long gone second hand book shop. It introduced me to authors I still love; Philip K. Dick, Tom Disch, Alfred Bester – even Borges and Ballard. I liked the multiverse narratives and time travel paradoxes. I loved soft, psychological science fiction. Speculative fiction, Harlan Ellison campaigned to have it re-labeled.

But, in all that time, I never knowingly made it more than a few pages into a bona-fide fantasy story. Or, perhaps I mean Fantasy – big, capital F – with their flutey names and fairytale-written-large world building.

The assumption that the novel I’m writing is Fantasy, with a big F, seems to come from the fact that it has magical and metaphysical elements. But, this in turn is simply a reflection of a wider interest I have in the nature of perception. I have, for example, a novel idea in the bank about deception and cons. Another (which I’m intending to write before I finish the larger project I’m currently working on) has a theme running through that explores the disconnection between the real self, the self people project and the self people perceive.

I am interested in fiction that has magical or metaphysical elements. But did Marquez or Calvino write fantasy? What about John Collier? Is Will Self’s Dorian a fantasy novel? Or Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow? Or Iain Banks’s The Bridge? Or Chuck Pahlahniuk’s Lullaby?  All have fantastic elements and other-worldly devices. All are considered contemporary fiction.

I’m not quite arrogant enough to put myself in the same league – but I’m aiming in that direction, rather than in the direction of, say, Raymond E. Feist or Robin Hobb.

Does that make me a snob?

I’m not sure. One thing I do know is, I’m not keen to have that label put on my work so early. Not because I categorically don’t think that it’s fantasy. It’s possible that you might find enough points of similarity to prove that it is. But, it’s also other things.

I’m keen to avoid the label because genre writing is a ghetto. Fantasy, horror, sci-fi… they have smart and loyal fans. If my work’s good enough, they’ll find it anyway. But, do mainstream readers venture into the section of Waterstones full of Harry Potter, Discworld and Twilight? Can you cross the other way?

The more I think about it, the concept of a mystical stream that animals refuse to cross seems plausible.