Phantastes by George MacDonald
George MacDonald, a minister in Scotland in the nineteenth century, published both collections of his sermons and fantasy novels. He influenced various writers, including Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, W.H. Auden, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Madeleine L’Engle called him “the grandfather of all of us who struggle to come to terms with truth through fantasy,” and C.S. Lewis described him as the greatest genius of myth-making he knew.
MacDonald’s book Phantastes, published in 1858, begins when the narrator unexpectedly finds himself in the midst of a forest in Fairy Land; it continues with a first-person account of the journey that eventually leads him back home. The many adventures read almost like a collection of short stories, which I admit made it a little difficult for me to get into the novel. But overall, I felt the power and the beauty of the individuals stories more than made up for the book’s fragmentary nature.
The story of Cosmo and the mirror told in chapter 13, a summary of a book the narrator read in the fairy library, was by far my favorite. Some other good stories include that of Sir Aglovaile, told in a poem in chapter 19, and that of the two giant-killers, chapters 20-21. Though I do not mean to over-emphasize each story in isolation: the book is meant to be read as a single novel, and I think its fragmentary nature is a weakness.
MacDonald also explores various aspects of writing and reading fantasy throughout the book. He sheds light on his own perception of the writing process when he has the narrator describe two instruments used by “fairy-gifted poets”: one for seeing the same thing everywhere and another for gathering images of beauty from various sources. He shares what appears to be his own response to fantasy stories through the narrator’s all-consuming and emotional experience in the fairy library. And with this question, asked by the narrator at the end of his journey –
Could I translate the experience of my travels in Fairy Land, into common life? Or must I live it all over again, in the other forms that belong to the world of men, whose experience yet runs parallel to that of Fairy Land?
– MacDonald challenges us to allow reading this journey through Fairy Land to affect how we perceive our own land and the way we live our own lives.