Fantastic Metropolis

“So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story…?”

—Yann Martel, Life of Pi

When I think about the novels and stories that moved me in 2003, I perceive a common set of elements running through them all: spirit, story, and need—specifically the need to believe (or to disbelieve) the manifestation of spirit within the story. Each novel and short work seemed, essentially, to reduce down to a question of faith—be it faith in God, faith in a lover, faith in magic, or faith in the teller of the story.

Story as Destruction

Affinity, Sarah Waters

(Riverhead Books, 1999)

“Doesn’t it seem to you, now you are here, that anything might be real, since Millbank is?”

Darker than both Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, Sarah Waters’ second novel, the story of Selina Dawes, a spiritualist convicted of fraud and assault and sent to Millbank Prison, and Margaret Prior, the emotionally unstable “lady visitor” who falls in love with her, explores the idea of belief that succors and belief that poisons, and shows that they are often one and the same. Waters also examines disparate levels of class, punishment and privilege, and female invisibility. And in a characteristic twist, Margaret’s journal, though it dominates the novel, is ultimately revealed to be the record of a minor character in another’s love story.

Story as Salvation

Life of Pi, Yann Martel

(Harcourt, 2001)

“I have a story that will make you believe in God.”

The story of Pi Patel, the shipwrecked boy who survives in a lifeboat with an adult Bengal tiger, is by turns painful, tender, and laugh-out-loud funny. “I am a person who believes in form, in the harmony of order,” he says. “Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape.” The structure of the novel—exactly 100 chapters—reflects that shaping of experience. So, to a much greater extent, does his belief in God. His ultimate point—that choosing God is choosing the better of two stories—will frustrate literalists who have expected proof over faith, but I found the equating of story with spirituality to be deeply satisfying.

A Fairytale for the Fairies

“The Birdcatcher”, Erika Peterson

(Strange Horizons, 2003)

“She had put aside her belief in the Birdcatcher back when she put aside her dolls and her plastic horses; she was as rational and modern as any shape-changing crow-woman could be. The sudden hope she felt now was both wonderful and bitter.”

Young lovers, a betrayal of trust, a seemingly-impossible task… these are the traditional elements upon which Erika Peterson builds her urban fairytale of faith and redemption, in which shape-changers rub shoulders with political interns in Washington D. C. Peterson’s mix of formal fairytale language and contemporary setting and speech is stylish and, at times, wickedly funny. But within the playfulness lies a deeper story of faith… from the protagonist’s faith in the fairy tale she finds herself living, to the shape-changers’ faith (or lack of faith) in the existence of the Birdcatcher—their own mythical figure of healing and salvation, whose sudden proof of existence provokes both bitterness and joy. That these reactions to spirit come from beings themselves fantastical makes the story all the more poignant.