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.

Layers of Impossibility

“The Tawny Bitch”, Nisi Shawl

(In Mojo: Conjure Stories, edited by Nalo Hopkinson, Warner Aspect, 2003)

“To hold intercourse with you, even through so attenuated a medium as this, will give me strength to endure whatever trials lie ahead.”

So writes Belle, an imprisoned quadroon heiress, to her schoolmate lover, in Nisi Shawl’s gothic thriller. But it is really through the agency of the tawny bitch—the manifestation of the spirit of Belle’s mother—that Belle receives her strength and succor… and, ultimately, her means of escape.

Or not. Belle’s epistolary narrative, written in urine on scrap paper, ends abruptly. Filling up the silence that follows, an anonymous (and clueless) commentator describes the circumstances of finding the letters, and his or her (failed) attempts to verify the people and places mentioned in them.

Belle’s schooling has filed off the texture and interest of her mother’s Yoruba culture, in which “the barrier between life and death was but a thin and permeable membrane”, leaving her with only her late father’s worship of Reason. In reclaiming the former, the anonymous commentator believes Belle has fully abandoned the latter… that the tawny bitch is a delusion, and that Belle has, in fact, been driven mad.

Shawl’s story slyly challenges belief—both in Belle’s story, and in the fact of her letters having been found (and recognized) at all.

Story as witchcraft

“The Fool’s Tale”, L. Timmel Duchamp

(In Leviathan Three, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre, Ministry of Whimsy Press, 2002)

“As is always the case with any text, whether the tale is truth or fiction, readers will have to decide for themselves.”

Pieced together from a set of hidden documents, Duchamp’s sharp and entertaining faux-scholarly work centers on the ladies of the court of James I, and on the conflict between ideal and reality for women in matters of love and marriage. This conflict is brought into focus by a court performance of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”, in which certain men and women of the court are (not always flatteringly) reflected.

The fool of the tale, Xaviera Cristiana Morley, is a dwarf (and presumed issue of the devil) whose talents include shape-shifting and magical storytelling. For the benefit of Queen Anne and the other court ladies, she opens the way to the imaginary Illyria, where they can see for themselves whether Olivia’s and Viola’s stories end happily (as the men of the court assert they must) or unhappily (as the women believe). There, they find Olivia unhappily married, while Viola, still dressed as a boy, awaits the fickle Orsino’s completion of his love-test—the recovering of her maiden weeds.

Cristiana writes down the tale of the journey for the Countess of Bedford, who is shrewd enough to know that admitting the reality of its magic would be perilous in the court of a king obsessively fearful of witchcraft. And yet story is, itself, a form of magic.

“The Fool’s Tale” is a pleasure from beginning to end, scholarly writing (complete with footnotes) bracketing and commenting upon Cristiana’s narrative. The author (appearing as herself in a neat bit of verisimilitude) chooses to believe the better story, that Cristiana’s magic is real, and brings the power of that magic full circle.