I recently finished a novel called, "The Grail of Hearts". It's a retelling of the grail story. The problem is that the author gets lost in the magic. One layer on top of the other. In the afterward, she describes the somewhat obscure German sources she uses and that's fascinating but she doesn't pull it off well.
I'm currently reading Harry Potter to my daughter and it reminds me of how well J.K. Rowlings uses magic throughout the series. I think one of the keys is to have strict rules regarding it. I think having a school setting where children are learning the rules is helpful to keep it in bounds. Another series of books that handle magic well is The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The writer never gets lost in it, maybe because he always comes back to the main characters leprosy and his damaged spirit as a result of it.
There is a writer about the grail legend that does the magic well and that is Marion Zimmer Bradley in the Mists of Avalon. It is not a simple story but she manages it, I think because she has a certain point to get across about the image of God as mother and that is the heart of her story (not the magic).
I have yet to use magic in any story (I don't classify psychic ability as magic). It's tempting but I don't think I'm ready for it yet, given my skepticism about the use of it in stories.
So, what do you all think? Perhaps I'm too skittish.
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4 comments:
I certainly think you have the right approach to how it should be used. However, it sounds like you're trying to figure out where and why it should be used, which is just as, if not more important.
The use of magic is a fine line. Sometimes authors turn to it as a panacea, and if magic can fix everything, what's the point of having a conflict in the first place? Alternately, they spend more time talking about the magic than the plot, and that's not a story, that's a fictional encyclopedia.
I'm right with you on this one. Magic by iteslf is boring.
Ditto what the rest of them said. And what you said.
My biggest pet peeve with magic is the bringing back to life bit...which Rowling pushed just a bit for me, but she still managed to pull it off. There must be rules! Otherwise there's anarchy! Which has its own special magic.
I love magic. But just because it's got to be so defined in order to be effectively portrayed. I love it because of the amount of variation you can have between one definition and another definition. Me, for example, I like big, flashy, lots of noise an pretty lights magic. Big powers, cosmic broo-ha. Juxtaposed against Tolkien magic, where you can't even exactly notice it unless you read really closely, paused every now and then, and consider if there was any magic in that passage at all. Tolkien so often seems to just suggest that the magic that is in Middleearth is just a piece of the down and dirty natural, and ain't even magic. I have hard luck thinking the sentence "palantirs ARE magic..."
But I had to put definition, rules, and tight regulations on my big, flashy, noisy magic. As much as anyone. Which was fun.
I like magic. And I like Terry Pratchett. He's cool.
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