The Door in the Hill, Part One

This has always and continues to puzzle me: If I am such an agnostic, why do I like certain stories about angels? And if I am such a good skeptic, why do I love to read and write about Faerie?

This has been on my mind since I recently read Chris Adrian’s “A Tiny Feast” in the New Yorker, in which Oberon and Titania’s stolen human child is dying of leukemia in a pediatric hospital in San Francisco. Adrian does Faerie very well. This is the description of the Faerie procession from the hospital to their home under the hill. The Faeries in the boy’s hospital room have been mostly invisible until their grief reveals their true otherworldly nature as they troop through the antiseptic corridors and down the elevator and outside the hospital, bearing the body of the changeling.

There was no disguise left to cover them. People saw them for what they were, a hundred and two faeries and a dead boy proceeding down the hall with harps and flutes, crowded in the service elevator with fiddles and lutes, marching out of the hospital with drums. Mortals gaped. Dogs barked. Cats danced on their hind feet, and birds followed them by the dozens, hopping along and cocking their heads from side to side. It was early afternoon. The fog was breaking against the side of the hill, leaving Buena Vista Park brilliantly sunny. They passed through the ordinary trees of the park, and then into the extraordinary trees of their own realm, and came to the door in the hill, and passed through that as well.

As it happens, Adrian is a pediatric oncoloist and student of divinity as well as a fantasy novelist, and his story is full of very closely observed medical detail about the running of the hospital and the details of the boy's chemotherapy, while at the same time chock full of spectacularly imagined, and very real, touches of Faerie. My favorite of these is probably the boy's blanket, Beastie, which is alive.

Adrian's story got thinking, immersed as I am currently in various nonfiction science projects, what it is about this kind of thing attracts me (though not so far to the point of dressing in velvet capes and sporting Elvish tattoos at Cons). I am actually pretty allergic to angel and fairy and dragon schlock. But the fact remains I have published five fantasy novels, three of them written while I was working full time as a science editor.

The angel part is easier to explain. When my childhood faith eroded away to agnosticism, the angels remained. My old UCC beliefs are there, somewhere, like my spiritual appendix, but I have reached a point in my trajectory of belief where I can no longer tell people in good conscience that I am keeping them in my prayers. I can look up into the Milky Way, spread across the desert sky in Utah, and feel wonder and awe and mystery, but it falls short of a view of God that can mesh with everything I accept about how life on Earth came to be, or account for the problem of evil. I Just Don’t Know. And I frankly never saw this not-knowing thing coming.

Reconciling my love of science and fantasy, and my double life as a science editor and fantasy writer, has always been harder, for some reason. But I’ve always like my fantasy grounded with close observation of the natural world and the quotidian details: Merlin’s newspaper. I’m thinking here of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Kingdoms of Elfin (her changeling story, “The One and the Other,” is terrific and T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, E. Nesbit’s “The Deliverers of Their Country,” and Nancy Willard’s essays in The Angel in the Parlor. It’s probably why I care so much more about the contents of Bilbo Baggins’s larder than I do what’s actually being said at the Council of Elrond. I like my fantasy psychologically real and grounded, like fulgerites, those casts of fused sand that lightning sometimes leaves behind in the ground: solid evidence of the ethereal. I like the way Chris Adrian walks me through the ordinary trees of the park, through the extraordinary trees of his realm, until I somehow find myself standing with a hand on the doorknob of a door in a hill, not quite sure how I got there, but glad I came.

For reasons I still don’t understand, science and fantasy are for me both powerful ways of explaining experience and revealing the unseen, and they are daily practices that both rely on the action of my imagination: my ability to see in my mind something I cannot see with my eyes. And maybe I will never explain it to myself any better than that.

(The image is Hume Nisbet's 1908 watercolor, The Fairy Falls.)

The Natural History and Evolutionary Biology of Dragons

OK, this is my new guilty pleasure: An Animal Planet show from 2005 called Dragon's World: Fantasy Made Real. We got it from Netflix, and I honestly think I enjoyed it as much as or more than the Budza. A rogue paleontologist finds a frozen carcass that may or may not be a dragon, and with his reputation in tatters he goes off in a helicopter (!) to try and get more evidence for his dragon theory. Not a very promising beginning, but lo and behold the writers actually manage to weave in a lot of bona fide scientific detail: these dragons have breeding colors and use fire for sexual display as well as to subdue prey; they have to patrol their territories against competitors for food and mates; a male is shown blowing on his mate's eggs to cool them, so they will develop into daughters and not sons who might turn into rivals. In this imagining, dragons escaped the KT asteroid by taking to the seas, and then radiating into niches around the globe. A particularly nice segment shows a Chinese forest dragon stalking prey through a bamboo thicket. Of course, there is a pounding rock soundtrack and some scenery chewing by the lead paleontologist, but not enough to really derail this for the true dragon and natural history enthusiast.

The writers and producers availed themselves of science consultant Peter J.Hogarth of the University of York, and it shows. Hogarth has published on various aspects of mangroves and the family lives of fish and crabs, but his interests seem to include the folklore or mythological fauna. If anyone were going to be Walker of Walker's Dragons of the Old World, I think it would be Professor Hogarth.

Throughout the program I kept thinking about a favorite book of mine, The Flight of Dragons, by Peter Dickinson. The Animal Planet mockumentary seems to be a case of convergent evolution, in terms of the biologically plausible details of how such unaerodynamic creatures as dragons could fly or how they could breathe fire. That book was published by Pierrot in 1979 and then was maddeningly out of print for nearly 20 years until Overlook Press rereleased it in 1998, when I finally got my own copy. The fantasy art by Wayne Anderson is High Seventies: straight out of Heavy Metal magazine or the album art of a certain kind of trippy folk rock band, like Fairport Convention.

It turns out Dickinson at 80 plus is still going strong, has a website, and there you can read all about how The Flight of Dragons came to be. Like so many things worth knowing about, it had its beginnings on a train.

And--oh, my God!--he's written mysteries. I knew that, but never seem to remember when I'm frozen in indecision, staring at the mystery shelves in a library or bookstore (you know the feeling: you're in a restaurant with an enormous menu, and you have no idea what you're in the mood for). Now I know what I'm doing for the next decade or so, readingwise. I mean, what's not to like about a book that has a title like The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest, and has as its plot the remnants of a primitive New Guinea tribe and a female anthropologist keeping house in West London?