It’s also a trope that kind of drives me nuts, because it almost always feels like a cheat. I had a writing professor in college who once said that the job of the writer was to either make the commonplace seem unfamiliar, or make the unfamiliar seem commonplace, and that resonated with me and my firmly entrenched genre-ghetto sensibilities. I never found slice-of-life domestic dramas to be my cup of tea, but if an author could make me see household chores or family dinners in a way I never had before, maybe that had some merit. On the flip side, having read my fair share of fantasy and sci-fi both awesome and wretched, I could see in retrospect that the forgettable stuff was idea-driven but not terribly relatable, while the memorable stories had more human hearts (to borrow a cliché).
It’s been very trendy for the past decade or so to bash Star Wars, but for the moment let’s assume that it (the original trilogy at the very least) belongs in the memorable-and-awesome pile. I have to give it up for the fact that Star Wars is a straight-faced soap opera fairy tale that exists in its own self-contained world. Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader live out experiences that are utterly alien, but the power of the story comes from recognizable emotions, from Luke’s longing for a more meaningful existence to Vader’s pursuit of power at the expense of the children he never knew (the cat’s in the cradle!!!) and his ultimate redemption. I would respect Star Wars so much less if it were the story of a Nebraska farmboy who falls into a space warp and ends up trained by a couple of old alien Jedi to save a galaxy far, far away.
Because it just seems like the easiest, laziest possible way out. If an author wants to tell a story involving a character like Jabba the Hutt, his or her task is to make that character concept believable and compelling when most people’s initial reaction to the thought of a vaguely humanoid gluttonous giant slug is that it doesn’t make sense. A movie-maker can build the giant slug out of foam and latex (or CGI, although I’ve ranted about my problems with the uncanny valley here before) and capture it on film and give us no choice but to accept the reality of it. A truly good writer can describe the essence of the idea in terms that bring it to life. A less-gifted writer can describe the idea by way of familiar metaphors to at least convey a general grasp of the idea. A hack writer would have the Earth-origin fish-out-of-water character look at the giant slug and say “I can’t believe what I’m seeing, it doesn’t make any sense, and yet there it is!” To be fair to my introductory examples, C.S. Lewis and Stephen R. Donaldson are both talented writers who don’t come close to the last instance. But there’s no shortage of hacks employing that method, either.
And it’s not just a matter of talent – to me, it feels like a matter of trust. I’m the one who picked up the book with the wyvern-carved ziggurats on the cover, so presumably I’m willing to suspend disbelief and figure out the rules of the world the author is building. When the author then includes a protagonist from Bayonne who will tell me that the warlock’s potion tasted like Kool-Aid, I feel like my intelligence is being insulted.
All this made me deeply skeptical when I started in on Spellsinger by Alan Dean Foster, which pretty much opens right off the bat with Jonathan Thomas Meriweather waking up in a fantasy world but fairly convinced he is just tripping on some enhanced weed back in his dorm room in California. I was actually deeply, doubly skeptical, because this seemed to open the door to a secondary trope which I find even more annoying: the character who keeps saying “This can’t be real, it must be a dream!” through most if not all of the adventure. (Donaldson uses this one too, hence “the Unbeliever”, but really he subverts the hell out of it and kind of makes that the entire point of the series.) I will grant that “Am I dreaming?” is a natural and appropriate response to surreal circumstances, but the trope becomes deeply annoying when the character’s doubts persist well beyond when logic should dispel them, to the point of overstaying their welcome within the narrative (which happens a lot).
(In college a buddy of mine and I used to talk about how great it would be to write a novel where fantastical things happen and the protagonist never once (a) thinks he’s dreaming or (b) tries to find the rational, scientific explanation for things. Said protagonist would simply take things at face value, as if he’s being menaced by a powerful necromancer and his vampire army, which in fact he is. Said protagonist would obviously need to be well-versed in fantasy to recognize it immediately, and thus would be an RPG-obsessed comic book fan … like me and my buddy.)
But back to Spellsinger. Jon-Tom (as the denizens of the fantasy world quickly take to calling the protagonist) gets over the “I’m dreaming” phase mercifully quickly and takes his surroundings refreshingly at face value. So much so, in fact, that I began to wonder why Foster had bothered making him an abductee from our world at all, when basically the same story could have been told with a generic Medieval Farmboy Lad in the same reluctant hero role. But once the story really started coming together, I had to admit that Foster needed Jon-Tom to be from our world.
Because as it turns out, Jon-Tom can tap into magical powers in the fantasy world, but he can only access them by playing a musical instrument and singing. On Earth, Jonathan had fuzzy dreams about becoming a rock star, and learned to play some guitar and cover some classics, which gives him just enough practical skills to become a (so far, middling) spellsinger in the fantasy setting.
And before you object that Foster could have written about a non-Earth farmboy who wanted to become a troubadour and ended up a spellsinger, remember the analogy of writing:music::dancing:architecture. A non-Earth farmboy would by definition only know non-Earth songs, and Foster would be forced to describe these melodies abstractly, and invent lyrics with potentially unintentionally hilarious results. But by connecting the spellsinger to American pop music, Foster can simply say that Jon-Tom played and sang Purple Haze and produced a mystical violet light display, or summoned a river dragon via Yellow Submarine. Just invoking those song titles gets them playing in your head and frees Foster up to move the story along. Which is pretty much the best justification for the Earth-fish-out-of-water trope I can think of. (I may be biased because I think the lyrics-interpreted-into-magic-results concept is so clever that I am actually disappointed whenever JonTom is not spellsinging. The songs he thinks might apply to certain situations, and then discards for one reason or another, are just as entertaining. Personally I could play the song/situation matching game endlessly.)
So Spellsinger has swordplay and magic and talking animals and lots of stuff I eat up, plus a big victory in using a trope that usually drags my enjoyment way down, so I’d have to say overall it was a worthwhile read. This is encouraging, because I seem to have stumbled into a long series once again. Spellsinger has nothing resembling a proper, satisfying ending and I will soon be looking for a used copy of the next installment. The copy of Spellsinger I have is an early printing, from when it was only the first book of a trilogy, but Wikipedia tells me the series went on to eight volumes. So maybe I will end up getting more than my fill of dinosaur rock lyrics as incantations when all is done and sung after all.
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