I’ve always had a fascination with Frtiz Lang’s Metropolis that I’ve never been able to explain. Obviously, it’s a visually powerful film and a tremendous influence on later films and later sf. But that imaginative magnificence seemed almost disconnected from the actual story of the movie. To a large extent, that’s because the Metropolis I knew for most of my life was a greatly-reduced version of Lang’s film. On its premiere in 1927, the movie was 4189 metres (13,823 feet) long, and ran 153 minutes; it was subsequently edited heavily, down to about 3100 to 3200 metres, without the input of husband-and-wife team of director Fritz Lang and scriptwriter Thea von Harbou. For decades, only short versions of Metropolis were believed to have survived, with major subplots and characters missing from the movie. A 2002 re-edit from rediscovered footage recreated something close to the original 1927 film and a 2010 version, based on a newly-recovered negative of the film, finally returned Metropolis to Lang and von Harbou’s original vision. Still, even seeing the whole thing, I have that sense of a kind of gap between the literal content of the film and what might be called its latent content — the mythic feel of the world it imagines.

I didn’t entirely understand that gap until I read Thea von Harbou’s novel of the story. Published in 1925, the book clarifies a number of things: elements of the plot, the character motivation, and the symbolism. The use of the pentacle, the presence of a cathedral, the imagery of Babel and Apocalypse, the vision of Moloch superimposed over Metropolis’s machines, and especially the seemingly self-destructive urge of Joh Frederson, “the Master of Metropolis,” all become clearer. At the same time, I was conscious that I was reading the book with memory of the film always present. It seems to me that the two things, book and movie, work together to make a rich and full experience out of a distinctive fusing of science fiction and the gothic.

It has to be said that there’s been some difference of opinions about the book. Critic Holger Bachmann describes the novel as “a disparate, trivialized collection of motifs from various literary sources,” and refers to its “trivial romanticism.” John Clute, in the entry on von Harbou in the SF Encyclopedia, states that novel doesn’t have much of the film’s “symbolic force.” Personally, I tend to agree with Gary Westfahl, who stated that “von Harbou excelled in the one aspect of literary craftsmanship that critics tend to ignore because it is utterly beyond their ability to comprehend: the power of myth-making.” The sense of latent power I felt in the film of Metropolis has to do with its evocation of myth, both old and new, and I think that’s more clearly present in the book. It’s not a technical triumph like the film, but it’s not to be overlooked.

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It’s not uncommon for writers of fictions called ‘literary’ to use science-fictional or fantastic elements in their work. And it’s not uncommon for sf readers to suggest that they’re using those elements wrongly, with a lack of understanding of the material they’re working with — usually, depending on the specific case, either because the writer didn’t understand the history of the way the element in question has been treated in prior (genre) works, or simply because they haven’t thought the logic of what they’re doing through in a rigorous way. Personally, I find this is rarely a problem in the fantastic ‘literary’ works that I read. And, intriguingly, when it is a problem, it’s not necessarily a significant problem.

I recently read Lydia Millet’s 2005 novel, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. Published and promoted as mainstream ‘literary’ fiction, it also contains speculative elements, and was nominated for the Clarke award. It’s an example of what I mean. It’s not an unflawed novel. And perhaps some of the flaws are the kinds that a writer used to genre fiction would naturally avoid. But I don’t think they’re actually critical flaws in the framework of this particular book, which has its interests elsewhere. And, ultimately, the flaws of the book are far outweighed by its successes.

The novel tells a story about Ann and Ben, a librarian and a gardener, who meet three men mysteriously reborn into the year 2003: Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard — three men who were behind the creation of the atomic bomb. The first quarter of the book brings the cast together, and if it doesn’t explain why the scientists have manifested in the world (just as they were at the moment of the first nuclear explosion at the Trinity test site in 1945, and with no memory of anything after that point) it at least establishes that we’re not likely to get any answers. The second quarter of the book follows Ann, Ben, and the scientists as the three physicists travel to Hiroshima, trying to understand the world of the future. In the third quarter of the book, the physicists, having met an eccentric millionaire in Tokyo, begin a crusade for nuclear disarmament. The last quarter sees the crusade reach a climax with a march and violent conclusion in Washington. Although to say all this in this way shortchanges the strangeness of the book: it’s an often-wonderful piece of extravagance, that lives in a heady mix of symbolism and humanity.

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You never know when you’ll find something fantastical to write about.

A little while ago, I started an ongoing project of reading through the novels of Iris Murdoch. This came out of an appreciation of A.S. Byatt’s fiction, which led to me reading her study of Murdoch’s early novel, Degrees of Freedom. That book in turn led me to start in on Murdoch. I loved her first novel, Under the Net, which is something like what might have happened if P.G. Wodehouse had written a philosophical social realist novel. The next book, The Flight From the Enchanter, was well-written but sprawling and felt overly symbolically-determined. So I started on the third novel, 1957’s The Sandcastle, unsure of what I’d find.

It’s set in a town not far from London and deals with an extramarital affair between Bill Mor (known throughout the book as Mor), a teacher at St. Bride’s school for boys, and a young painter named Rain Carter, who comes to the school to paint a portrait of the school’s former headmaster, Demoyte, a longstanding friend of Mor’s. For the first seven chapters, the book unfolds much as you’d expect from a mimetic novel. The background of Mor and his family and his school is sketched in; his political ambitions are described; the implicit conflict with his strong-willed wife Nan is set up; the personality of Rain is implied; a set of accidents throw Mor and Rain into close proximity. The prose is direct, even simple, and on the whole without ornament.

Then we get to chapter eight and everything changes.

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Hilary Mantel’s two novels of Tudor-era statesman Thomas Cromwell, 2009’s Wolf Hall and 2012’s Bring Up the Bodies, have both won the Man Booker prize; a third, The Mirror and the Light, will complete the trilogy, but has not yet been scheduled for publication. I want to write here not about those books, but about 2005’s Beyond Black, the last book Mantel published before embarking on the Cromwell trilogy. Her ninth novel, it was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Orange Prize. It’s a novel of the fantastic, in the broadest sense, and can be approached as fantasy, as horror, even as noir; but may be best understood simply as a thing in itself.

It’s the story of a medium, Alison Hart (born Cheetham, who changed her name for obvious PR reasons), and the business manager she hires, Colette. It follows their relationship, as well as Alison’s half-hearted attempt to recover memories of her abusive childhood. It’s also the story of their relationship with the ghosts who follow Alison, but remain invisible and imperceptible to Colette. One of these is Alison’s principal spirit guide, Morris, and you will find few characters living or dead nastier than he and his friends. Morris is one of a group of thugs from Alison’s past and understanding their background — what Alison did as a girl and what was done to her — becomes the key to the novel.

Or, at least, a key. The book’s notably plotless, in the sense of being defined by actions in sequence that necessitate one another. Things happen, characters change and are revealed, but there’s no tight narrative. The book’s held together by character, by imagery, by tone, and by the fantastic conceit at its heart: the validity of ghosts and psychic experience. To me, that makes it not just a fantasy, but one that’s worth looking at because the fantasy does something unusual — it’s part of the structure of the book in an interesting way.

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A few years ago, a cat came to live with me under unexpected circumstances. (This is getting around to a look at a fantasy novel, and no the novel has nothing to do with cats as such, and yes I have a point.) I’d never had a pet when I was young, so I suddenly found myself dealing with a new range of experiences and emotions; and found also that the depictions in most media of relationships between pets and their humans were notably lacking. There’s a complexity of living with, and to an extent being responsible for, a non-human animal. You have to learn about (and sometimes worry about) diet and medical needs and what certain behaviour patterns mean. You have to learn how to communicate with a creature that does not use words — but which may be surprisingly good at understanding emotions in a voice. These sort of things are rarely shown in most stories about humans and animals, but they’re a crucial part of the experience of dealing with a pet.

Which brings me around to Johanna Sinisalo’s book Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi, a Finnish book translated into English in 2003 by Peter Owen as Not Before Sundown and then again the same year by Herbert Lomas as Troll: A Love Story. The book won the 2000 Finlandia Prize for best novel written by a Finnish citizen and was one of the winners of the 2004 Tiptree Award, apparently in the Owen translation. I read the Lomas version, and was impressed by the prose and structure, by the book’s conceptual flexibility and symbolic heft, and by Sinisalo’s depiction of a man coming to learn to live with an inhuman creature — specifically, a troll. It’s not quite a ‘pet’ in the sense of a domesticated animal, and the relationship between man and troll is certainly different than that of the usual human and pet. But some of what the main human character feels and does is recognisable to me as somebody who lives with a cat.

And I think that kind of relationship informs the basic theme of the book: otherness and the things one person projects on another. Sinisalo’s book acknowledges that the most profoundly ‘other’ creatures around us are the animals we call ‘pets.’ They are adopted members of our families; but do not share the biology that makes us what we are, and that shapes how a human thinks. Their thought processes are alien to us. We try to understand them, we think we come to know them, but for all our good intentions probably still can’t help but project ourselves onto them. That tendency to project fears, hopes, and narratives onto others is I think what drives Sinisalo’s book.

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Normally, I write here about fantasy (which to me includes science fiction and horror). But some mimetic novels have a lot to say about the fantastic. Or a lot to say about related themes; wonder, for example, or the numinous. Those books are sometimes worth discussing at Black Gate, I think. Which is why I want to write now about Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy — classics of Canadian literature, novels deeply concerned with wonder — and consider whether they should have been even more open to the fantastic than they in fact are.

For there are moments in these books that at least touch on the fantastic. They’re a set of three interrelated bildungsromans, life stories told in different situations to different audiences. Running through them are themes of magic (both stage magic and actual magic), of dreams, of sainthood and miracles. They’re books concerned with the transfiguration of the mundane by the perception of the numinous. That’s risky terrain, something that can easily come off as banal, but Davies avoids the easy romanticisation of the miraculous in favour of a more complex romanticism — a self-aware examination of the joy that comes with Romance, faced with the claims of the soi-disant Real.

The books are also an in-depth investigation of the subconscious, from a primarily Jungian standpoint; one of the novels, in fact, is essentially the record of a man’s therapy with a Jungian analyst. The trilogy seems to suggest that it’s important to dig a recognition of the magic of the world out of the subconscious. To an extent, it anticipates Urusla Le Guin’s idea in her essay “Why are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” of fantasy as threatening to the North American Puritan mentality, which reacts with censorship and repression. But reading Davies, I found myself wondering, in fact, whether he and his writing had been hindered by that drive to repress the fantastic; whether that repression had been internalised more than Davies and his early critics realised. To explore this, I’ll need to write a bit about Davies and his times and the Canada from whence he came. But it’s best to start with the books themselves.

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One of the distinct pleasures of book fairs and used book sales is finding an intriguing book you’ve never heard of. A greater and related pleasure comes when that book turns out to be quite good. Then, in reaction to that, there’s a melancholy that sets in from the fact that a worthwhile book is largely unknown. I’d like to think I can take the edge off that last sense by writing about some of these books here. So, given all that, a few words about Virgil Burnett’s Towers at the Edge of a World:

First published in 1980 by St. Martin’s Press and republished in 1983 by The Porcupine’s Quill with illustrations by the author, it’s a collection of 15 short stories and an introduction, all set in an imaginary French town in times ranging from the Dark Ages through to the near-present. It’s tied together by imagery and theme more than plot, both as a whole and in the individual stories. There’s little dialogue or drama, though more as the book goes on — it could be seen to be replicating the (supposed) historical development of a sense of character.

Born in Kansas in 1928, Burnett passed away last year. As well as being an author, teacher, and acquaintance of Stein and Joyce, he was an artist and art historian whose work included cover illustrations for Penguin (I’ve included examples of his art that I’ve found online alongside this article). From 1974 to his death, he lived in Stratford, Ontario, where he taught Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo. In addition to Towers, he wrote Skiamachia: A Fantasy (1982), A Comedy of Eros (1984), a collection of short stories called Farewell Tour (1986), and Scarbo Edge: A Romaunt (2008). He co-wrote two mystery novels with Bruce Barber under the name Bevan Underhill, The Bloody Man (1993) and The Running Girl (1994), and with Barber co-edited the 2004 anthology, Habaneras, which he published through his own Pasdeloup Press. In 2010, he published an essay on drawing, Object and Emblem. In 2003, a translation of his play Leonora was published in French; I can’t find a record of an English publication.

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