One of the many paradoxes of my life is that: though the stories I consumed avidly as a child were all from the realm of fantasy and mythology, most of them narrated to me by people I grew up around, as an adult I can’t bring myself to read any work of fantasy. And I am forced to admit that this stubborn resistance to the works of fantasy deprives me of the pleasure of reading some of the most celebrated works of contemporary and classic fiction.
It’s not as if I haven’t tried enough. I genuinely have. In fact, I am one of those masochist readers who go on reading the book until they finish it, even if they don’t like it at all. Last year I picked up Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean At The End Of The Lane. Driven by his huge popularity and personal charm, I somehow convinced myself to read his work, despite knowing that he serves his fiction with a generous dose of fantasy. I was excited. It was my first Gaiman. I told myself, “you will be a good boy; you will not fuss; he is one of the most important contemporary voices of the literary world; you will read him patiently.” Alas! Even my literary masochism could not force me to finish the slender book. I must have read about three quarters of it before I gave up. This is not a commentary on the quality of his writing—it’s wonderful and amusing. Rather, it’s about my inability to fully relish fantasy now.
There was a time in the latter half of the century when the genre of magic-realism had opened floodgates of imagination for writers. Many of the post-colonial writers seized on this new territory and produced works that are now counted among contemporary classics, such as, One Hundred Years Of Solitude and Midnight’s Children etc. Magic realism was an attempt to marry two major tributaries of literature, namely, realism and fantasy. As I read some of these brilliant books, I realised that even they did not move me the way I had expected them to. They amazed me; they wowed me; but they did not move me. And when I read (for pleasure), I want to be moved emotionally. So even this subset of fantasy with its strong semblance of realism, I realised, did not appeal to me.
I was one of those kids who were oblivious to the extraordinary sway of the Harry Potter series. Later on when I got to know about it and realised how crazy most people my age are about it, I toyed with the idea of reading it. But, of course, I couldn’t. I found myself too old to be reading it; when I read the synopsis, I realise that if as a child I had the opportunity to read the series I may have devoured it; but now at this stage, I could not bring myself to invest in the struggles of the little bespectacled wizard with the dark forces.
From the books that I read now, I have come to demand a world populated by real people struggling with real problems—and God knows (does he?) that there are aplenty. While I understand that most fantasy is strongly underpinned by real-life incidents, I have grown too impatient for veiled metaphors and indirection. I like books that call a spade a spade and not a witch’s spatula. I now demand fiction to be as brutal, untidy, and unresolved as life. And I think it’s far more difficult to capture life with all its squalor and shapelessness. Squalor: that we live through daily but that makes us uncomfortable when we encounter it in art. In life there are no neat resolutions, there is no triumph of the good over evil. However, one must also concede that in many instances fantasy has been the ultimate resort of writers who write in an environment or for an audience that is hostile to free and unvarnished expression of thoughts. (We still live in a world where writers, bloggers, activists are being hacked to death.)
Perhaps, my aversion for fantasy stems from the fact that mythology had such a strong influence on my psyche while I was growing up that it was difficult to undo it until much later; and maybe I still haven’t been able to undo it fully. As a (wannabe) writer I had once resolved to never write stories that are purely imaginary, because, I thought it will make me complicit with the myth-makers who instill false hope in people and don’t let them see the world the way it is. I wonder which of the two resolves I am going to break first: that of reading fantasy, or that of writing it.
