Those teenage years… weirdness personified, no longer a child but not quite a grown-up. Hormonal and a little scared yet impatient for the future. These are the ‘in-between’ years and good teen fantasy books add to that experience of the ‘threshold’ by preparing a questioning mind for what lies ahead…
I was a greedy reader as a child. Ahead of my class at school, one day I was invited by my teacher to pick a book outside the general curriculum. The book I chose was, apparently, ‘too advanced’ for my reading age, so I was told to pick something else, something less challenging. I was very young, 7 or 8 or thereabouts, but I can still recall my confusion and anger, not so much at being denied a crack at something ‘challenging’ but the fact I was being forced to endure yet more inane stories of cute kids and their cute pets.
Some moments are formative, this one, along with the time I was made to search the school library for a book that had its index in the front, informed my future bloody-mindedness and set me on an independent course of learning that ran parallel to – though outside – the school system. Two paths that never met until years later when I plunged into art school.
I’d devoured Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and the Tibetan Book of the Dead by the age of 17 simply because they were deemed ‘difficult’ or ‘weird’, and because I could. I wanted to know what the adults knew, and I wanted to… you know, impress girls. These were both errors of judgement, and I’ve lately found myself in slight agreement with JG Ballard that some books shouldn’t be read too early in life.
None of this is to brag, but it’s to suggest that sometimes “no” can be the spur you need, and to thank Miss Willett for unknowingly launching me onto a path of the most enthralling winters of my early-reading life. Winters that opened new worlds and which lead to the icy, fiery embrace of the German Idealists and French existentialists via a single literary threshold…
“The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is Abraxas.”
—Hermann Hesse, Demian
Hermann Hesses’s Demian is a short and unsettling work, a coming-of-age tale of social, sexual and spiritual awakening. For my enquiring mind and body, it was the perfect route through a book-littered youth and encompassed what today, at a stretch (my stretch), might be called ‘young adult fiction’…
If you know the book you’ll probably disagree, it’s Hesse after all, but I’ll explain…
Teenage minds, possibly more than any other, are questioning minds. They’re curious for answers but they’re no longer gullible nor in thrall to a myth of wholeness. They’ve learned imperfection. They may even have witnessed death. They’ve seen that the world is full of lies, fear and bullshit. They’re an untidy mass of exploring eyes and probing intelligence and, crucially, their compliance has not yet been bought by Capital. Curiosity is an energy that ignites pre-coital imaginations and encourages a search for impossible things. Cynical, yet energised, life for the ‘in-betweener’ still has ‘adventure’ and ‘possibility’ writ large on the can.
To the young adult, it’s not a choice between the red pill or the blue pill, it’s both. Hesse’s Demian perfectly encapsulates this ‘exploratory uncertainty’.
Good YA novels drill an obscure vein, the adventure feels both real and unreal, echoing the excitement and fear of nascent adulthood. It’s a ‘middle earth’, not in the sense of Tolkein’s one-dimensional wizards and hobbits but in the sense of profound ambiguity. Good versus evil and the implied moral imperative, (whether or not it’s a metaphorical dig at the Nazis) is the stuff of childhood. The young adult is empowered by an un-decidability at the heart of things, which mirrors day to day existence, a place at least temporarily, beyond good and evil.
Once you’ve entered this space, admired The Gorgon, you’re pretty much hooked. At this age the imagination is not just an ‘escape’, it’s driven by an inquiring desire that rounds on itself, self-examines and demands answers.
I recall all this quite clearly from my own teenage years…
I was never a bullied kid, but the library marks you, especially on a close-knit council estate where everybody fights everybody. The ‘library-run’ was not a metaphor but I was athletic, so I had no problem out-running the bigger kids who were determined to punish me for my nerdy-ness as I returned my latest bunch of reads. I remember several instances of being locked in the library, waiting for the gang outside to lose interest… the (mostly) female librarians were sirens watching my back, I loved them all. I dreamed about them incessantly…
This all added to the seductiveness of the written word and I could no more let it go than halt the teen habits that spoiled my bed sheets.
With this reminiscence in mind, I recently found myself ensnared within Railsea by China Miéville. I have a habit of gobbling up the works of writers I take to and had entered, without researching, the world of my third Miéville in as many weeks. I hadn’t realised this particular book was classified ‘YA fantasy’ by which time I was already hooked, already in love with the characters. I had no real option but to go deeper…
What I liked most about the story, apart from the typically rich imagery was its ‘broken heart’. The best fantasy literature leverages human frailty — hearts are made to be broken then fixed and maybe broken again, but never ignored… Accordingly, characters loved and betrayed each other. Shipmates stood firm and didn’t. Friends were sometimes enemies. There was blood…the ground constantly shifted but behind it all stood a profound hope that things can be better, a belief that people can change, and that fallibility is not a mortal sin.
The best teen fantasy books open a door to fluidity without making a show and without getting mired in ideology. It celebrates difference without fetishizing… no agenda, no ‘ism’.
Miéville does this so well, quietly subverting the hero myth, he ‘corrupts’ in the best sense. Never preachy, he’ll present alternative ways of thinking, seeing, being and living. His powers of description are immense, he’ll give you credible and incredible alternatives that will push the limits your imagination, your sense of what’s possible…
The suspension of disbelief that energises Railsea and beats a path towards Miéville’s adult novels is not just about the plot line and the well-defined characters, and most definitely not the vain hope that ‘brokenness’ can be fixed. What lifts the story off the page is its celebration of incompleteness, and the resulting sense of possibility that endures in the face of the great unknown.
This is the unique ingredient of well-crafted teen fiction in all its flavours.
For the mature reader, part of the pleasure of teen fantasy books is to read through the eyes of your younger self… to critically revisit your own fall from pre-hormonal ‘Eden’, those brief years just before you gain a credit-rating and become a fixed, identifiable point in time and space. There’s a flexibility in youth that we as adults are likely to miss or dismiss in our need for outcomes. At its core, the YA fantasy novel allows the dream to live without conclusion. It encourages play with all the aspects of an evolving personality not yet burdened by itself or its responsibilities. ‘Reality’ is deferred, its readers continue to question the prevailing mythology that adults actually know what the hell they’re doing and why…
It’s a utopian impulse, but it’s also a critique of utopia that acknowledges, even welcomes, its own brokenness. Thus, it breathes.
Reading Miéville and other YA fiction writers as an adult, at the very least, serves to remind me of the ‘energetic wisdom’ of uncertainty. In an accelerating and digitised 21st century that’s slowly unravelling the ‘certainties’ crafted in 20th century stone, that could be huge… the strength to dream will surely be a required skill set in the anthropocene.
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