What Alcibiades said to him was this:
“O Erixymachus, best possible son to the best possible, the most temperate father: Hi!”
—Plato, Symposium, tr. Nehamas & Woodruff
Welcome, creatures! In this edition, children’s books where magic is fake, but mystery is real.
Rachel Manija Brown has this very fun post, “When did we stop caring that elves aren’t real?”: “Starting around the 1950s, a number of books in English for children had the message that magic isn't real. Helpfully for the historical cause, many of them won Newbery Medals or Honor, so they are very easy to come across.”
If you describe it like that, these books sound miserable—the worst kind of bait-and-switch. And it seems like a lot of them are the exact depressing, materialistic, moralizing thing you’re picturing:
The basic plot is that Protagonist Kid meets a kid (Tragic Kid) who claims that magic (elves, etc) is real. The kids do magic spells, make elf homes, etc. Protagonist Kid usually isn't sure that the magic is real, but wants to believe that it is. At the end it is revealed that magic is definitely not real, there are no elves, and Tragic Kid was making it all up to cover up for the fact that their father is abusive/their mother is an addict/they have no parents and are living alone/etc. Protagonist Kid is sadder but wiser.
These anti-enchantment award winners provoked a certain backlash, which I’m going to call antidisenchantmentarianism, because I can.
But as I was grinning and shaking my head knowingly at this post, I realized—one of my favorite children’s authors, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, actually goes to this well several times, and the results are my favorites among her books. How does she do it? How does she tell stories in which magic isn’t real—which are often about the discovery that the magic isn’t real—while still imbuing them with mystery and wonder?
(Spoilers for the children’s section of 1985, I guess?)
Snyder also wrote actual fantasy: I liked her Below the Root trilogy. But my favorites are the two and a half books she demagicks: The Egypt Game, The Witches of Worm, and sort of The Headless Cupid. ALL THREE OF THESE were Newbery Honor books, they’re her only ones that got that shiny medal on the covers, so yes, the Newbery medal had a type and it was “elves are fake.” Which elf hurt you, Newbery Medal?
ANYWAY The Egypt Game has several plotlines, but one of them is, “The mysterious messages appearing in a shrine to a pagan god are being written by normal people, not magic.” Cupid is about a poltergeist which turns out to be—mostly, maybe not entirely—the stepsister the reader already suspected. And the plot of Worm is basically, “Sometimes if you mistreat a cat, because you’re very unhappy, it isn’t nice to you.”
The Egypt Game offers so much pure pleasure—the kids forging unlikely friendships via made-up “Egyptian” rituals, learning to accept April’s fake eyelashes and Marshall’s everpresent stuffed octopus and Ken’s constant embarrassment about having fun. Alton Raible’s illustrations are perfect, as always.
Alongside the “discovery of Egypt” plotline, another plot is unfolding—a serial killer stalking children in the neighborhood. The magic of Egypt takes on a threatening aura as mysterious messages appear, and it becomes clear that someone is watching the children: maybe the slumping, glowering mud-sculpture god Set, or maybe someone worse.
But this threat isn’t where the novel opens onto mystery. At the end of the book we learn that there was nothing supernatural about what happened in “Egypt.” But it doesn’t feel like a disappointment, because the real explanation opens a doorway into the mysteries of loneliness, longing, grief, and hope. The book’s ending centers on a key, and the ending itself feels like a key into a world beyond anyone’s understanding: a devastated land, slowly putting out the first green feelers and small unfurling blossoms, a human heart.
In Worm, too, the mystery comes from the strangeness of an individual soul. But in this case it’s a little girl, neglected and furious, who is tempted to increasingly-violent acts. She thinks her foul, scrawny cat is the tempter, but the voice in her head is her own. This is a pretty raw book: that Blake line, The human face a furnace seal’d, but the face is the face of an elementary-schooler.
The Headless Cupid is an exception here, since the conflict within the blended family is basically normal—well-depicted, very funny, but not haunting. Possibly the overall realistic, kitchen-sink tone of the interpersonal conflicts and their resolution explains why Snyder left certain mysteries unsolved, certain gates to the supernatural rattling slightly on their latch.
I guess what I’m saying here is that Snyder’s books get away with “magic isn’t real” because she herself seems to feel so palpably that people are mysterious: unruly, unpredictable, capable of change and regeneration but not manageable by clear moral guidance. (St John Newman says, “The management of our hearts is quite above us.”) Her characters often don’t want to be the way they are. Their attempted escape routes might be ambivalent, silly, downright evil—but the results are never what they expected, and always better than they hoped.
icymi
You haven’t missed anything. I’ve been finishing the edits for the Gay and Catholic sequel, forthcoming late fall from Ave Maria Press and currently titled Tenderness: A Gay Christian’s Guide to Unlearning Rejection and Experiencing God’s Extravagant Love.
I am going to be on a panel tonight at 6:30, hosted by The Lamp, talking about “St Joseph and the Meaning of Work.” Info is here.
Now Playing
The Weakerthans, “A New Name for Everything.” My parents and I are clearing out the hoarder corner of the basement, and I found a mix CD from what turned out to be the height (so far) of my musical #cancon, feat. both the Weakerthans and Martin Tielli. Also a little unsettling to realize that I was putting the Levellers’ “Fifteen Years” on a mix CD, for myself, at least two years before I quit drinking, which is just weird in several ways. Funny idea of fun….
This is the song that got me into the Weakerthans & this for MT.