English Magic Realism

There were several things I mentioned in passing in this earlier post which I intended to come back to when I had the chance. Of course, life got in the way, or else I've ended up blogging about other things as they've come to my attention or crossed my mind. I still haven't gotten to posting about most of the things I thought I wanted to post about when I decided to start this blog! Hopefully, that's stuff for future posts.

I loved Tim Pears' In the Place of Fallen Leaves. After years of reading English fiction about cities (well, London), I'm starting to find I want to read more rural or provincial fiction. I haven't read anything by Tim Pears before, although I remember watching the BBC adaptation of his second novel In a Land of Plenty. My memory of the adaptation is that it was sold as a follow up to the successful Our Friends from the North from a year or two previously. There were deffinite similarities. Both series were episodic sagas tracing the lives of various characters over the preceding 40 years against a backdrop of Britain's changing economic and political fortunes. The sort of challenging television on a large scale which the BBC no longer seems interested in producing. In contrast to the more politicised Our Friends from the North however, In a Land of Plenty is a much more personal story about the interpersonal relationships within a somewhat dysfunctional family.

If I remember correctly, In a Land of Plenty never achieved the same sort of critical success and popularity as the earlier show, becoming rather lost in the schedules. I haven't seen it since it was first transmitted, but my memory is of an enchanted depiction of post war English history and life. Even so, I wasn't expecting the magic realism of In the Place of Fallen Leaves which from its opening pages comes on like full blown Garcia Marquez transplanted to Devon in the midst of the 1985 heat wave.

I've no interest in trying to define magic realism here. I have some sympathy with Terry Pratchett's view that it's "like a polite way of saying you write fantasy", although I don't quite agree with him. I love (almost!) everything Sir Terry has writen, but some of his pronouncements about his craft do bespeak something of a chip on his shoulder about the way he feels his chosen genre is treated by 'respectable' literary critics. I don't quite have the time or the critical tools at my current disposal to work out a definition for myself let alone anyone else, but I do think it's both possible and useful to define it as a distinct category of the fantastic.

If I say it's rare in that earlier post, it's because in an English literary context, I feel it is a mode which not many writers have tended to use, although I'd certainly be willing to find myself corrected on that score. We've certainly produced a great deal of fantasy. Its always tended to be seen as an exotic 'other' in a English context, springing from Latin America or Europe. Salman Rushdie for example, may have been resident in London when he wrote all of his most significant fiction, but I wouldn't confine his work to an English context. I think there's a broad agreement that his work operates in a post-colonial context, although obviously (and appropriately) his work draws upon a multitude of traditions. And as I say in passing in my earlier post, I would now place his work very strongly within the context of Bombay.

So, this is just a brief list of books to try and define for myself a tradition of English Magic Realism. Perhaps this contradicts my blog's name, but I define it as English because that's the landscape and the identity which I'm most interested in exploring on this blog.

Kate Atkinson, Human Croquet, and the stories in Not the End of the World.

Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop, Nights at the Circus, Wise Children, some of her short stories and the film A Company of Wolves.

John Fowles, The Magus which may be mostly set on a Greek island, but still feels very English to me.

Paul Magrs, Marked for Life, Does It Show?, Could It Be Magic?

Michael Moorcock, Mother London, King of the City.

Tim Pears, In a Place of Fallen Leaves.

Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, A Canterbury Tale.

Salman Rushdie, the London scenes in The Satanic Verses.

Marina Warner, Indigo

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Sexing the Cherry.

Yes, a small list, but hopefully there's more to be discovered. I shall add more to this list at a later date should I think of or else come across anything else which seems to fit. I can already think of a couple of titles I should probably put on this list, but I haven't read them as yet. It's meant to be a personal list anyway, and of course, some or all of these titles could be clasified in different ways. I'm sure this 'tradition' I'm briefly sketching overlaps with others, but that's surely part of the pleasure to be had here.