Fantastic Realms, Ordinary People

[ecosophia]

My epic fantasy with tentacles The Weird of Hali hasn't gotten a lot of reviews yet, but one of them -- a favorable review of Dreamlands on the Ashtar Command Book Blog -- has me thinking.  The reviewer liked the book, and managed to catch some of the less obvious bits such as the reference to JRR Tolkien. He commented in a bemused tone, though, on the fact that the characters in Weird of Hali aren't special. They're ordinary people -- in the case of Dreamlands, of course, the main character is an elderly college professor with terminal cancer, and the rest of the cast includes a gay Bostonian writer from the 1920s, an assortment of other professors and grad students, and a rat-sized prosimian (a primate related to lemurs and tarsiers) of a species unfamiliar to science but quite familiar to anyone who's read H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dreams in the Witch-House."  (Okay, I grant that an otherwise unknown species of primate is a bit exotic, but she's not noticeably more so than, say, a pet monkey.) 

Now of course that's part of the point of the series, but it got me thinking. 

The hero of the first fantasy novel that really had me staring in awe at nothing in particular for days afterwards is perhaps the most ordinary character in all of literature. Yes, that would be Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit of respectable family who spends most of The Hobbit in a state of confustication and bebotherment (his terms), having been flung into the middle of a madcap adventure involving dwarves, wizards, trolls, goblins, elves, and a bona fide dragon. He's far from the only relentlessly ordinary character in classic fantasy. Go all the way back to the first fantasy novel ever written -- William Morris' The Wood Beyond the World -- and you've got Walter, a guy who walks away from a disastrously failed marriage via the first available boat. Yes, he's as ordinary as that sounds, even though he rises to the challenge of a series of astonishing adventures and ends up becoming a king. 

That was pervasive in classic fantasy. Even Conan the Cimmerian started out as another dumb kid from the barbarian North before a taste for adventure and a lot of heavy challenges turned him into the iron-thewed thief, warrior, and (eventually) usurping king he became. Somehow, though, that got lost, and a large amount of fantasy got sucked into a single narrative -- the story of a special snowflake, uniquely talented at whatever, who's marked out for a Really Shiny Destiny because (s)he's, well, just so special. Or has super-powers, or super-duper-powers, or super-duper-pooper-powers, or what have you. 

That kind of thing bores the bejesus out of me. Back when I was into comic books -- he're we're talking a long, long time ago! -- I liked characters like Batman and Green Arrow because they didn't have super-powers -- just courage, motivation, some nice technogimmicks, and a really robust exercise routine. My favorite characters in fiction, from childhood faves right up to the present, are ordinary people; even if they have one unusual feature (say, a talent for music like Brecken Kendall, or tentacles for legs like Laura Marsh), that doesn't keep them from being ordinary in every other sense, and having to scramble to deal with fantastic challenges the way you and I would have to do. They rise to the occasion -- that's what makes them protagonists -- but it doesn't come naturally and they have to give it everything they've got -- that's what makes them interesting. 

Is this purely a quibble of mine, or is this something other people have noticed too? Inquiring prosimians want to know. ;-)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

At the end of the first book, Nyarlathotep advises Laura to become cross-trained in the Starry Wisdom Church, as well as continuing as a Priestess of Dagon. Did she do that? It hasn't been mentioned since.

[ecosophia]

It's mentioned briefly in the last book. I don't think she pursued it very far, as her duties in the Esoteric Order of Dagon are pretty extensive.