A Darker Shade of Magic
by V.E. Schwab
First posted June 2015
This was the first Fantasy book I picked up in about a year, and I believe my reviewing style at the time was tiptoeing toward the “try to be like The New Yorker, but worse” vibe that I was mired in for a few years.
Whole lotta semicolons not used very well in the first paragraph. I’ve done my best to clean things up, but even five years removed I’m a loose editor. Enjoy!
Idioms are curious to me. So often, they seem profound, but when you really dig into the vast expanse of available idioms, something can be dredged out to support nearly any position you might like. “Familiarity breeds contempt,” or “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” might be truisms in romance, but are almost uniquely inapplicable to fantasy fiction, where multivolume epics are de rigueur. Large series trade in the familiar; the same characters: the same world. Even if the quests may change, the dramatic personae does not. Look at the popularity of mass-market Star Wars paperbacks, or game adaptation books, or books-to-movies, comics-to-novels, toys-to-shows-to-books. No, we need different idioms to cover the Fantasy genre.
More apt might be, “Better the devil you know” —which, for the record, I had a hell of a time trying to provenance, and still don't feel secure in its origin—because it can be hard to give yourself over to a hundred pages of prologue before anything gets moving. How much do I want more fictional geopolitics, race relations, and cultural cachet kicking around in my head, especially when I have the option of jumping back into one of a dozen existing fantasy worlds where I know the general tenets?
It is strange, then—knowing how much the familiar assists in garnering readership—that fantasy world literature with a tie or grounding to our particular “real world” reality isn't the norm. I am grateful, however, because it has always bothered me. Magic Kingdom for Sale...Sold! was my first experience outside of the classic David Bowie movie Labyrinth, and the whole concept always came across as cheesy to me; even though it sat on my shelf since I was twelve years old, it was years of fits and starts before I finally got through it.
I wonder, reflecting now, if its escapism from adult responsibility rather than from adolescent impotence impeded my teenage brain from internalizing it—most fantasy literature is about teenage males finding their place in the world, after all. Now that I've given up hope that Vader is really my father, maybe Magic Kingdom and its tale of a real-world Chicagoland attorney purchasing a magical amulet, falling through portal, and becoming a King/Knight/Wizard amalgam might appeal: it was not so much a story of finding his place in the world as appropriating a new one after casting off his old.
The Harry Potter series sidestepped the “magic plus real world equals lame” formula by making the real-world anchor England, which already is an enchanted isle to we boorish Americans. This might explain part of the reason why A Darker Shade of Magic pulls off the “real world/magical realm” crossover well:
“She comes from the other London,” said Kell. Tieren showed no surprise. “The one without magic.”
“No London is truly without magic,” observed the priest.
Given what we know about familiarity, it makes sense to keep one foot in reality. People know reality. Fantasy literature is escapism in its purest sense, so pulling the main character from the reader’s world is sort of a, “Hey, your own owl might show up soon!” kind of trick. Literal—literary—escape from reality.
The other hallmark of fantasy—the epic, multivolume length—affords its own piece of familiarity to grasp; readers have a lot of time to get to know their characters. When there were only forty or so pages left of Darker Shade and little prospect of a satisfying resolution, I braced myself for the “Book One Cliffhanger Ending,” where the immediate threat has ended yet a larger horror rises in the distance. But it comes together in an altogether pleasing, albeit alacritous, way. Things—life, culture, people—won’t return to their pre-adventure status, nor will they maintain the heightened stress of all-consuming plot-based action. If there was never another book, things would be okay.
My personal favorite parts of fantasy books are the antecataclysmic rest-states, where things are just going on in their normal—fantastic, to the mundane outsider—way. And then, something inevitably changes:
Kell shut the door and sagged back against the wood as candles flickered to life around the narrow room.
He’d been set up, but by who? And for what?
And sometimes I care, but usually I don’t: I don’t want unique danger that the main character’s skills are particularly unsuited for. I don’t want empires to fall or islands to crumble or magic to disappear forever or an ancient evil to rise. And somehow, even though Darker Shade hits all the “everything will be ruined forever” notes, its struggles are kept measurable; the problems are treated with real immediacy, and never is the word “prophecy” uttered. Things go wrong, the main characters attempt to fix them, things change, end scene.
The most surprising character growth was personal: Darker Shade taught me appropriate use of parentheses:
“I know a man,” he said, which wasn’t the half of it, but was certainly simpler than explaining that Fletcher was a petty criminal who’d lost a bounty to him in a game of Sanct when Kell was several years younger and several shades more arrogant, and Kell had gifted him the White London trinket as either a peace offering (if he felt like lying to himself) or a jab (if he was being honest).
Nothing (for me) will ever be the same. Now if only I can find a story that shows restrained use of the m-dash...