Fantasy Magazine Online, Oct. 29-Nov. 5, 2007

Fantasy Magazine, formerly a print journal from Prime Books, has debuted online with a number of reprints and two new stories.

In “Swan” by Eilis O’Neal, a teenage girl’s attempts to come to terms with the transformation and imminent departure of her older brother serves as the basis for a finely balanced dialogue between reality and the fantastic. Brendan, Dani tells us, has turned into a swan, a metamorphosis that, though seemingly more attractive than that endured by Gregor Samsa, causes her at least as much heartache and confusion as suffered by Gregor’s sister. In fact, as its name suggests, this sensitive tale owes less to Kafka than it does to mythical representations of swans in general and to Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Wild Swans” in particular. In the latter, Elise’s eleven brothers are transformed into swans by a jealous stepmother—as are Lir’s children in the Irish myth—but here, the metaphorical transformation is a result of neglect, of carelessly withheld love.

O’Neal uses the swan motif and the idea of transformation not simply to render Dani’s painful sense of abandonment, but also to suggest her attempts to overcome the more mundane problems confronting an adolescent girl. This is managed with both authority and a lightness of touch, a peerless tightrope walk that presents Dani on the one hand as the Ugly Duckling—to poignantly comic effect as her anxiety causes her to mess up a musical recital—and on the other as a loyal and spirited would-be heroine. The plot matters less here than the telling and that to which it alludes: at eighteen, Brendan has finally seen through the sham of his parents’ relationship and their own self-obsession. He chooses to escape this loveless environment and find his own way in the wider world. Dani perceives Brendan’s estrangement from the family in the form of a magical transformation that neither parent seems to recognise or at least acknowledge. This inability to perceive, or see through, the surface of things suggests an intellectual and emotional withering; it implies a failure of imagination, and it is this notion, I think, which lies at the heart of the story.

Echoing the actions of Elise in “The Wild Swans,” Dani takes an unfinished sweater knitted by her mother and tries to drape this over her brother in the hope—vain, as it turns out—that this will bring about his retransformation into human form. But Brendan, unlike Elise’s brothers, as we older, more worldly-wise creatures than Dani realise, does not want to be rescued or “cured.” In leaving home, he effectively abandons his sister, disrupting not only our expectations of sibling loyalty, but undermining Dani’s status as fairytale heroine. O’Neal’s deft handling of some of the defining tropes of fantasy—bondage, recognition, metamorphosis—sets up an ironic form of what John Clute calls “thinning,” where instead of a loss of magic, the growing awareness of her parents’ relationship with each other and with their children, prompts, in Dani’s eyes, the magical but unwelcome transformation of her brother. This is a marvellous story, deceptively simple in its telling, but confident in its allusions to, and engagement with, the concept of fantasy.

Making more explicit use of the fantastic in both setting—a building in which a complete lifetime can be spent in ascending its floors—and tone—a melancholy weirdness that pervades the narrative—Lavie Tidhar’s “Elsbeth Rose” dances tentatively along the edges of genre, creating unexpected patterns out of familiar steps. The narrative begins with Traveller Yud, a man whose entire life has been spent journeying upwards through an apartment building, stopping to seek rest and water outside the home of Elsbeth Rose. Though we know next to nothing about either, these short opening paragraphs, suggest, through an accretion of small details and inferences—to age, dress, and experience—the burden of memories, which, in turn, are transformed into the stories of their lives.

Taking pity on the dandyish, “slightly out of shape” Yud, Elsbeth is impressed by his courage—he has braved the threat of “feral apartment dwellers” to make it to her floor—and by the singular fact that he is the only person she has ever seen from the floors below in all the time she has lived in the building. They are immediately at ease with each other, and while making him a cup of tea, Elsbeth invites him to tell the story of his wanderings. Even before this point, the narrative has let slip—to the reader, rather than to her—particular details about this odd man that signal his ability to weave a narrative out of the fabric of his life. Years and floors ago he saw a giant squid in an apartment that “opened up onto an immense aquarium lit only by strange glowing fish that ebbed in the water like curious lanterns.” His learning is hinted at through the throwaway revelation that, had he seen it, he would have recognised the strange alphabet whose letters spell out the name of her fridge as Assyrian, a script he has encountered previously on the “Fifty-Seventh Thousand, Four Hundred and Thirty Fifth floor of the World.” These glimpses offer an ironic contrast to Elsbeth’s initial impressions, revealing the powers of observation and recall that make his story so entrancing to her.

The disjunction between perception and reality we see in Elsbeth’s first sight of Yud is mirrored in his initial impression of her. Where, having ascertained that she is a painter, he expects her work to be “idyllic” and “serene,” he sees instead that it is “bizarre” and “frightening,” showing fantastic and erotic mythical scenes. Repeatedly throughout the story there is a discord between what each of them thinks or assumes about the other, suggested in the late afternoon sunlight which momentarily blinds Yud but which Elsbeth perceives as wreathing him in an almost angelic light. Even the mundane realisation that it was merely his beard and moustache catching the sunlight cannot shake her sense that he is something other than what he appears.

Reality begins to intrude into the narrative when Elsbeth tells her own story to Yud, but here too, the border between the two is flimsy, as the UK is transformed into the “island-nation of Britannia,” while Scotland and Ireland assume their Roman names, Caledonia and Hibernia, hinting at a connection to a mythical time and place. As a young woman, she once auditioned for theatre impresario Vivian Van Damme, but this in a land where Edward VIII went ahead and married Wallis Simpson, or Queen Wallis, as she is referred to in passing. The collision between the real and the fantastic posits some fascinating images: a husband killed after stumbling into a “turf war between the Moriarties and the Baker Street Boyz” while trying to purchase a first edition of Conan Doyle’s Memoirs of a Consulting Detective’s Life; a son called Silence, who ran away to sea and was last heard of through a letter “postmarked the Cape of Lost Hope, in Zululand.” But the cumulative effect of this strangeness tends to overwhelm, undermining the resonances which give the budding relationship between Elsbeth and Yud its tenderness and conviction. It feels at times as if Tidhar has allowed his inventiveness to get the better of him, and some images are included merely to show this off. Despite this, he manages to retrieve that core of emotional truth with a quiet and beautifully understated ending that illustrates an ability to pull back from the edge of narrative incoherence.