Fantasy, Art and Life

This impressive book is in part a companion-piece to the author's earlier Death and Fantasy, after finishing which he felt ‘almost a compulsion to produce a sequel.' Originally a series of separately-published essays, lectures and book-reviews, the various chapters of the book together consider how far fantasy can draw us back towards life rather than away from it. Gray takes as his main authors the Victorian Scottish writers of fantasy George MacDonald and Robert Louis Stevenson, while referring also to C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman and Neil Gaiman. MacDonald's belief in the power of fantasy to heal the spirit, his unsentimental ideal of the childlike in life and literature, and his continuing sense of the need to relate the experience of fantasy to the real world, are traced in such works as his Adela Cathcart, ‘The Golden Key' and Lilith; while Stevenson's The Wrecker, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and his more macabre short stories serve to explore the mixture of romanticism and realism in his work, and his strong sense of the immediate reality of evil. Throughout, Gray's knowledge of philosophy, theology and literary theory deepen and contextualise his arguments. This is a book to savour and reread, by the author of several noted recent studies of fantasy literature.