It seems only fair to question that choice. A great deal of fantastic writing uses its non-realist elements as metaphors for the thoroughly mundane, or as a gloss on it. Writing about Neil Gaiman's recent novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane a few weeks ago, Guardian reviewer Edward Docx expressed the wish that the novel could have been stripped of its fantastic elements and left with what, to him, were its stronger mimetic elements: "Gaiman's intelligence and his skill as a writer-to this reviewer at least-are best mobilised in the adult writing he purports to eschew his account of real human drama, relationships, sensibility, emotions, thought." This caused some flurry of consternation on Twitter (not least, of course, because of Docx's history as a provocateur of the genre wars), but to my mind Docx's review, however inflammatory, raises a valid point of discussion.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |