Having read somewhere that the work of such beloved authors as C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle had been influenced by having read George MacDonald, I procured this book. I have long enjoyed their work and was interested in reading something that might have been inspirational for them.
Phantastes, the first novel, follows Anodos as he traverses through the Fairy Land, experiencing quite a bit, and accomplishing almost nothing. The tale meandered as Anodos did, never threatening to have a plot or a message, just flowery script and imaginative characters, who were nonetheless quite one-dimensional. I had to put this down and read something else several times because I was so bored with it. I did not find Anodos a terribly likable character, either. Several times along his excursion, various denizens of Fairly Land give him a warning not to do something or other. Every time, Anodos does it anyway, most times even thinking, ‘Hey, I was told not to do this, but I just can’t help myself.’ Most of the conflict in the story comes as a result of Anodos ignoring or flagrantly defying the advice he has been given. However, I shudder to think how much more tiresome I would have found this tale had he taken heed and avoided peril. Upon returning from Fairy Land, Anodos finds that he has been missing from our world for 21 days and remarks that it felt like 21 years. To me, reading about the journey seemed to take 21 months.
The second novel, Lilith, begins a bit better; Mr. Vane meets a ghost who is also a raven, and a librarian and a sexton. This individual, Mr. Raven, escorts Mr. Vane to an alternate world, attempts to explain that in order to lead a more fulfilling life, Mr. Vane must ‘wake up’ and ‘go home’ (not, of course, meaning at all the general and obvious interpretation of these two concepts) and bids him take a nap. Mr. Vane, however, does not like the look of those sleeping nearby, and decides to run away. He soon finds himself on the same kind of journey Anodos undertook, encountering odd things that have little meaning or interest, but that the author seemed to have gotten a hold of some particularly hallucinatory drug and then decided to write a book about ‘life’ and ‘meaning,’ man. MacDonald also frequently insists that his narrator is having a lot of trouble describing the things he encounters, as everything was so very different and unique from his Earth-centric worldview that words fail him. This reinforces my theory that the writer was definitely trying to describe his own drug-induced visions. Otherwise, why even write a book like that?
At one point on his incredibly pointless journey, Mr. Vane decries his former preference for being alone with book or pen, musing, “Any man…is more than the greatest of books!" I strongly disagree with this statement and almost gave up reading the book. It seems to me an author with so little regard for books has not written anything worthy of my regard.
Scarcely 100 pages after I almost gave up, I did indeed give up. Mr. Vane was urged by one he trusted completely not to do something, and that if he were to do so someone he loved would suffer. At the point Mr. Vane fails to heed this most emphatic warning, I threw the book at the wall and decried the time I spent reading both tales. What a giant waste. ( )