What Makes Good Fantasy (Part 1)

Beneath the Silent Heavens

The other day, I recorded a great conversation with two Catholic literary experts, Jonathan Geltner and Gregorio Montejo. Jonathan wrote the novel Absolute Music and translated Paul Claudel’s Five Great Odes. Gregorio is an expert on the strange and whimsical R. A. Lafferty, and is nearly done putting together In a Green Tree, which is Lafferty’s semi-autobiography. We were discussing the fantasy novel Beneath the Silent Heavens by Brian Christopher Moore published in 2019 by Angelico Press. Beneath the Silent Heavens is a retelling and expansion of the story of Noah (Noe) and the Flood from the book of Genesis.

I’m not going to rehash the conversation here, so you will need to wait for it to come out in a few days (April 15)! However, I want to try to describe what I think good Catholic (or otherwise) fantasy should look like. The key word here is “try.” There are also only my opinions and preferences. This is not meant to be exhaustive.

The short answer is to just recommend Moore’s Beneath the Silent Heavens.

“I compel no one,” answered Noe, his unruffled, somewhat wry terseness infuriating the student so that the young man launched, in spite of his intentions, into an eclectic, disorganized babbling of current platitudes that even he felt unsatisfactory. At the end of the oration, he retreated towards a wall where he looked on with malicious pique.

The longer answer involves a bit more of an explanation. Literature like Beneath does not emerge from a vacuum. It takes cultivation; the imagination needs to grow with good soil, water and sunshine. I believe this comes from understanding the roots of modern stories. In my opinion, these are Scripture, mythology, fairy tales and ancient and medieval literature. Whether or not you are a believing Christian, to deny the influence of these stories on our culture is insane.

These resources form the substrata of the imagination and provide many good tools for an author to use either consciously or unconsciously. I don’t think an author needs to have mastered these resources, but having a general familiarity helps in adding a layer or two to the story. The deeper an author delves into these wells, the richer their imagination becomes. Moore has delved deep and has brought to the surface a wonderful treasure in Beneath.

Moore, as well as Gene Wolfe, Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, R. A. Lafferty, Tim Powers, and Eugene Vodolazkin have an understanding of the medieval mind as well. To the medieval man, time is not a straight line, like an arrow, but a spiral with repeating patterns and tropes. Time does have a beginning and an end, but history rhymes with itself. In our discussion, Jonathan described this as being able to see time from God’s perspective. Time is like a tapestry to God and He can see all of it at once. Vodolazkin wrote about this concept in depth at First Things in 2016.

This concept is easier to experience than it is to describe. Moore uses this idea in Beneath. Other books that engage with something like “timeline convergence” (let’s just coin a phrase) include Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, Powers’ The Anubis Gates, Lafferty’s Past Master, and Vodolazkin’s Laurus. It usually, though not always, involves elevated prose and a metaphysical/spiritual transformation that the protagonist undergoes. Noe goes on a spiritual journey towards the end of the book that transcends time and connects his story to the past and future.

With this understanding of time, historical events, past, present, and future, are intimately connected, not just in terms of cause and effect, but typologically and thematically as well. Noah is a typological image of both Adam and Christ. Noah’s story engages with the same themes and patterns but embodied in a particular way. Noah’s Ark is an image of the Church and the Church is an image of Noah’s Ark. Both images shed light and add layers to the other.

With Moore’s Beneath, I think we are witnessing the beginning of a literary tradition, or maybe the continuation of the long neglected tradition of mythic storytelling. I don’t here mean just stories of gods and monsters, though it should include them! Beneath has them as well. I mean something like embodying the pattern of Christ in the story itself. Monsters, legends, and pagan gods should be viewed in light of the pattern of Christ and reinterpreted within that framework. When this happens, no matter how short the story, it has a certain grandness and a cosmic scope when done right.

For example, the Grimm brothers do this masterfully by combining imagery from Classical and Norse mythology with a plot that has the structure of the Christian story. The bones or structure of the Grimms fairy tales are Christian but they are replete with imagery from pagan mythology. In the story of Snow White, three birds are present at her slumber in the glass coffin: the Owl (Athena), the Raven (Odin), and the Dove (Holy Spirit). Gene Wolfe’s The Wizard Knight reimagines the Norse god Odin as Valfather, who is a shadow of The Most High God. This approach is not religious syncretism but something almost as old as Christianity itself, the repurposing of pagan imagery to point to Christ.

To summarize, I find the best fantasy utilizes at least some of what I mentioned above. This is the end of part one. In part two, I want to dive into how magic can be portrayed and compare that to the concept of a “magic system.”