Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children’s Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper (review)

Reading a critical study sometimes offers the same pleasure as reading literature can; so stimulating and intriguing is Charles Butler’s book on four fantasy writers of the “second Golden Age” (1) of British children’s literature. This ambitious and complex, but at the same time jargon-free and accessible, work is intended to encourage a multifaceted exploration of possible affinities between their books. As Butler shows, these convergences emerge from their biographies and from their preoccupation with various manifestations of Britishness. Praiseworthy is Butler’s awareness of the dangers of too insistent a pursuit of these parallels as it may “easily degenerate into an exercise in critical ingenuity, or an insidious combination of innuendo and selective quotation” (17–18). Hence, although Butler’s careful analysis of the writers’ works and their own comments—which are well served by notes and detailed bibliography—provides strong evidence supporting his conclusions, he realizes that these interpretations remain tentative and problematic. Still, this is without detriment to the study, as the wealth of information gathered therein, both on the four authors and on children’s fantasy in general, will certainly impress even the most skeptical readers.

The first chapter of Butler’s book, with the telling title “Contexts and Connections,” serves as an introduction to the whole project. Butler begins with a brief discussion of the writers’ ever-evolving position in children’s literature and attempts at inscribing their works in generic categories within fantasy fiction. Still, as the reader learns at the very end of the study, Butler’s own conception of fantasy is very loose: fantasy alerts us to how our lives testify to the constantly nebulous “border between the mundane and the magical” (274), a clarifying remark that would be more justified and useful at the beginning of the book. The second and the third part of this chapter give the reader a tantalizing foretaste of the author’s in-depth analysis that appears further in the book. The second part, “Children in Wartime,” looks at how the reality of war affected the themes and imagery in the discussed texts. An argument of Butler’s that I find particularly compelling in this context is that for all four writers the notion of family and home ceased to signify comforting safety and reassurance, having been replaced by the awareness that even one’s closest environment could be marked by hostility and betrayal. This dystopian theme of home has recently become quite frequent in children’s fiction. The third part of chapter 1, “Oxford Fantasies,” examines the writers’ studies at Oxford and points to a possible influence that C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien—through their creativity, scholarship, and didactic work—could have had on them. Whereas speculations about specific aspects of the Narnian cycle or The Lord of the Rings that could have inspired the four writers are of some interest, of special importance is, as Butler rightly stresses, the Inklings’ “indirect influence . . . in creating a commercial and cultural market for fantasy” (16) and in shaping the reception of this genre. Butler’s detailed analysis of the intricacies of this legacy will fascinate readers who are interested in the historical development of fantasy. The undeniable merit of Butler’s readings is that although most of the anecdotal facts from the Inklings’ activity that he presents are well known, they acquire a fresh dimension when filtered through the perspective of the younger writers.

In the second chapter of his study, “Applied Archaeology,” Butler attempts discussing the oeuvres of the four authors in terms of historical, mythical, and personal aspects of time as testifying to their awareness of living “in a land where consciousness of the deep past is in constant interplay with change and contemporaneity” (32). As Butler cogently argues, this double nature of Britain...