The Hills of Faraway: A Guide to Fantasy (review)

The Hills of Faraway tries to be two different books at the same time; unfortunately, its two purposes contradict and eventually negate each other.

On the one hand, Waggoner wanted to write a book about "all of fantasy, and . . . nothing but fantasy." The bulk of The Hills of Faraway is an annotated bibliography of fantastic fiction, and it seems to represent "all of fantasy" as Waggoner understands it. If it does, she has an eccentric idea about what "all of fantasy" is.

Her list includes some children's fiction, but "it does exclude books that may be characterized as 'easy books' or picture books." But Waggoner criticizes many of the books she includes just because they are easy, or because their protagonists, being children, are unsophisticated. And she doesn't even mention Sendak's Higglety Pigglety Pop, which is neither easy nor a picture book. Worst of all, her guide to "all of fantasy" doesn't include Lewis Carroll, because, she says, his books are not fantasies. She calls them dream-stories; but then she goes on to discuss a lot of "dream-stories" in her bibliography.

The problem is obvious. The value of Waggoner's bibliography is limited because it represents, not "all of fantasy," but her own critical prejudices. The result is not a guide but a canon.

In fact, the other book The Hills of Faraway tries to be is a defense of Waggoner's theory of fantasy; and the defense is not convincing. Waggoner seems to believe that Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, "the principal inspiration of my work," is the one true fantasy, and she judges everything else by the extent to which it is like Tolkien. As a result, Susan Cooper is condemned for possessing a moral vision unlike Tolkien's, and Alan Garner is praised for being a Tolkien clone and creating "A Secondary World worthy of comparison with Tolkien's Middle-earth."

Furthermore, Waggoner's fondness for sweeping critical pronouncements makes her insist that one book is "weaker" than another, or that another book is "realistic" or "competent" without any explanation of what she means by these things. So the usefulness of her bibliography is spoiled by her unsupported opinions and her critical prejudices; and her opinions are unsupported because they appear as brief comments in a bibliography that lacks completeness because of her critical prejudices.

All things considered, a guide to "all of fantasy" still needs to be written. And so does a critical statement about the nature of fantasy.