Beyond Window-Dressing? Canadian Children's Fantasy at the Millennium (review)

In her introduction to Quests and Kingdoms: A Grown-Up's Guide to Children's Fantasy Literature (2005), K. V. Johansen warns readers that her book is not "a critical history heavy with theory" (7–8). She thus implies that her intended audience of "teachers, parents, or librarians who do not read much fantasy themselves" (7), will find her book a more useful, and certainly a more readable, guide to such literature than that produced by academic critics. Although many texts "heavy with theory" are unnecessarily ponderous and almost unreadable, except by those whose extraordinary patience allows them to regard clarity and graceful expression as effete, Johansen fails to see that literary history need not sink into a morass of polysyllabic obfuscation and pedantic impenetrability to be insightful. In practice, however, she includes a bit of both history and theory in the brief introductions and conclusions to the encyclopedia-like entries that form the bulk of her "tour through the history of fantasy for children" (8). At the end of her study, for instance, she explains that the rise in popularity of children's fantasy in the late 1990s was attributable to the enormous attention mass media gave to J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series and to a second "less obvious factor": the "increase over the last three decades of the century in serious attention to the creation of internally cohesive realities in fantasy, fantasy in which the fantastic is not merely whimsy, window-dressing, or there for comic effect" (433–34). The requirement of internal consistency is not controversial, but Johansen repeatedly seems to insist that the best fantasies are those set in what Tolkien and his followers call the "secondary world."

Both the disdain for previous critics and the bias for secondary world fantasies are evident in Johansen's latest book, Beyond Window-Dressing? Canadian Children's Fantasy at the Millennium (2007). Organized by sub-genres of fantasy rather than the historical periods of her earlier study, this tour begins with an historical overview of Canadian fantasy and criticism. The targets of her disdain for critics are Sheila Egoff and Judith Saltman, especially their New Republic of Childhood (1990), whose argument, she says, "creates the impression that what is most valuable in fantasy is its novelty when attached to an otherwise realistic story of the primary world" (13). Johansen declares that Egoff, Saltman, and other critics tended to praise "stories with 'simple', easily identifiable themes and plots" and to criticize more complex texts "for the very literary attributes which can make a book thought-provoking and capable of sustaining repeated readings" (25). Johansen thus dismisses both the fiction and the criticism of the twentieth century: "Not only was most Canadian fantasy thin, but the critical culture within Canada praised it for its thinness" (13).¹

The following eight chapters, each devoted to a different classification of fantasy, consist of brief reviews of particular books or series. These discussions generally follow a two-paragraph pattern: the first summarizes plot, and the second provides critical commentary. The analysis is repetitive, with Johansen constantly trotting out "consistency" as a way of evaluating characterization and setting. She devotes very little attention to ideas and themes, but she castigates authors who employ the simple and obvious didacticism traditionally marring Canadian fantasy.

As in Quests and Kingdoms, Johansen expresses especial contempt for time travel fantasy, declaring that her reviews of four books demonstrate that time travel is "a fast and easy tool to enable a character to explore family history and present-day problems—time-travel as therapy" (39). In subsequent chapters, she praises the primary world fantasies of O. R. Melling and Charles de Lint, the animal fantasies of Kenneth Oppel, and the secondary world fantasies of Dave Duncan, these being the only Canadians she included in Quests and Kingdoms. She does find a few other writers worthy of praise, but her criticism constantly indicates that she most values those who provide a fully...