Constructing Adolescence in Fantastic Realism (review)

Alison Waller's first book is a productively odd synthesis of theoretical styles. Its foundation is in genre studies, as she proposes a new subgenre of the fantastic and populates her argument with teen fantasy novels available in Britain over the last half-century. It also makes use of historical research, particularly research on the changing relationship between adults and parents as well as, in the final chapter, thoughts on the potential of new technology to reshape thinking about adolescence. But its main project is the juxtaposition of theories about adolescence and her proposed subgenre, fantastic realism. In four hefty chapters, Waller—a senior lecturer at Roehampton University—argues that close readings of fantastic realism can open our eyes to common and frequently harmful ideas about adolescence itself.

Waller's definition of fantastic realism is fairly simple, but the implications of that definition are not. Fantastic realism is a subgenre in which "the characters and events of contemporary or recognizable adolescence found within teenage realism [combine] with some aspect of the consensually impossible, supernatural, or unreal" (17). Citing standard theories of the fantastic, Waller notes that such a pointedly strange mixture of real and unreal has great subversive potential. As she puts it, "Whereas teenage realism purports to portray teenagers and their lives as they really are, fantastic realism has the potential to disrupt these representations, subvert the dominant discourses of adolescence and offer an alternative set of ideological positions" (26).

Waller does note several examples of successful subversion in fantastic realism, but her analysis is decidedly glum. Although Waller finds that fantastic realism has the potential to imagine adolescents forging lives that do not follow adult scripts, such deviance is almost always imagined as a threat to be controlled. She pinpoints multiple "anxious points of departure from normal developmental models" (41) in the fiction as well as active points of adult resistance to adolescence's "shifting space[s] where existing social structures can be resisted and rebuilt" (91). What fantastic realism offers to boys, for example, may have the veneer of power fantasies, but that power always comes with the obligation to grow into the responsibility that accompanies it, a responsibility defined by adult mores. For girls, the potential of the fiction is similarly undercut. Although these fantasies offer stories of girls with great magical power, the girls of whom the narratives approve will essentially grow up to be just like their mothers. The result, it might be argued, is empowering, but it is hardly subversive. "Despite the innovatory form of many teenage fantastic realist novels," Waller complains, "the values invoked by them are often conventional or even reactionary, however, and display anxiety about adolescents transgressing what are considered to be their natural boundaries" (195).

The treatment of gender is a particular source of disappointment for Waller. She notes that boys in the novels often achieve their happy endings by escaping emotional or social traps that are clearly coded feminine. Waller makes repeated use of Kristeva's sense of the feminine, including insights on time in fantastic realism. In Robert Westall's The Devil on the Road, for example, she points to how "the novel prioritises . . . male-centred discourses of adolescence which refuse to allow the individual to become trapped in playful or duplicating time" (43). Here and elsewhere, Waller convincingly argues that for fantastic realism, femininity represents "stagnancy and regression" (44). Even the fantastic elements of the novels, the elements that would seem to open such possibilities for revision of standard ideology, are part of the subgenre's gender conservatism. In many of the texts, Waller argues, the female characters "are intimately associated with the fantastic and irrational because of their femininity" (76) but the fantastic is also painted as a regressive stage to be outgrown in favor of the elements of realism in the book, which Waller reads as masculine. A girl strongly identified with the fantastic in books such as Alan Garner's The Owl Service therefore becomes "a 'silly gubbins' who can only regain any sense of real...