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Real enchanter

Lead review
Last Updated 23 May 2015, 15:32 IST
Trigger Warning
Neil Gaiman
Hachette
2015, pp 307, Rs. 499

If you’re not yet on the list of Gaiman fans, this book could be a clincher. Either way. You might find your place in the literary sun, or you’ll smile politely and walk on to see if there’s something better.

It’s a book of previously published stories mostly, and a handful of poems. The poems could have been prose, there’s nothing much to indicate here that Gaiman is indeed a poet — except when he’s writing prose. Much like the stuff of literary cults where you have readers dying for another Plum, Dahl or Adams, but knowing sadly in those cases that it’s an impossibility, here’s someone alive and well and with his own dedicated following, fanatical to the core, prepared to follow him to the farthest cubbyholes of darkness and mystery. It all depends on how you fare after reading this one. Whether you’ll be hooked. Or not.

It is said that all literature involves varying combinations of a limited set of story plots. These are formulae that can be variously presented to make them appear fresh. These stories, at least some of them, are illustrations of how the new mind can deal with old ideas. Neil Gaiman is a master storyteller, chiefly because he’s not too keen on following the rutted path. Even if he does reach these paths, he appropriates them and makes them his own in such a way as to add lore to his oeuvre. In a way that makes even the jaded turn exciting.

Take his rendering of the Sleeping Beauty and Snow White tales. He combines them to tell a tale of his own, where the latter travels with her old friends, the dwarves, to set the sleeping princess free. The kiss is surprising, the awakening eerie, but the reader’s satisfaction is kept alive all through the story’s 20-odd pages.

The fear that resides in dark places, under the bed, in unknown corners, suddenly springing beasts and stormy dark nights is used to great effect in stories like A Lunar Labyrinth, Click-Clack the Rattlebag and Black Dog. It takes a master to be able to narrate and describe the ordinary telling of events we’re all used to, even as a slow undercurrent of uneasiness is allowed to percolate into our reading minds until it shatters the comfort and familiarity with which we began.

Adventure is a romp in the unknown. I’d read The Truth is a Cave in The Black Mountains... (with quote marks and all) in another anthology, but reading it here with his other stories gives this tale of retribution a new life, and when my son informed me that the dwarfish narrator is actually a leprechaun in true Irish tradition, my perspective really changed. The mountains, which I’d earlier visualised as being in South America or some such exotic location, came from the author’s impression of the Isle of Skye that I gazed at from across the ocean many years ago. (I’d never have thought!)

Like places, so does he bring people alive to the reader in totally unexpected ways. Even as you get used to a character, knotted in their finely described characteristics, you become aware of the changes in lighting and atmosphere that make you view them from a completely different angle.

He toys with the mind. The Thing About Cassandra is a little shocker about a girl from the protagonist’s past who returns to haunt him. Nothing new, except that Cassandra is a girl he drew on paper to impress his friends when he had no girlfriend at all. When she later comes alive, first to his friends, then to him, we’re a bit wide-eyed. No, that’s no spoiler, the real jump comes later! (Reviewing Gaiman’s stories is a bit like walking a mine-field, really; if I’m not careful, I’ll be detonating secrets, and you wouldn’t like that at all.) This story also takes a mildly mischievous glance at the art scene, galleries and their inner workings.

We visit many worlds, both now and sometime else, both possible and wildly imagined. There’s the Arabian Nights-like detour in An Invocation of Incuriosity, a nod at his wife’s previous pastime in the “statue” story, which ends rather eerily though, and an audacious post-creation of Holmes’s post-retirement adventures with mountains, honey and death; replete with brother Mycroft and Dr Watson.

One of the most interesting series of stories is A Calendar of Tales, one for each month. The first one has an interesting twist to the idea of the old giving way to the new, and Gaiman’s persistent engagement with the concept of Time.

Confident about his work and comfortable with his readers, Gaiman has a long author’s “note” to explain circumstances that led to his stories and the title of this collection that is rather like a disclaimer, forewarning readers about things they’ll encounter that could possibly scare them out of their wits. And they do. Many times. If you’re going to read them alone at night when no one’s looking, good luck.
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(Published 23 May 2015, 15:31 IST)

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