Portals

All mirrors are magic mirrors. ~ George MacDonald

In 1858, George MacDonald wrote what may be considered the first modern portal fantasy, ‘Phantastes.’ This was also MacDonald’s first novel of any sort, followed by many more, both fantasy and mainstream. With William Morris (who wrote the first modern high fantasy), he laid the ground for the fantasy writers of the Twentieth Century.

Strictly, neither man is ‘Modern.’ Their writing belongs to the late Romantic. I might be inclined to describe them as precursors to modern fantasy rather than its first practitioners. They are very important precursors, to be sure—one can draw some direct lines from MacDonald to C.S. Lewis (or to Tolkien from Morris, for that matter).

The portal in ‘Phantastes’ is to Faerie; it opens quite early in the narrator’s own bedchamber, thanks to his fairy blood evincing itself when he reaches sufficient maturity. No wardrobes or doors are needed for this initial passage (though others appear later in the narrative). The one world, our world, simply fades into the other. Near the end of his career (1895), George MacDonald created another—and better—portal fantasy, ‘Lilith.’ There, the portal lies in a library and is somewhat better defined as an actual passageway between worlds.

‘Alice in Wonderland,’ written less than a decade later than ‘Phantastes,’ did much to popularize the portal concept. It may be argued, however, that it is not fantasy in the genre sense, being dream-based and full of absurdities, taking it closer to surrealism. ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ carried the concept into the Twentieth Century—if one is willing to consider the tornado a portal. My own stories have used similar storms to open portals, but have carried no houses to other lands! Perhaps the cave where John Carter falls into unconsciousness, to awaken on Barsoom, can also be considered a portal. I’m willing to include it among the important portal fantasies. Important enough to spawn its share of imitators, anyway.

But the ‘true’ portal fantasies with which almost all of us are familiar are C.S. Lewis’s Narnia tales. Actual, physical ways between the worlds exist in them. At the same time, the experience of the children transitioning from one to another on entering the wardrobe, is surprisingly similar to that in the opening of ‘Phantastes,’ written a century earlier.

‘Phantastes’ is a decent story though without much cohesive plot. It gives a first person account of the protagonist’s rambling journey and of his making stupid mistake after stupid mistake. I occasionally wanted to shake the narrator and scream, ‘Pay attention when folks warn you!’ Such dependence on the protagonist’s bad judgment is not a good plot device—in its way, just as bad as the hero who makes no mistakes at all.

The tale is told in a clear, serviceable prose style—decidedly better than what one gets from some of his contemporaries—but one might do well to skim over MacDonald’s attempts at poetry. He certainly couldn’t match Morris there! The overt symbolism might be off-putting to some. One of the main points there seems to be that ‘Faerie’ is all around us and the mundane world is an illusion. This is akin to some of the Christian symbolism we encounter in Lewis. One can hear echoes of MacDonald in Dunsany, in Lewis and in Tolkien, in pretty much every modern writer of fantasy. The shadow that follows Ged in LeGuin’s work is not so removed from the one attached to our protagonist in ‘Phantastes.’

As a read, the novel hovers somewhere between ‘good’ and ‘very good,’ readable and reasonably interesting. It might even be called a minor classic, though mostly for its influence on the fantasy stories to come. ‘Phantastes’ is, of course, long in the public domain and may be downloaded as a free ebook at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.