A Follow-up to Oldfangled

So, I'm a little late coming to it, but I did want to address Paul W's query a few weeks back in which he queried the absence of four specific authors from my Classics of Fantasy / Suggested Reading List:

I've praised them before, but I wonder that Mary Stewart, 

Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, or Mary Renault didn't make your list. 

Admittedly, Renault's works might be considered historical fiction 

but they all have magic in them to one degree or another. 

Of these, I haven't read much Renault* but rate her highly based on what I have read. But, as you suggest, I think of her more as a writer of historical novels than as a fantasist. 

The same holds true for Mary Stewart. I have a high regard for her earlier Arthurian novels (THE CRYSTAL CAVE, THE HOLLOW HILLS), not so much for the later ones. In her case the fantasy element is there, but it's not what the books are about. I can see the argument for considering her a fantasy writer but somehow I can't quite make myself believe it.

With Lloyd Alexander and Susan Cooper's quintologies there's no doubt they're fantasy, and good fantasy at that. It wd have been no great injustice to have included them. It's just that I don't, in the end, think they hold up. Alexander I realized at the time I first read him wd have meant more to me if I'd read him before Tolkien rather than after. I still liked them well enough right up until I read THE MABINOGION (in Patrick Ford's transation). I've found that when it came to Welsh myth and legend the real thing spoiled just about all the adaptation for me --with the exception of Morris's THE BOOK OF THREE DRAGONS, which did make the original column.

Susan Cooper comes even closer, and mainly got left out because the series is uneven and because I find some aspects of how her 'good guys' behave appalling. 

In the end I think fantasy's defining characteristic is the present of magic. It is the literature of the impossible. And without the impossible, for me it's just not fantasy.

Hence after much debate I omitted Daniel Pinkwater's THE SNARKOUT BOYS AND THE AVOCADO OF DEATH (1982) when I started putting together my recommended reading list because in the end it seems to me that while this book comes as close as possible to the line where a book gets so weird it crosses the line to become fantasy, in the end I'd say Pinkwater stays on the not-yet-quite side of the line. 

--John R.

current reading: AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS (1939)

*with those I have mostly being from Taum Santoski's shelves, he being a big fan.