AO: World-related Questions (Spoilers - possibly full spoilers)

[Kelsy]

I'm about halfway through Among Others, and I'm wondering who else has been questioning the existence of magic at all in this world.

(view spoiler)[Part of me really wants there to be fairies and a dark battle against her evil mother. But at the same time, Mori seems like an unreliable narrator at best. She's recently dealt with the incredibly traumatic experience of losing her sister and becoming seriously injured (we still really don't know how this happened), along with what sounds to be many years of emotional abuse from her presumably mentally unstable mother. (hide spoiler)]

Do the fairies/magic really exist? Or has she created this fantasy reality for herself as a coping mechanism? What do you guys think so far?

Also, I'm not finished with the book, yet! So maybe this stuff will be revealed soon, but I thought it'd be fun to talk about.

[Serendi]

Not specifically related to this, but I don't like it when a book, marketed as SF, could be either fantasy/SF/alternate world OR mental illness. I always go for the "It really IS elves or whatever" answer.

Haven't read enough of this one to know if Walton intends you to wonder. As far as I'm concerned, it *better* be real magic! If it isn't, market it differently so I can avoid it.

Iron Dragon's Daughter, The Stolen Child, and Liar all come to mind. In my view, they are all SFF. Even though at least two of the authors intend you to doubt, quite possibly all three.

I think some people like the ambiguity; in this particular area, I'm not one of them.

[John]

I don't actually buy that this is a mental illness. It's either real or she's mythologizing her life in her diary to feel more special and deal with great loss. That is a very different dynamic than the typical "is she crazy?" cop-out, because it's about the usefulness of Fantasy in life. That makes it a much richer experience than most post-modernism.

Some things swayed me to believing one, but they're all later in the book. Don't want to spoil them.

[Serendi]

Would you be willing to put which one you believe in a spoiler tag? I'm curious.

[Louise]

I don't mind a bit of ambiguity and am quite happy to accept that in this story. To me it doesn't matter whether its part of her imagination, because that doesn't make it less real.

I'll have to try and remember how it actually turns out...

[Dazerla]

I personally believed that she is actually experiencing what she describes, but I can see interrupting it the other way as well.

[John]

Serendi wrote: "Would you be willing to put which one you believe in a spoiler tag? I'm curious."

Sure! I just stink with tagging. Let's see...

(view spoiler)[So late in the book, she brings her boyfriend to the woods and he seems to see the faeries as well. He could be faking just to get laid, but since his potential duplicity never paid off in the novel, I presumed he was being honest, and this convincing me Mori did see these things.

The other was how random the final battle with her mother was. That came on so fast with so little rising action in the entries for fifty pages before it, that I felt Mori had been preoccupied and was blindsided by something like that happening.

I still buy interpretations that all of the Fantasy is artifice she's using to mythologize her life, but these two pushed me towards buying that some of her magic is real. I don't believe everything she says, though, as she's still liable to contextualize things towards her self-importance. She clearly needs that with how powerless she is over most of her life. (hide spoiler)]

[Kelsy]

I agree with John's assessment.

(view spoiler)[For me to believe in the magic, I needed someone else in the world to interact with the magic, too. Although Mori is the one giving the account of Wim's meeting the fairies later in the novel, these parts feel trustworthy to me, especially with the small details of how he couldn't really see them at first, but once he held the walking staff the fairies gave her, he could *really* see them.

And, yes, this means I stayed up to finish the novel... :D (hide spoiler)]

[Andrew]

I just finished and found the whole thing quite boring. I feel the fairies and 'magic' is how she copes with her life being what it is.

[Hélène]

I really felt the same way, and am really happy not to be the only one!

For me, it's not really mental illness, but more of a coping mechanism. Her life is so hard at that time, the reality so much for her to beare, that she retreats in her books, and in that universe she used to share when her life was "better". Because everything she went through makes sense this way, and make it bearable. She is really young and alone, and there's no other way to make sense of what happened for her.

[Amy]

At the star I thought maybe it was all a bit in her head, but by the end I was pretty sure it wasn't.

[Serendi]

I'm going to post something about this in the "Done" thread. Just FYI.

Oh, and thanks, John, for braving the spoiler tags!

[Nathan]

I agree with John but . . .

(view spoiler)[I did not quite buy the sisters as witches though. Her reaction to them when they tried to be nice to her showed how emotionally damaged Mori was. Those sisters were nothing but nice to her if aloof.

Their "magic" was something as mundane as building up webs of obligation and relationship between them and her father, something people do every day.

I saw her reaction to the earrings as a rejection a relationship with them and perhaps some jelousy of the hold they had on Daniel. (hide spoiler)]

[Dazerla]

Nathan I don't completely agree with you. (view spoiler)[. I felt what happened with the earrings and the piercing as a disconnect between the Aunts and Mori. Having been in the situation of having relatives push fashionable behavior and dress on me and get really upset when I didn't want those things. What I saw that scene as is a rejection of the Aunts being able to dictate what kind of person Mori is. Without bothering to know her at all. Of course I could be reading I to this because of my own experiences. (hide spoiler)]

[Nathan]

Julia wrote: "Nathan I don't completely agree with you. [spoilers removed]"

All I am saying is thatthere is a way to refuse, reconizing their good intentions, without throwing a fit about it. Perhaps that might have been asking too much of Mori given her emotional state though.

[Ruth (tilltab) Ashworth]

I liked the ambiguity because it made this novel feel like it was a work of fact, and not fiction. Because there was deniability, I could completely believe that the fairies and magic are a part of this world, and that Mori might be someone I could meet one day.

[D. H.]

Like a lot of people, I thought it would turn out to be mental illness, but (view spoiler)[ I was going back and forth.

When Wim saw the fairies and at the castle's ruin and even repeated something a fairy said, I started to think Mori was more reliable because she hadn't told him.

Once I started to think the magic was real, it was easy for me to believe that the sisters were witches too. (I actually suspected it before when I was going back and forth.) (hide spoiler)]