Through the looking glass

My missus is half-German and speaks to our kids mostly in German. Recently, she’s been reading to them from Cornelia Funke’s Hinter Verzauberten Fenstern – literally, Behind Enchanted Windows, a book about entering magical worlds through the windows of an Advent calendar.

The kids absolutely love the book. It’s probably beaten Roald Dahl in the race to favourite-ever story.

Part of what they love is precisely that portal fantasy element – entering a magical world from this one. That portal element is so central to kids’ enjoyment that you can think of a load of books which place that portal front and centre: Through the Looking Glass, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Tom’s Midnight Garden, for example. Even where the portal isn’t there in the title, it’s still often one of the central emblems in the book. Just think how important Platform 9 ½ is to the symbolism of Harry Potter: on one side of that platform is – just London. One the other side – everything magical and wonderful and dangerous and strange.

Those transitions are critical. You can’t mess them up. One of our editors, a much-published and acclaimed kids’ author, Brian Keaney, used to advise writers of portal fantasy that they write the first draft of that key transition scene in poetry, before remastering it in prose. His idea was to make sure that the magic of the moment was captured properly, before you started working on all the boring detail.

First poetry, then prose.

As a practical idea for me personally, that idea has never worked. I’d feel too self-conscious about the poetry to really let rip. And, contrariwise, my prose never worries too much about playing by standard prose rules, so I don’t feel especially constrained to avoid the strange or the magical.

Also, of course, I don’t write portal fantasy for kids and young adults, so the idea didn’t really relate to me.

Or so I first thought. But the advice stuck with me, because I came to realise that almost every book worth a damn has a portal scene of some sort in it. Books start with some kind of status quo. Then some inciting incident comes along and – another world beckons. Not a magical one, necessarily, but one whose rules and possibilities have that glitter of danger and possibility. If you don’t have that kind of moment, it’s questionable what in heck’s name you think you’re writing about. 

And the essential quality of the key portal scene is still the same, no matter what you’re writing. It’s to convey the transition from workaday (safe, known, stable) to magical (dangerous, unknown, unstable, replete with possibility.) That transition will have a specific quality to it, a quality that comes close to the essence of your story.

Here, for example, is a key moment from my The Deepest Grave. Fiona is at a murder scene. The woman, an archaeologist, has been decapitated and spears plunged into her chest. This is already no ordinary murder, but then we get the first flicker of portal:

Charteris’s empty eyes are turned towards the wall, where there hangs a piece of framed text, in that hard-to-read medieval script. I take a photo of the text for later reference, but try to read it anyway. It says, I think, something like this:

Agitio ter consuli, gemitus britannorum . . . Repellunt barbari ad mare, repellit mare ad barbaros; inter haec duo genera funerum aut iugulamur aut mergimur.

—Gildas, De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae

I don’t understand Latin—though ‘Britannorum’ and ‘repellunt barbari’ presumably mean something like what you’d think they mean—but I feel the tug of that ancient world, its torments and darknesses. Perhaps there, in that tug, is an important part of Gaynor Charteris herself.

That’s not quite a wardrobe you can step through – but this isn’t a fantasy and it’s not written for kids – but it comes close. That phrasing ‘the tug of that ancient world’ is, clear as a day, an announcement of the magical world that will dominate the pages of this modern police procedural.

Over the next dozen or so pages, that first flicker firms up into something more definite, more certain. Fiona soon comes back to the murder scene, but this time in the company of an archaeologist (Katie) capable of reading the Latin. Here’s how the portal moment comes again, but more strongly this time:

I point her to the medieval fragment hanging on the wall. The one Charteris was looking at.

‘Oh, that? It’s Gildas. The groans of the Britons.’

I don’t say anything, but my face probably does a ‘Gildas who?’ kind of look.

Katie: ‘Gildas was a sixth century monk. A saint, in fact. His writing is one of our earliest sources for the period.’

And, reading the Latin, she translates:

‘To Agitius, thrice consul: the groans of the Britons . . . The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us to the barbarians; between these two means of death, we are either killed or drowned.—Gildas, On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain.’

‘And the barbarians in question . . .?’

‘Northern tribes. Modern day Scots and Irish basically.’

She answers the question, but the words drop noiselessly, pebbles vanished in a well. We both share a sudden sense that it is almost disrespectful to be talking about these long ago conflicts when what we are dealing with is a very twenty-first century corpse. It’s strange how this investigation, young as it is, keeps getting tugged under by the past, and the deep past at that.

Stolen Dark Age finds. Iron Age spears. Gildas and his Latin lament.

That last paragraph gives you, in list form, the disconcerting elements of our portal-world. And notice that our extravagantly murdered corpse is not in herself disconcerting. To Fiona, homicide investigation is part of her day job. The corpse alone doesn’t create the portal. It’s the bits all around it. The parts that don’t belong. That parts that make up the music of this particular book.

When I think of it, probably all of my books have some kind of portal moment. I bet yours has one as as well.

And the advice that emerges from this set of thoughts? Simply this: notice the magic. Notice the music. Write in poetry first, if that idea appeals. But if it doesn’t, bring the poetry in anyway. This is the place where the music of your book sounds its first true notes. The rest is preamble. This bit matters. Make sure the music pushes through. Do that, and your book already has the glitter of something that the reader wants to read.