Hero's Path page six, by Marvin Hill
When my agent started talking about epic fantasies, I was skeptical. My personal voyage in epic fantasy had begun well with Tolkien, drifted lazily through David Eddings, and ended with my first attempt at reading Terry Goodkind. Every now and then I’d take another stab at epic fantasies while visiting my parents; my Dad read them one after another, like eating potato chips, and I could pick one off the bookstore shelf for his Xmas present without even opening the covers. But they seemed interchangeable to me, and I could reread the same one every holiday without realizing it.
Hero's Path page twelve, by Marvin Hill
My agent had a better opinion of the genre. Epic fantasies, he told me, were not one band of picaresques roaming faux-medieval England after another. They were varied, large-scale adventures and took place in exciting and different worlds. He suggested quite a few, so I have been reading them. But it’s not large-scale adventure and different worlds that are the most striking characteristics of these books. It’s homely pleasures and happy endings.
Of course, I knew this when I was picking those random fat paperbacks off the shelf for my father. They were never going to
Hero's Path page fifteen, by Marvin Hill
surprise him with an unhappy ending. Neither would he be bothered by ambiguity about whether the good were in fact evil, or the evil in fact good. Basic assumptions about the things that make for happiness in life would not be questioned; love and family, good meals and worthwhile work, the satisfaction of manual labor and a bath afterwards, would be vividly described without being obscured by the protagonist’s angst or ambition. Characters in an epic fantasy – good characters, at least – got out of their own heads, and wouldn’t bore my father with incessant self-examination.
Hero's Path page twenty, by Marvin Hill
I, however, thought self-examination mattered. How people decided what their quest should be interested me far more than the mechanics of how they achieved it; I preferred Robertson Davies and Louis Auchincloss, authors in which the setting and adventures were often determinedly mundane compared to their characters’ vivid interior lives and dilemmas.
So after a twenty-year hiatus, I return to reading epic fantasy and find much of it basically unchanged. Its protagonists still work hard, enjoy good meals and love their horses. They still often sidestep the gigantic question of how to determine their lives’ significance; they live in worlds where options are limited, and quests are handed to them by magic or prophesy. Villains are still easily distinguished from heroes, even without a program. Exotic locales are still valued, and people who apparently never read The Arabian Nights are making a fuss about how innovative The Crescent Moon is. And my Dad could still read them one after another, like eating potato chips.
Hero's Path page twenty-two, by Marvin Hill
What I find I like best in epic fantasies is the beginning, in which the author establishes the Good Life that protagonists will be fighting for. Being able to make good and help your father, a steady job in the stables and pleasant companions, a cup of tea with a friend. These are the things I care about, and care to read about. The grand magic and exciting battles, in which monsters threatening these homely pleasures are introduced, almost triumph, and are vanquished: not so much. The more straightforward and tension-free those parts are, the more quickly over, the better for me. In fact, you could replace all those middle chapters with ***here the hero triumphs***, and I would be just as happy. Because to me, the real adventure is still the interior one to decide what your life’s journey will be about, absent quests and villains, and how you’ll turn yourself into the kind of person who can enjoy that Good Life.
I wish someone would create a subgenre for those stories.
Hero's Path page twenty-five, by Marvin Hill
The art here is from Hero’s Path by Marvin Hill, a local block print artist who also thought that the epics ended too soon, before the hero had dealt with any of the important stuff. He corrected that in his art (and, many of us think, in his life).
