No magic at all…
Chapters Seven and Eight of The Magic Key: The Dread Night by Bardelys are really one episode: caught by the soldiers, Hans tries to escape. He manages to make his way out of the camp and runs some way up the valley, only to sprain his ankle, whereupon he hides in a haystack; the soldiers track him there and burn down the haystack.
The chapter ends with a cliff-hanger as Hans goes out into their clutches.
There is not a whit of magic to be sniffed out here. No fairy godmother rescues Hans, and the soldiers don’t seem to use any magic to track him. (They might use magic, but we don’t see any hint of it. This to my mind equals no magic at all.)
So we have here a standard bit of boy’s own adventure fiction, direct descendent to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island episode where Jim Hawkins falls into the apple barrel and overhears the mutineers.
Where Bardelys seems to have gone wrong is in the level of detail, or granularity, with which he tells this tale.
Let us consider this movement through the tale, as if we in the audience, along with the hero, were traversing an unknown land. I can say that there are three broad paths we could follow:
- flying
- riding
- slogging
The Brothers Grimm, and most traditional talesmen, chose to fly. They soared high above the events of their tales, swooping down for the occasional episode or scene of heightened suspense or emotion, winging higher to cover transitions of great distance or time.
The nineteenth-century master novelists rode down the King’s highways, or took us in coaches, stopping along the way to observe some especially scenic outlook, racing onwards now and then, and enjoying a nice meal at a roadside inn.
Modern talesmen slog through the bogs and mires cross-country, and make us feel every midge-bite, smell every outburst of marsh-gas, and struggle through the mud of every single moment.
Bardelys, though he began his tale in imitation of the traditional flying talesmen, has slipped, as though by default, into the modern manner of slogging with young Hans over every step of his flight, asking us to share every tortured breath, the feel of the new-mown hay stubble upon bare feet, the chill of the night fogs, and the fear of discovery.
If as seems likely, Hans begins the next chapter in the hands of the soldiers, he will find himself in precisely the same position he was in at the head of Chapter Seven, and these two chapters will have been wasted.
On the other hand, these flights have been an attempt by the author to make us share in the fortunes of the hero, to feel grief (not enough of that), anger, desire, fear alongside Hans. Maybe he has deemed this necessary to enforce identification (sympathy + empathy) with Hans; and maybe now, or at some point soon to come in the tale, he will consider that it has been enough of this, that we do now identify with Hans (or we never will) and thus Bardelys can go back to riding or, we hope, even flying.
We shall see.
(Composed on keyboard Saturday 8 November 2008)
