Bringing the Magic Home — Linh S. Nguyễn

When I turned fifteen, I couldn’t help but wonder, why haven’t I gotten the chance the fight a dragon yet? Harry had gotten past a dragon at fourteen. Katniss had won the Hunger Games at fifteen. Lucy, Edmund, Susan, and Peter had already won a war and started ruling a kingdom. Percy had saved the world. So where was my evil dark lord? Where were my old, wise mentors? Why hadn’t my superpowers revealed themselves yet?

As a child who was often immersed in a different time or universe, accepting reality was a difficult process when growing up. As Neil Gaiman said:

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in.

For so long, I wanted my own adventure in the great wide somewhere. I wanted to find magic and be a warrior. A large reason for this was that often, the characters and stories that I read of were so much more meaningful, supportive, and interesting to me than those actually around me. They never criticized and never judged. Instead, they showed me, by example, how to be strong, brave, and kind. As Dumbledore said, “of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean it’s not real?” I was definitely learning and growing from these stories, which was good enough reason to make them real for me.

I did not want to let go of that magic as I grew older. Regardless of how my parents and teachers protested, all the stories that I love had shaped the best parts of me, and I did not know how to relinquish something so positive in my life. However, even Dumbledore had told Harry that “it does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.” Eventually, most of the characters that enter fairyland do find their way back home — from Narnia, from Neverland, from Oz, from Wonderland…

Reality and fiction had so often been presented as a dichotomy to me, but as with most dichotomies, it is a false one. It took me a very long time, and a lot of guidance, to learn to reconcile these seemingly contrasting concepts, and to bring all that magic back into reality.

Between conventions, dressing up at book and movie premieres, and make-believe games we play as children, many people already try to live out the magic of stories in our real world. However, much of the thought behind dressing up and playing pretend is about escaping into the story. As a kid, that had always been what I was aiming to do. But, as I grew older, I realized that the important part wasn’t leaving. The important part is how we come back.

Fiction often leaves us discontented with our world, as Neil Gaiman said, but he elaborates:

Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

Susan Pevensie from Prince Caspian (Adamson, 2008)

Stories help to show us magic, beauty, and knowledge that can then be harnessed and brought back to other parts of our lives, to make us stronger and better people. On a mass scale, this can be observed through the countless charity organizations and initiatives have sprung up, inspired by stories, such as Fandom Forward (formerly the Harry Potter Alliance), which have accomplished amazing things in the real world.

For me, one particularly important example that helped me to understand how magic can be brought home is through the character of Susan Pevensie in C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. At twelve years old, Susan goes through the wardrobe with her siblings and enters Narnia, where she becomes Queen Susan the Gentle. Many years later, she returns to London with her family, then moves to America. Of all the characters in the entire series, she alone does not return to Narnia in The Last Battle.

Susan Pevensie from Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Apted, 2010)

When I first read that Susan had left Narnia for good, it broke my heart. She was my favourite character — intelligent, master with a bow, and successful leader of a country for decades. Yet, she adjusted better to leaving Narnia than anyone else. For a long time, I considered her moving on to be a negative thing (as Lewis suggested that it was), until I read some different takes. As a few writers have suggested, “the greatest beneficiary of all that happened in that magic land was actually Susan the Gentle, left behind to live her life with the wisdom of Narnia.” She alone was able to take the knowledge, strength, and courage from her time as ruler of Narnia and bring it back into the real world, perhaps making a difference in the Second World War and the Feminist movements that followed. Her siblings, unable to let go, could not.

In many ways, the leaving of a fairyland is a metaphor for our journey into literature. Eventually, after a whirlwind adventure, we must return home. But, we do not emerge from a book as the same person who began reading. Again, as Neil Gaiman so aptly puts it:

If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn’t you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with (and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real. . . . As J.R.R. Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.

Often, we need to step away from a situation to gain a better perspective. That is what fiction and fantasy offer. In the end, as all these writers suggest, it is not the spells and potions that are the true magic; it is the values and words that will stay with us as readers long after a book is closed.