Understanding Magic

A couple of years ago, I read a book that went something like this:

Villain creates a doppelganger of a girl.  In order to survive, the doppelganger must devour the girl’s possessions: this restores the doppelganger’s power and likeness.  The villain tells the doppelganger that in order to live a full life, the doppelganger must devour the girl.  Instead, the doppelganger teams up with someone who has a convenient magical watch who can extend her life.  It works, the villain has a Disney death, the end.

I was appalled by this solution.  In addition to being unsatisfying and full of plot holes, I said to myself: This author doesn’t understand magic!

Oh?  Then what should the solution have been?

The doppelganger should have eaten the villain!  We know she restores her power by eating, and the villain was the ultimate source of the magic that kept her going—and that would have satisfyingly defeated the villain in a way that made sense and wasn’t simply convenient.

Now, from a storytelling perspective, I stand by this.  But what a strange thing to think: “This author doesn’t understand magic!”  Understand magic?  Magic isn’t real!  Why am I treating it as a universal?

Contrast this to a book I just finished rereading for the first time in years: Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always.  I don’t usually do this, but while reading it, which approaching the climax, I thought: This author understands magic.

Again, what a peculiar thing to think!  Why do I feel that I (or anyone else) can understand magic in the same way I understand weather or seasons or food?  Magic isn’t real! 

And yet I do find that I have a very solid and stubborn understanding of what magic is and is not.  The rules change, but there the essence, the ultimate base underlying principal, does not:

Magic is a raw, wild thing, though it may sometimes seem tame.  It works by primeval laws.  The deeper and older the magic, the more this is true, and the more it demands blood and sacrifice—and not necessarily the kind you expect.

Where do I get this idea?  Because although my understanding is not uncommon, it’s also not universal.  Have I gotten it from the books I’ve consumed, especially those I consumed in my formative years?  The Narnia books have magic like this; so does Diana Wynne Jones.  So do so many other authors.  So do many of the books I had read to me when I was very small—Lawrence Yep’s Dragon Quartet, for example.  But I don’t get my idea of magic only from words of the past century; it’s much older than that:

This is the sort of magic one finds in fairytales.

I’m not just talking about the Brothers Grimm here.  As a child, as today, I love reading fairytales from around the world.  The details change, but underlying them, the rawness is there: it is there in Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German, Romanian, Norwegian, and Celtic folklore—and a great many other places besides, whose stories I have read less recently.  It is in the folklore of countries divided by time and culture and distance, individually developing their own versions of vampires, ghosts, tricksters, and child-snatchers—of the monsters that live in the forest and in the lake and under the bed; of the things that only come out at night. 

Magic is the power of fear given manifestation—and stories are the manifestation of hope and the human spirit given to defeat that power (and, sometimes, to harness it; and it often allows itself to be harnessed, though deep in its heart, it never fully forgets that it was once a wild thing).

So now I have put into words, however clumsy, my understanding of magic.  No wonder I write so many monsters in my books.