There Is No Gray in Moral Failure by Yves Johnson

As her fantasies persist, she’s taken to a psychologist by her guardian, a severe man she knows only as Uncle. When we first meet her, Christine is a young girl prone to princess daydreams aided by an imaginary friend, a talking rabbit, who promises her these are no mere dreams. Activate your Online Access Now Article content If you are a Home delivery print subscriber, unlimited online access is included in your subscription. Tucked into a fantastic world that never lacks for imagination, the need for escape is an unsettling undercurrent for our hero, Christine. In his novel Chrysanthe, the notion of escape hangs over what could otherwise be a somewhat standard tale of a youth thrust from a boring life into an epic birthright. (As William Gibson has shrewdly pointed out about science fiction, another genre that was once unfairly maligned as evading the here and now, the good stuff is always about the world we live in, writ into new forms.) Besides which, all fiction will to some degree be an escape: The Great Gatsby may reveal the hollow core of American society, but its message is incisive precisely because the gilded life of its characters is a fantasy for most of us.Nevertheless, the image persists, but at least there are fantasists like French-Canadian Yves Meynard, willing to exploit the reputation towards interesting ends. That’s a particularly egregious mistake in the case of Thrones, a show that has psychological depth to match almost any on television, but it’s an attitude that pervades a lot of knee-jerk reaction to anything with swords and sorcery.īad fiction, of course, will always drift somewhere far away from reality, but a magical world doesn’t necessitate escapism any more than a hard-boiled one does - if anything, it can help sneak through ideas that would be quickly dismissed if they wore modern clothes. In some of the misguided dismissals of HBO’s Game of Thrones, TV critics seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that fantasy is forever unhinged from the world in front of us. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.

There Is No Gray in Moral Failure by Yves Johnson