It’s a portal fantasy. The protagonist’s twist is that he’s aging – or rather he’s over thirty (this falls flat, since my own generation simply has no milestones for age: did you know that for some reason, star wars is still around?). He’s in a rock band and has a motorcycle, but his girlfriend has a car: the presence of women hints at stricture and death. His newly adult life, about which he feels ambivalent, literally miscarries, offering the promise of escape into fantasy once again.

It’s a male book, and deals with male alienation and rootlessness: our hero Theo has to remind himself that the aborted baby was his as well as his girlfriend’s, he feels misplaced even seeing her in the hospital, and the girlfriend’s father summarizes the superfluity of men in family (and, in darker undertone, the superfluity of men in reality):

‘…his wife and only daughter treated Tom Lillard s though he were a graceless but acceptably familiar sundial in the middle of a flower bed they were gardening. When Cat had wantd him to approve of Theo, or at least pretend to, she had enlisted her mother’s help and there had been dinners, family outings. He was a figurehead – an aging CEO of his own family who only showed up for board meetings and wondered how so much got done without him.’

Theo isn’t even pathetic: he has a foil there in his friend Johnny:

‘…ol’ Johnny B. didn’t have a lot else going on in his life. Besides his record store job and the Clouds, in fact, John was pretty much the kind of guy advertisers made fun of but who kept their clients in business–an amiable lump who lived on take-out food, rented porn movies in bunches, and watched wrestling by himself.’

Instead, his youth has emptied out of him, and his delusions spoiled that having a child would make life qualitatively different, he frets that he’s nobody.

‘I’m dying here, he thought suddenly. I don’t belong here.’

In Thomas Covenant style, his life spirals downward, though the physical terrors happen only to those around him, and affect him indirectly by erasing him – after his girlfriend leaves him, his mother starts to die of pancreatic cancer, and the mysteries of the real world are shown in harsh light against those of the fantastical. The medical lingo is ‘…a dump truck full of spiky Greco-Latin terms, […] poured […] over everything in an avalanche of meaningless but still terrifying syllables.’ The fantasy novel, we suspect, is the mirror-image of this, where gobbledygook, Greco-Latin or pseudo-Old Norse or Middle English, is literally meaningless but seemingly not so. He’s about to go to ‘the Old Country’ that his grandma told him about (Ireland, which so many fantasy worlds are modeled on), where there are ‘fairies and giants’: ‘simple-minded nonsense.’

“I’m not ready to be in the world right now, Johnny. Give me some time to come back.”

The deliverance comes in the form of a manuscript from a dead eccentric great-uncle, who is the portal to the Faelands. His (pseudo?)-autobiographical novel hints at the magic key that fantasy always seems to offer, that breaks through illusion and into the real, which is all the more real for being fake:

“After such exhausting researches (and after so many failed attempts!) to behold at last that fabled metropolis standing before me, the teeming streets and the shining towers that so few men have ever seen, and fewer still have returned from, was to understand once and for all that Science is a sham and what we call “human knowledge” a compendium of evasions and half-truths.”

The evasion and escape of fantasy, in other words, is always turned on its head by the fantasist: Science palliates disease with verbose nonsense, and so in its pretensions only prolongs and then caps off a life that couldn’t have been worth living in the first place. Ignorance is a virtue in that, if we really did know it all, and everything we know is so terrible, it follows that all there is are terrible things, and so the mere possibility of open vistas is all a modern man can ask for. Enter the fairies, who are unknown and yet so pleasingly familiar.

But I always fear the boldness of this move is insincere. Fantasy itself becomes a kind of medicine, a pleasant (or not so pleasant) adventure that cements its own importance only in relation to ‘the real world’ that, despite being so terrible, no novelist is brave enough to abandon:

‘…better to rent, to live off at least some of the proceeds while he figured out how he was going to get his train wreck life off the siding and back on the tracks again.’

And so the idea is that we all need to go a little schizophrenic and indulge some daydreams, or the unalloyed reality will kill us. That needs to be avoided, so that – we can come back to more.

A metafictional wink:

‘Eamonn Dowd’s invented world seemed to be in some ways a standard Fairyland, but it was neither the butterflies-and-flowers place of children’s tales nor even the glamorous, perilous land of Celtic and Scandinavian mythology. instead, from what Theo had read so far, it seemed like a bizarre mirror-version of the real world, albeit in a slightly old-fashioned way. already there had been references to office buildings and railway lines. what kind of Fairyland had railroads, for God’s sake?

It was original, at least – he had to give his great-uncle credit for that. Maybe he really could find a legitimate publisher.’

the variations on fantasy have exploded so widely that this has to be a joke in its own right: also, no, although Williams found a publisher, you never will (or at least, stumbling onto the Faelands is a more reasonable thing to hope for).

‘…how hard can it be to write one of those fantasy books, anyway…?’

Theo sells his mother’s house and retreats to a cabin in the woods with his uncle’s fantasy. There a zombie from the other world attacks him, and he escapes with a foul-mouthed sprite through the Portal into the place his uncle described.

There’s something unsettling about a fantasy world in which not even the protagonist remembers the names of the places he’s visiting and simply wants to leave. Theo’s intelligence drops a lot, so that people have to exposit to him more; he forgets things the reader remembers (and that he should know, given that he has his uncle’s book), and stays a bit too flatly mopey for prolonged reader sympathy. Things happen without happening, and people ask themselves questions that the reader who’s paying attention should already be asking (and sometimes, have answered) anyway.

Much of the early story in Fairy is just a kind of sensory smorgasbord, where mythological characters from the British Isles in a ‘twisted fairy tale’ -style industrial society whiz past, a little too quickly to get a decent look at any of them. But there are some cute touches: non-pagan religious references seem to actually physically harm these creatures. There is little sense of a plot, and little sense of character: so this seems mostly to be a love letter from the author to that mythological corner of the world (púcas and brownies and all that), but this is strangely short-circuited by making the setting so mundane, so it has the flatness of urban fantasy, which tends to equate magic with quirky alternate-history technology. This makes the wonder the narrator keeps telling us Theo is experiencing unconvincing.

‘Still, it was interesting how quickly he was beginning to get used to it–if he half-shut his eyes, he could almost believe he was back home.’

Though maybe the idea is that the real world, having expanded so far into fantastical territory that it’s become intrinsically devoid of mystery, now leaves no room for fantasy of anything except this sort (at least so long as authors have stunted imaginations):

‘The whole thing was so much like ceremonial magic and yet so similar to using a bar code reader that Theo was suddenly struck not by the strangeness of the Fairie world but by the previously unremarked strangeness of his own.’

It’s best when we get to see real fairy tales, like the stories the goblins tell (part fable, part fortune-reading), but these are too few and far-between. That the scheming titular Flower lords have cutesy names (Thornapple, Larkspur) is funny at first, but spending hundreds of pages with them, it just peters off to becoming slightly unfitting.

There’s too much focus on a psuedo-love triangle, between the Tinkerbell type and the hellion princess who of course he runs into. You’d really have to have no taste not to prefer the feisty six-inch fairy lass, obviously (read her dialogue with an Irish accent – what a wholesome cutie pie!). The early themes of alienation and the crux of all portal fantasy - the Portal - are dimmed in the shuffle, and everything is pretty aimless, though there is one great reveal that gives the feeling of being lost in one’s own world some literary teeth: our hero is a changeling, swapped at birth for a mortal baby, and so literally an alien in his own home (not quite the forgotten son of the king, but all the same).

The plot finally deigns to begin about 60% though the book, but by then I was bored – did not finish.

The War of the Flowers reflects its own protagonist too closely – aimless, unconvinced of its own importance, never bothering to begin, refusing to deliver on the thematic promises of the opening section, which are forgotten except when convenient.

“What was it Dolly Ogre called me? Shallow. Like that rainwater. Just going with the flow, sliding away, changing direction– whatever’s easiest.”

It wants to be over, but doesn’t know how to be.

“He didn’t want to waste any more brainpower on the ins and outs of this cartoon world.”