| Towards or Back to Human Values? Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006. ISBN 1904303730 (hardback) Review by Lindsay Myers, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland Over the last decade academic interest in fantasy for children has risen enormously, and a wide range of critical studies exploring the structure and purpose of this literature have emerged. As Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Marek Oziewicz note, however, the majority of these studies have tended to focus on the social, political and poetical aspects of fantasy rather than on the moral and spiritual dimension. That the ethical component of fantasy for children has received such little attention is puzzling, especially given that fantasy is widely recognised by children’s authors to be one of the most conducive vehicles for investigating what it means to be a human being. Towards or Back to Human Values? Spiritual and Moral Dimensions of Contemporary Fantasy marks an attempt to redress this imbalance, and there is little doubt that the nineteen essays collected in the volume provide important new perspectives on this hitherto overlooked aspect of children’s fantasy. The volume combines theoretical articles with in-depth analyses of specific texts for children, and is divided into four distinct sections, each with its own brief introduction. The first section, “Theorizing Fantasy Through Mapping its Spiritual Territory”, examines the way in which “considerations of spirituality and human values in the fantasy genre, as well as the ethical world views that they entail, may be contained in literary-critical discourse” (xiii). The articles, which are predominantly theoretical in approach, focus on the ways in which fantasy texts through their subversion of a generally accepted materialistic world-view often move back as well as forward to human values. The second section, entitled, “Fantasy on the Role of Imagination in Human Life”, explores the imaginative function of fantasy. Stratford Caldecott reinterprets the Romantic theory of imagination in the context of the Christian Platonist tradition while Devin Brown discusses how the techniques that J.R.R. Tolkien employed in his Lord of the Rings effectively sanctify the ordinary. The third section, entitled “Fantasy as Asserting Interconnectedness of All Life, Stressing the Need for Cooperation and Fostering Environmental Awareness” looks at the ways in which fantasy for children draws together diverse communities and builds respect for the environment. It includes in-depth discussions of several recent fantasies for children, among which Robin Hobb’s The Assassin’s Quest and The Tawny Man series, Hiromi Goto’s Water of Possibility and Kenneth Oppel’s Silverwing, as well as an informative essay on ecological principles of life on the earth and their literary interpretations jointly written by Professor of Ecology, Piotr Skubala (Piotr Skubala is the Prof in the Dept of Ecology of the University of Silesia, Poland – so maybe you could rework the punctuation accordingly – I wasn’t sure how to do it!) and Marek Oziewicz. The forth section, “Fantasy as Exploring Human Experience in the Context of Life and Death, Chaos and Order, Rationality and Intuition, Fate and Free Will, the Real and the Imaginary” considers how writers for children use fantasy to explore these aspects of human experience. Fantasies discussed in detail include Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, David Almond’s Skellig and The Fire-Eaters, Alan Garner’s The Owl Service and Red Shift and Roger Zelazny’s The Chronicles of Amber. I believe that this volume is particularly significant for two reasons: Firstly the work brings together contributors from different countries; it thus does not have the Anglocentric bias of many other recent critical collections. Secondly, and equally importantly, the fantasies considered all originate from a wide-range of different countries; a factor which highlights both the similarity and diversity of fantasy across the globe. The fact that the contributors also come from a variety of different academic fields and that the volume contains articles on recently published fantasies for children as well as on the more well-established classics is an added bonus. Towards or Back to Human Values? Spiritual and Moral Dimensions of Contemporary Fantasy is also to be praised for the consideration that it awards to the spiritual and moral dimensions of domestic fantasies; ethical and moral concerns are all too often perceived to be the domain of high or heroic fantasy. The opening introduction convincingly outlines the rational behind the volume, and the index of contributors is particularly useful (although it is unfortunate that there are some spelling errors in the names of the contributors). As regards the individual articles, it seems to me that there is considerable variation in the quality; while some bring significant new perspectives to bear on specific sub-groups of fantasy or on individual texts, others are far less innovative in their content. There is also significant repetition across some of the articles, particularly in the first section. That said the very fact that certain themes recur has its own significance. From a personal perspective, the articles that I found the most rewarding were Margaret Hiley‘s analysis of the writer/reader relationship in Michael Ende’s Neverending Story and Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart, Marnie K. Jorenby’s exploration of the ethical function of other-world characters in Matsutani’s Miyoko’s Naoki and Yuko series, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak’s investigation of the way in which Hiromi Goto’s Water of Possibility argues for the formulation of a new environmental ethics, and Maija-Liisa Harju’s discussion of the ecological merits of anthropomorphism. Overall I believe that this volume achieves what it sets out to do which is to provoke discussion about the ‘ethical and value-oriented underpinnings’ in fantasy for children as well as to raise questions about the development of the genre in new cultural, social and political paradigms. Rather than pigeon-hole fantasy texts into particular categories, these articles investigate the interconnectedness of fantasy for children on a variety of philosophical and structural levels, thereby drawing attention to the enormous potential that this genre affords for personal and collective transformations of consciousness. Lindsay Myers |