Escapism Part Three: Fantasy Fiction

Let’s face it, we all secretly want to be an elvish ninja-assassin-wizard dragon-rider

At last we have reached my favourite type of escapism: fantasy fiction. To be honest, fiction in any form is my go-to for escaping the mundanities and insanities of real life. There are obviously many types of fiction in both genre and form and I’ll take my escapism in almost any shape it comes, barring a few exceptions (like horror—because I’m a massive wimp), but for the sake of keeping this post brief-ish, I’m just going to focus on one medium and one genre: books and fantasy.

A book a day keeps reality away…

I fell in love with books before I could even read. I grew up in a family of readers. Both my parents loved to read, and my older brothers often had their noses stuck in a book. Being able to read was almost like a right-of-passage in our household; a coming-of-age ritual that proved you were ready to explore the world. The bookcase in our house seemed to me a treasure trove—each book a chest waiting to be opened for the precious gems it contained within—and I couldn’t wait to plunder every single one. We were read to every night as children and then, when we began to learn to read, we were taken to the library every week to check out the maximum of six books each.

Hence, when I was about seven years old, I had my Kafka moment and woke one morning transformed into a giant bookworm. From then, books became portals to escape the everyday and run amok in other worlds.

And no book was considered off-limits (with the exception of The Lord of the Rings, because my dad insisted we could only read it when we were old enough to truly appreciate it) so I never had any concept of selecting a book by reading age or ability. If a book took your fancy, you took it off the shelf and read it. I never once looked at a book and thought it was too long, too old or too hard to read (and this is despite having to have extra reading lessons for a year because my reading level was behind that of my peers). If the content appealed, I’d read it and no one ever told me I couldn’t or that I might find it too difficult or that I was too young, or too old, or the wrong gender. Reading was an adventure and books were safe spaces to explore—much safer than the real world.

Books as a kind of escapism are entirely different from social media and virtual reality. It would seem obvious to state that books are less interactive than other forms of more modern entertainment—after all, books are pretty static: the words are fixed, prearranged by the author and (choose your own stories aside) the plot is fixed—there’s nothing the reader can do to change it. You don’t get to have any control over the content and the conversation is entirely one way— you don’t get to actively participate. Social media and gaming, on the other hand, require more involvement from their audience; both encourage users to actively engage with content and also allow a certain amount of autonomy alongside that—from something as minor as choosing your Mario Kart character and vehicle, to something more freely creative like producing your own Instagram Reel.

But I think it would be an oversimplification to assume that because of their static form, books require less interaction from their audience or are somehow less immersive as a form of media.

Sometimes, less is actually more.

Disclaimer time!

Let me make a sort of disclaimer here: I fully acknowledge that there exist readers and non-readers. There are people for whom reading is the least interesting thing they could be asked to do. They derive very little, if any, pleasure from it. And even though I’m a hopeless bookworm, I get it. Reading is not natural. Story-telling is—humans have been spinning narratives since the beginning of our history—but reading is not. The written word is something we have constructed for ease of communication, specifically as a means to record and retain communication, but that doesn’t make it easy to use. It’s perfectly natural that for some people reading is about as appealing as licking rocks. In fact, some people would rather be made to lick their way from one end of Chesil Beach to the other than read a novel. I get it. If you’re a non-reader, books will do NOTHING for you, except perhaps give you a strong incentive to go and do literally anything else.

On the other hand, readers can be divided into three categories: non-fictionalists, fictionalists and a rabid breed of bookworm who will devour ANYTHING that’s made of words, including the backs of cereal packets and every handwritten sales ad on the  noticeboard in the local shop whilst they’re queuing for the till: if it’s in their line of sight, it MUST be read or bad things will happen—like their descendants growing up illiterate. I see you, you weirdos.

I know a few non-fictionalists and fiction does absolutely nothing for them; reading stuff that is made-up just seems like a colossal waste of time. Non-fictionalists prefer stories about real people doing real things, and they’d rather read about famous serial killers or watch documentaries on jellyfish and music festival scams than read a story about a thousand year war between elves and dwarves over the land of Fingardaanlin which possesses the only soil fertile enough to grow crops of magic wishing beans… or something.  

Basically, someone people are, quite reasonably, not big fans of reading or fiction and I just wanted to acknowledge that really, in case anyone thinks I’m assuming everyone is a rabid book worm like me.

Although I am the rabid bookworm type, who is easily pleased by reading absolutely anything (with the exception of Robinson Crusoe… honestly, give me some rocks to lick instead please), when it comes to escapism, I am actually a hard-core fictionalist. Only a strong dose of made up stuff will do when I want to escape the real world. The further from the real world the content is, the better, in fact. Give me space pirates, Victorian vampires and villains who want to rule the galaxy through entirely implausible means. Give me elves and magic and hobbits. Give me robot overlords, zombie apocalypses and science fiction that’s heavy on the fiction. Get me out of this world and into another, with characters and dilemmas that I’ll never have to face in my own world.

Don’t get me wrong. I can enjoy a good contemporary literary novel as much as the next bookworm, but the last thing I want, at the end of a long day at work, is to sit down and read about real, entirely relevant modern day issues. No, thanks. That is not going to prepare me to teach disenchanted, cynical teenagers the next day. It’s not going to give me an incentive to get out of bed and march into a day where break duty, a three-hour-long parent’s evening and four stacks of unmarked assignments await me. If I’m going to face that kind of soul-crushing tedium, I want to do it with the reckless bravery of a dystopian rebel fighter or the swagger of an elven assassin.

I’m honestly not sure if this makes me a little unhinged or something, but I find fiction (the more fantastical the better) the inspiration I need to get through the challenges of real life. For example, when I get into work and discover that my desk has completely disappeared from the office to make room for a photocopier, and all my stuff has been dumped somewhere else without my foreknowledge or permission, I pretend I’m in a sitcom. Can you hear the canned laughter over my internal screaming?

If I’m not feeling particularly motivated to exercise, I’ll imagine that getting down the gym is my training montage for surviving the Hunger Games—got to be fit enough to outrun the other tributes or I WILL be the first to die.

And when my chronic fatigue is being a proper jerk, I handle it by pretending it’s just a monster I’m living with until I figure out its secret weakness and destroy it.

Honestly, fiction has kept me physically health and out of prison for murdering a work colleague more times than I can even remember.

The Interactivity of Books

So, in what ways are books interactive?

Honestly? I think books are interactive in the one way we can’t really measure—and that’s their ability to awaken and engage the human imagination. That’s not to say that other mediums, like video games, don’t require users to engage their imagination, but I think this is where the ‘less is more’ theory comes in. With mediums like film and video games, users are provided directly with a lot of the visual and audio detail: it’s right there in front of you, transmitted onto your eyeballs and into your ears—what the fictional world looks like, how the characters sound, audio clues as to the mood and atmosphere of the scene. On a purely physical, sensory level, these mediums are incredibly immersive.

Books, however, offer their readers nothing but words to work with and the reader is the one who has to translate the little black characters on the page into something more—this translation requires activating our imaginations and this, I would argue, is potentially a more immersive experience than passively receiving a ready-made image.

Of course, the level of immersion is going to vary from reader to reader for a variety of reasons: the genre, writing style, context in which the book is being read and the reader’s capacity to create mental imagery. In the case of the latter, someone who has aphantasia (which is the inability to create mental imagery) is not going to be able to visualise descriptions of people and places. Whereas someone on the other end of the scale who has hyperphantasia will visualise such things as vividly as if they are really seeing them. For the latter, it is possible to become so immersed in a book that they disconnect from the world around them, filtering out the sights and sounds of the real world in favour of those in the fictional.

Whatever your capacity for imagination, books have the potential to get in your head in a way that other modes of entertainment perhaps can’t: the world on the page gets manifested in your mind’s eye in a way that is entirely unique to you as a reader. Characters are born into your brain from your own imagination (with the help of the words on the page) and this means you get to know and understand them in a way that is more personal than watching an actor portray them on a screen. This could just be me, but I think there’s a certain level of intimacy in reading a book that is different from watching a film or playing a video game.

This is why books are my second favourite mode of escapism. A really good book isn’t something you just read, it’s something you live through. Some of my memories of books I’ve read are as vivid as my memories of my real life. For example, I can recall the experience of walking through the Mines of Moria alongside Frodo and Gandalf, and the other members of the fellowship of the ring, as clearly as if I read that scene yesterday, and I actually haven’t picked up The Lord of the Rings for at least a decade.

I think this is why people describe re-reading a good book as like visiting an old friend. There’s a very particular bond a reader can develop with a good book—one that really captures their imagination and touches them deeply. Sometimes I even get this feeling reading a book for the first time—somehow I recognise it even though I’ve never picked it up before. It’s a strange but oddly exciting and comforting feeling.

Fantastic Stuff

So… that’s books, but why fantasy?

To put it bluntly: because it’s unequivocally NOT real. It’s much easier to disconnect from the real world when you’re stepping into a fictional one that looks nothing like it. It’s nice for a while to exchange worries about the economic crisis and political drama for worrying about dragon invasions and whether or not the dark lord is going to be defeated before the waxing of the full blood-moon. It’s also so much easier not to become dissatisfied with your real life after dabbling in a fantasy one. Although I do occasionally come back to the real world thinking it would be handy to have some fire-bending powers as a classroom management tool, I don’t ever feel like I’ve been short changed because I live in a world where the only special power some people have is how annoying they can be in the last lesson of a wet Wednesday afternoon. Real life is real life. Fantasy is fantasy. There’s a clear, happy line.

I think the other thing that makes fantasy so appealing is linked to the point I made at the start of this escapism series:

There are two key factors in an escape: what you’re escaping from and what you’re escaping to.

The first part we’ve kind of covered: we’re usually escaping from the mundanity and insanity of real life.

But what are we escaping to?

I think, when it comes to fantasy, what we’re escaping to is possibility. The great thing about fantasy is that the possibility factor is limitless: anything can happen to anyone, anywhere.  The restrictions of the real world don’t exist. This is obviously a lot of fun, but it also means that certain desires and hopes can be realised too—we can kick realism to the curb and live vicariously through the characters of the fantasy world. For a little while, we can experience a life completely unlike our own: exciting, dangerous, heroic and empowered. Let’s face it, we all secretly want to be an elvish ninja-assassin-wizard dragon-rider.  

The point is that fantasy allows for dreaming without restriction and isn’t that the main appeal of escapism? To indulge our imaginations beyond the realm of possibility the real world offers us?

The Faith Bit

So… what has escapism got to do with faith? Personally, I think the human desire for escapism is just one indication that we are aware that the world as it is now is not how it should be. I think it reveals our desire for things to be different: to be different ourselves. I think when we escape we’re looking for things we can’t find in our current, fallen world: things like empowerment, hope, freedom, courage, individual validation and value. I think we’re looking not just for entertainment but inspiration to take with us back into our real lives.

God created a world that, in His own words, was good. And then it was ruined by human disobedience and sin. And now we’re looking for the good that we lost and one of the ways we seek it out is to escape the real, fallen world and get absorbed in another that offers us temporary relief. As such, I don’t think escapism is an inherently bad thing. Obviously too much is a problem—as is too much of anything—but I think that ultimately the instinct to indulge in escapist activity is a hopeful one.

Fortunately, Jesus came to give us the only sure hope of escaping this broken world, and the consequences of sin, so that we can instead enter into right relationship with God—the only source of good in this universe. We’re promised an escape to a new and perfect world, and isn’t that something to keep us going when our office desks disappear overnight and our neatly organised paperwork ends up in an unholy heap on the floor?

So, dear non-fictionalists, fictionalists and rabid bookworms, here are some questions for you:

1.      What is your favourite mode of escapism? I haven’t actually covered mine here… can you guess what it is?

2.      Do you think escapism is ultimately a good thing or a bad thing?

3.      Fantasy: the best of the all the genres or weirdness that’s only for people who dress up as wizards at the weekend?

Thanks for waiting so patiently for this newsletter. Next I’m going to be posting about the major culprit behind why my posts have been taking so long to arrive, and that’s the little monster I’ve mention before: chronic fatigue. It’s been over a year and I have many thoughts, some lessons I’ve learnt, and a few questions to share with you.

If you have any experience, insight or questions on chronic fatigue, let me know using the comment section, and I’ll try to cover them in the next post.

Take care, friends!

PJ