On Magic Portals and Doors into Otherwheres
and Books
I hate reading. It’s boring.
This was me, aged nine or ten.
I only like comics, like Fantastic Four, with the Human Torch saying ‘Flame on!’ And 2000AD, with Tharg’s Future Shocks.
That’s what I’d have said.
I loved television, especially sci-fi programmes like Space 1999 and UFO. Whatever was a bit like Star Wars. But I would happily watch anything for three or four hours, as long as it wasn’t Songs of Praise.
My parents used to threaten me with the fate of Mike TeaVee from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
You’ll get square eyes, they said. Don’t sit so close.
It was books that were a bit like Star Wars that pulled me into reading.
I can’t remember going to a bookshop with my parents, so most of what I ended up acquiring came from cardboard boxes under foldaway tables at summer fêtes and bring and buy sales.
I think that’s where I discovered —
Which I’ve reread, in the last few days.
And though I am very grateful to Diane Duane (along with Isaac Asimov and Alan Dean Foster and Gene Wolfe and J.R.R. Tolkien) for helping get me into reading, I have to say it’s not very good.
I’ve reread The Lord of the Rings a couple of times, and wasn’t disappointed. It still works on me, with its ongoing dialectic of cold/hungry/threatened and cosy/full/safe. And I plan to revisit Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, the first Star Wars spin-off novels — which I found completely confusing, aged eleven.
But as I reread The Door into Fire, I wondered what I’d ever liked about it.
Yes, it has a troubled hero who is promised great magical power but struggles to master it. (A bit like Luke Skywalker.)
Yes, there is some questing, some lovemaking, some feasting.
But it’s a strangely inert and expository book. Much of the action takes place in dream sequences — though these are drug-induced dreams. And a great deal of the hero’s struggle is thuddingly psychic.
What’s best about it, seen from now, is how open it is to queerness. Many of the main characters (male, female, spirit) have satisfying and loving sex with one another. It’s no biggie.
The most important romance, Herewiss and Freelorn, is male-male.
As with Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius books, there’s a definite sense that big characters are going to have big appetites, and heterosexual monogamy just won’t do it for them. Humans are too protean for that.
What’s also impressive is the — I’ll have to call it visionary gusto of the worldbuilding. Whenever magic is being done, Duane is at her best.
As we join Herewiss, he is about to cast a big spell, an illusion to scare away a besieging army —
He started small. Fyrd began to slip out of the dark mist, moving down on the besiegers with slow malice. Great gray-white horwolves snarling softly in their throats, nadders coiling sinuously down toward the hold, spitting venom and shriveling the grass as they went. There were dark keplian, almost horse-shaped, but clawed and fanged like beasts of prey; destreth dragging scaled bodies along the ground, lathfliers beating heavily along on webbed wings and cawing like huge, mis-shapen battle-crows. Herewiss made sure that his creations were evenly distributed around the army. In a flicker of black humor he added a few beasts that had lurked in his bedroom shadows when he was young, turning them loose to creep down towards the campfires on all those many-jointed legs of theirs.
Yay.
I can imagine teen-me loving this.
But about halfway through my reread, I began to doubt whether I’d have got so far when young and impatient.
There are slow bits followed by slower bits. There’s backstory and more backstory, often given as infodump around the campfire. There’s a lot of rather forced plotguilt over a brother’s death.
The prose is clean but rarely thrilling. (Even at the time, I knew Gene Wolfe’s The Sword of the Sorcerer was better written. I saw things more clearly through his gorgeous sentences.)
However, when I came to the climax of The Door into Fire, I realised that I must have read the whole thing — because Herewiss and his companions eventually reach a castle far out in the wasteland. It is misshapen, vast, and has many corridors and many doors, and each of these doors opens out into another dimension.
“We could look at the view,” Herewiss said, and started down the hall. He looked into the first door he passed — …
There was no room behind the door. The stone of the doorsill was there, hard and solid under their hands as they reached out to reassure themselves of it; but through the opening cut in the glittering gray they saw a mighty mountain promontory rearing upward from a sea the colour of blood. Pink foam crashed upward from the breaking waves and fell on the rose and opal beaches; the wind, blowing in from the sea, stirred trees with leaves the color of wine, showing the leaves’ flesh-colored undersides. The mountain was forested in deep purples and mauves; a cloud of morning mist lay about its shoulders.
Herewiss reached out, very slowly, and put his hand through the doorway. After a moment he withdrew it, rubbing his fingers together.
“It’s colder there,” he said, “and damp. Lorn, this is it. Doors into Otherwheres — ”
Years later, when writing my paranormal adventure, Lilian’s Spell Book, I used this image. In fact, the novel starts with a door into fire —
In the very heart of the fire — I could see it clearly — there stood a figure. I thought for one mad moment that it must be my husband, and that he must be burning to death. But the figure stood there, quite calm, quite still, completely unaffected by the furnace-like blaze surrounding them. I could see them through the open doorway that, for some reason, wasn't burning. The fire did not come that far.
Perhaps I should be clearer. This was not a figure made of flames. This was the outline of a figure where the bright flames left a darker gap. And the gap went all the way to the bricks of the far wall. It was almost as if there were a person-shaped tunnel running through the whole infernal room, from front to back. And there was nothing there to burn, I was sure. This room of our house was totally empty. It was the air itself that seemed to be on fire.
The light from the burning room scorched into the backs of my eyes. How long before the fire spread? How long before our beautiful old wooden dreamhouse was razed to the ground? But still I didn't turn and run. Still I stared into the light.
(You can read on here.)
This was my magic portal, my door into an otherwhere.
But it had been a long struggle to get to this point.
With Lilian’s Spell Book, I’d finally written a magic portal novel — though there had been plenty of interdimensional fun in Dead Boy Detectives. Here are Charles and Edwin following a cat through a magic mirror —
Even as I was reading Diane Duane, back in my early teens, I was thinking of writing my own fantasy epic.
I started one, and got fourteen pages in.
My problem was, I didn’t know how to get my character through the portal and off on their adventure.
I wasn’t satisfied with any of my solutions.
A door into another dimension seemed too lazy. It had been done.
I thought of having a door in a tree, but that was Alice in Wonderland. Or in a mirror, but that was Alice Through the Looking Glass.
After a very short while, I became disheartened, and stopped writing the epic.
It was only years later that I finally accepted that if, as a storyteller, you need a door into another dimension, then you might as well bloody use a door into another dimension.
However, there was a more brilliant solution, and Philip Pullman had the genius to come up with it.
Instead of a magic doorway, he had The Subtle Knife — a way of cutting a portal in space itself.
Lyra imagined she could see Will’s soul flowing back along the blade to his hand, and up his arm to his heart…
“I felt something there,” he said to Giacomo Paradisi. “The knife was just slipping through the air at first and then I felt it…”
“Good. Now do it again. This time, when you feel it, slide the knife in and along. Make a cut. Don’t hesitate…”
This time it was easier. Having felt it once, he knew what to search for again, and he felt the curious little snag after less than a minute. It was like delicately searching out the gap between one stitch and the next with the point of a scalpel. He touched, withdrew, touched again to make sure, and then did as the old man had said, and cut sideways with the silver edge…
He kept careful hold of the knife, and put it down on the table before giving in to his astonishment. Lyra was on her feet already, speechless, because there in the middle of the dusty little room was a window just like the one under the hornbeam trees: a gap in mid-air through which they could see another world.
Of course, books were always the real magic portals.
👏👏👏👌🎄