Jack the Giant Killer by Charles de Lint skip to main skip to sidebar Veronica's Book Blog Thursday, August 03, 2006 Jack the Giant Killer by Charles de Lint I have continued to read in Terri Windling's Fairy Tale Series. After a regrettable experience with Pamela Dean's Tam Lin (I read 176 pages before putting it down because I simply could not make myself care about the indistinguishable characters), I tried this 1987 publication from Charles de Lint. I was curious how I would experience this book as an adult. When I was a young teen, de Lint's Moonheart was one of my favorite books, but I had not read anything of his in a decade or two.
Jack the Giant Killer
De Lint's novel is swiftly paced, and combines heroic action with ordinary behavior. His heroines do impossible things while remaining recognizable twentieth-century Canadians. There are few profound themes here, though the book has a significantly Tolkienesque morality. It was fun, light reading.
There were two burrs in my enjoyment of this book. The first was a premise, fairly common in fantasy literature, that fairies and other magical creatures depend upon human belief for their existence. As humans cease to believe, the fairies are weakened. I have always found this premise a little disappointing. The power of magical realms and mythic stories, it seems to me, lies in their ability to convey the Other, the alien realities that intrude onto our own. To make magic dependent on human belief removes some of the Otherness, and changes the frisson of fearful strangeness into pity for the sadly helpless. Instead of taking us to Balder's country, it says Balder's country is in our imagination, and could we help it out a little. How utterly drab. Myth hardly seems worth bothering about, then. | |
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