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 sets several classic fairy tales in modern day Ottawa. I confess that charmed me at the start. I do not know the city very well, but my husband and I honeymooned there after a dreadfully hot American summer, and the city holds a cooling magic for me (though I understand they are suffering a heat wave now. My sympathies.). De Lint’s book combines the stories of Jack the Giant Killer and Katie Crackernuts, and adds allusions to the Seven Swans and other tales. His Jack is a young woman named Jacky, who fills the trickster role assigned to the Jacks of fairy tales. Jacky, drunk and heartbroken, accidentally witnesses the murder of a Hob, an elf-like fairy creature. She takes the hat dropped by the deceased, and when she puts it on, she can see into the fairy realm, which exists invisibly in the same time and space as our own. She meets the Gruagagh of her city, and through him takes on the task of rescuing a fairy princess from the dark Host that seeks the destruction of the good fairies. She acquires friends and helpers along the way, like her mortal best friend Kate Hazel (i.e., Katie Crackernuts).
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.
The second flaw was de Lint’s willingness to mix a little religious speculation with his Fairy Tale. I much prefer Tolkien’s way in Lord of the Rings of leaving religion as an unmentioned undercurrent. De Lint’s novel has a rather explicit henotheism, the belief that each land has its own particular god who rules it. One character tells Jacky that the “dying desert god” (Jesus) has no power in North America, which is ruled by a Native American deity. This brief conversation has little relevance to the rest fo the story, and I am not sure why de Lint chose to include it, unless it was to voice his opinions on Christianity. The mixing of religion and Faerie merely serves to weaken the spiritual power of both. Disappointing.
Other than that, my only complaint, which says more about my own lack of education than de Lint’s writing, was my bewilderment at the pronunciation of some of the Gaelic terms. Gruagagh, for instance, is apparently a Manx term for brownie or ogre, but I still have no idea how to say it. A pronunciation guide would have been nice.
