I know little of Alice Thompson’s day to day life but the unnamed, hedonist-dilettante of her short novel Justine is a thoroughgoing Social Fantastic, taking us around the bend of the bifurcated reality which gives rise to this book: our hero slides off the rails of contemporary FCUK/KFC London in grand style, in a Poe-like story heavy with the putrid scent of literary debauch. (Thus the recent film of Don Quixote fails at the first fence, being unable to simultaneously present us with both Quixote’s and Panza’s mutually contradictory perspectives).Īnd, now that we all live in a space of mutually agreed mediocrity, governed by the twin poles of advertising and consumption (if you can read this, as the bumper stickers say, you’re too close) neurotic mental states transformed into full-blown Guernicas are increasingly tempting for First World novelists, hide-bound by the spiritual and philosophical deprivation of their communities and, by and large, their own lives. Deciding to use this device is a veritable Open Sesame for contemporary writers, hemmed in as they are by the strictures of Fictional Realism, since writers, unlike dramatists or filmmakers, can play endlessly and fruitfully with the intrinsically allusive nature of the written word. The modern Social Fantastic, from Nabokov’s Charles Kinbote to James Kelman’s Sammy in How Late It Was How Late (and, one could argue, Harry Potter) is a character who radically reorders their world in order to stave off psychological or emotional extinction. Don Quixote is the greatest Social Fantastic in literature, though Cervantes affords us the company of the sceptical Sancho Panza–as most contemporary Social Fantasists do not–so as to play up the richly ironic contrasts between the “real” world (sheep windmills) running alongside the hero’s fevered imaginings (knights damsels).Īlice Thompson You may order this title by clicking on the link corresponding to your delivery region below: orders are fulfilled by our partners at Amazon.
Reviewed by Fin Keegan SPEAKING TO “Time Out New York” recently, novelist Patrick McCabe ( The Butcher Boy) made the point that the narrators of his novels tend to be Social Fantastics, that is, unreliable to a degree that allow a novelist to remain a Realist while, in the guise of depicted reality, including material drawn from the far shores of human possibility.
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