sawyl | The numinous and the ambiguous

This quote, from Jo Walton on the subject of Susanna Clarke's superb Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, seems to me to be just about perfect:

That book has a lot of magic in it, and a lot about people learning magic, but it’s also about the process of magic starting off as numinous and becoming familiar, and as each piece becomes familiar further regions of the numinous open up. Mr Norrell’s real magic begins as the numinous, and then Jonathan Strange’s magic is, and then both of their magics are petty and accepted and it’s Faerie in contrast that’s numinous, and she just keeps on going. I remain deeply impressed by the book, and I’ve never read anything else like it. At the time I read it, I said most of us were building sandcastles on the beach and then Clarke came along and raised up a great castle out of sea.

Also interesting is the quoted comment on the subject othe three way conflicts that occur in fantasy novels where the numinous is a power in its own right:

If the numinous is a tool, then you have a two-way conflict, between protagonist and antagonist. But if the numinous is a power in its own right, you’ll have a three way conflict, protagonist with the numinous, learning to understand it, and protagonist with antagonist, with the protagonist working with the numinous in a cooperative way to defeat the antagonist.

This really can be the case with magic, and I can think of examples. If magic is good or evil, or if there are good and evil kinds of magic, it defines where you stand in relation to it and affects ambiguity.

Which, I think, goes directly to the heart of what makes Garner's The Moon of Gomrath such a great novel. When an impulsive act of compassion triggers a series of events that lead to the release of the old magic of the wild hunt, the children turn to Cadellin, the wizard, for reassurance. They ask about the purpose of the hunt and whether it is good or evil, only to be told that it has no purpose, it simply is what is.

But when, during the great battle, the forces of light are almost confounded, it is the old magic that comes to their aid and not Cadellin's high magic. And when they do call upon the old magic for help by sounding Susan's horn, the price that they have to pay is terrible: that they will never know peace again, not in the sun's circle or in the darkling of the world; that by their actions, the old magic will be set free forever.

There's something wonderfully wrenching about Garner's refusal to shirk the costs of Colin and Susan's survival. I sometimes wonder what might have happened to the characters after the events of the novel are complete. I imagine the unflappable Colin surviving largely unchanged. Susan, however, who bares many of the costs of old magic in the book, I can easily imagine being hopelessly damaged by her encounters with the old magic, unable to live in the human world or the wizard's world. Garner's old magic has a deep ambiguity: as it save it, also destroy; it may either serve the causes of good or of evil or serve a purpose all of its own.