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[bibliogramma]

Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman

There’s a thread of sorts that runs through a lot of Neil Gaiman’s work, and that thread has a lot to do with the concept of the interaction of dual or multiple realities – dream worlds, parallel worlds, shadow worlds, otherworlds, and afterworlds. It’s the sense that no matter where you are, there is something else going on just over there, or under the hill, or through the mirror, or some other place that you are just barely aware of, that would turn your understanding of your own world upside down or inside out if you ever really noticed it.

Something else that Gaiman pays a lot of attention to is storytelling as an act, as a frame, as a way of providing context or counterpoint. When he writes stories in the first person, they are often the stories of a conscious and self-conscious narrator, who knows he or she is telling a story and is aware of how it sounds, how it is shaped. Sometimes his protagonists are storytellers, or his stories draw on the words of other storytellers for settings or images.

One of the reasons to enjoy Fragile Things is that there are lots of stories that are perfect examples of what Gaiman can do with these two themes in his work – separately or together. Stories about people telling stories about ghosts, stories about writers trying to tell fantastic stories about autocars and bank mortgages in a world where daily life is profoundly gothic in nature, wonderful stories about the art of storytelling while looking through a glass, somewhat obscurely. Many, but not all of these stories have a distinct flavour of the supernatural or of horror, and there are a good many stories that qualify as ghost tales - explicit journeys into the otherworld.

And for the reader who enjoys watching writers play with the issues, ideas, characters, themes and worlds of other writers writing otherworlds, there are some particular pleasures here, as this collection includes such stories as “A Study in Emerald” – Gaiman’s truly magnificent imagining of how certain characters from the Holmesian tales of Arthur Conan Doyle would behave were they to find themselves in a mirror world where the Elder Gods of H.P. Lovecraft held sway – and “The Problem of Susan” – a story that asks the reader to consider the situation of Susan, the young woman that C.S. Lewis barred from the higher, deeper, inner Narnia (which is to say, Heaven) because she found lipstick and boys interesting.