"A red book, smallish but plump, comfortable and shabby"

[larryhammer]

And then there's what happens to Half Magic in Seven-Day Magic. The former is a book the children in the latter have read, as we learn on the opening page:

          "The best kind of magic book," said Barnaby, ... "is when it's about ordinary people like us, and then something happens and it's magic."
          "Like when you find a nickel, except it isn't a nickel -- it's a half-magic talisman," said Susan.
          "Or you're playing in the front yard and somebody asks is this the road to Butterfield," said Abbie.
          "Only it isn't at all -- it's the road to Oz!"

That may look like gratuitous self-puffery, especially if you've just come from Magic or Not?. Putting himself on the same level as Baum, no less. And yet, somehow, here the fictionalization of Half Magic -- highlighting that it is after all a novel -- doesn't betray it, but validates it. Which is a pretty nifty trick.

A couple pages later, these ordinary children stumble on their own magic: a library book (due in a week) that grants their wishes by writing their story out. A few pages in, they read the opening, and it's the opening pages of Seven-Day Magic. In a very real sense, the book you're reading is also the book they have. (Someone should reprint it in a scuffed and faded red cover.) The premise has recursion and frame slippage built into it. And slip we do, all over the place.

That first page lays out the program of the opening chapters. Their first adventure ends up bringing the Wizard to Oz. Their second starts by arriving at a familiar Toledo street corner the moment after Mark drags his sisters away, where a little girl with a baby holds a half-magic talisman -- and so we get what happens next. Yes, Eager's fictionalized Half Magic, but he does it to write a sequel. He eats his cake, yet still gets to have it.

He does this by being very clever. (If you haven't gathered by now, I'm fascinated by the rhetoric of fiction and poetry -- that is, how is it a writer convinces us. What do you do to create that willing suspension of disbelief, even beyond don't make flubs that trip the reader.) Jumping into another author's book is an old staple of the genre, and Eager also did it in The Time Garden, by ruthlessly confusing the semi-autobiographical Little Women with the history of the Alcotts. And he uses the other author's book, first. Then with the pattern established, he jumps into his own book, and makes us lap it up by giving us more of it. More rhetoric of convincement: we never do learn the girl's name, and we're told this is outside the scope of the story -- we slip frames, but there still is a border. By leaving that little bit out of the reader's reach, Eager reassures us. There still are rules. Another nifty trick.

And those are just the simplest of the adventues, textually speaking -- the others mix text and real life in different ways. (The final adventure, btw, should be required reading for young writers.) Well, except for the denouement magic, when they fly to the library to return the book solely because, like, dude -- flying rocks.

Still, I can't, off-hand, think of an author who's done anything like Half in Seven. Not that many have slipped into their own books (ETA: that is, wrote characters of one book into another of their own), aside from Heinlein's last novels. Their own fictions come to life (a la Pat Murphy's recent one), sure. Any others?

---L.

Comments

[wyldemusick.livejournal.com]

Stephen King not only inserted himself into the last two Dark tower books, the books themselves then become a functioning part of the metafictional King's reality; there's an established interdependency.

Grant Morrison and Alan Moore have inserted themselves in the continuity of comics they've written...Moore did this particularly amusingly in Promethea where the comics reality loops around to affect Moore and his artist even as they're creating the reality of the comic.

I believe barry malzberg had a habir of becoming part of his fiction, and this has been a fairly common thing with J.G. Ballard as well (EMPIRE OF THE SUN and CRASH being two books of his where Ballard himself becomes the protgonist.)

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

Does it count that Philip Jose Farmer inserted a piece of his personality into many of his books--or the kind of person he would like to be in an alternate reality--and gave his characters names with the initials PJF?

[larryhammer]

Whoop -- both of those are different from Eager's sort of level-mixing. Eager himself never appears, not even in any apparent disguise, in any of his novels; but books of his appear in other books, and sometimes vice versa. Edited above to make that clear, I think.

---L.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Will Shetterly turned a previous book, Cats Have No Lord, into a VR game in The Tangled Lands. I hated it.

[larryhammer]

Oh, that's right. And in Caverns of Socrates, Dennis McKiernan does the same to Mythgar. Though in neither do actual events & characters of the previous books show up (that I recall), just the world. Interesting that in both cases, the game book isn't as interesting a story as the worlds being fictionalized.

---L.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Are you sure? I thought that one of the characters in The Tangled Lands was playing a role in Cats Have No Lord. Though it's been a long time and I could well be misremembering.

[larryhammer]

Not positive, no. It's been a long time for me, as well.

---L.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I have Half Magic in a scuffed red cover.

[larryhammer]

That's a hopeful sign for a correctly bound Seven-Day Magic.

---L.