Here Be Dragons (27 page)

This external, wild nature is contrasted with the parks, gardens, and other pockets of tame nature that can be found within Newford. These places of controlled nature are few and mostly only implied or mentioned in passing. In this respect, Newford is similar to Minas Tirith. Unlike Tolkien's city, however, Newford encompasses bubbles of wilderness. These bubbles appear all over the city and come in various sizes. The largest is a section of urban blight covering several blocks, but most
are as small as a riverbank or a plot of bushes and weeds. Some, like the grounds of the artists' colony Kellygnow in
Forests of the Heart
(2000),
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are untouched nature, wilderness left uncontrolled but contained by the city culture around it; but most are the result of parts of the city being released, ignored, no longer controlled. Nature is allowed to go feral—the wild percolates into the city.

Wilderness is also found beyond the city in quite a different respect, namely as part of the mostly mythical and always magical worlds accessible only to a few of the city's inhabitants and created by even fewer. The existence of this Otherworld is just one of several indicators of the second division in Newford: the division between the domain of everyday life, very much like our primary world in its mundanity, and a domain of magical places, beings, and events. In
Widdershins
(2006), one of the magical characters explains how Newford is “built on a nexus of time and spirit zones, which means the spiritworld rubs shoulders with this one more than it normally would otherwise[,]” and that this accounts for the great number of unusual events in the city.
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In the stories, the magical domain actually consists of two settings: the multifarious Otherworld, where time and space behave quite differently from the mundane world, but to which some characters can travel;
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and the magical part of Newford's reality, sharing time and space with the domain of everyday life. Various human users of magic, who can straddle the border between the domains of magic and mundanity, appear frequently in the Newford stories. The two largest and most prevalent groups of the magical domain's denizens, however, are the native animal people, who can change between human and animal shape, and the various Faerie beings of the Seelie and Unseelie courts, who arrived with the European settlers. Both groups belong to a category of magical beings that have their origin in myth and legend, a category that in Newford also includes, for instance, a few vampires, Bigfoot, a unicorn, and the Devil. Other inhabitants of the magical domain include: spirits that find new abodes (including the powerful entity in
Spirits in the Wires
[2003] that takes up residence in the Wordwood literature website, and the so-called numena that take on physical life through Isabelle Copely's paintings in
Memory and Dream
[1994]); personifications of abstract concepts (for instance, the spirit of the city itself as the eponymous Tallulah and a character's Jungian shadow come to life); and ghosts of dead people that have not yet passed on.

The magical domain and its inhabitants are often perceived as an
ontological threat by the citizens of the mundane domain. In “Ghosts of Wind and Shadow” (1990), for instance, fifteen-year-old Lesli's ability to see fairies brings her into conflict with her mother, Anna, who adamantly refuses to acknowledge fairies and magic as part of the real world. Anna's final realization that magic beings are real destroys her worldview and forces her into drug-induced oblivion.
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Not everyone is as disturbed by the magical domain as Lesli's mother, however. In “The Stone Drum” (1989), Jilly is given evidence that magic and Faerie creatures are real as a punishment. Like Lesli, Jilly is excited by her ability to experience the magical domain, and her wonder at the magical aspects of reality turns the curse into a blessing.
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The reactions of the majority of Newford's citizens when confronted with the Faerie domain place them somewhere between Lesli's and Jilly's sense of wonder, on the one hand, and Anna's dread, on the other. Most people push the out-of-the-ordinary from their minds and forget what they have experienced.
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Like the natural domain, the magical domain cannot be controlled and is therefore unseen, invisible. Invisibility is also a key concept when looking at the third way in which Newford is divided.

The final division cuts across the city's social space. While Minas Tirith is defined mainly by its defenses, Newford is defined by its inhabitants, and architecture tends to become a backdrop to human interaction. Although descriptions of the urban environment are allowed comparatively more space in a few stories (in, for instance,
Trader
[1997] and “Tallulah” [1991], the old part of the area called “the Market” is described; and “Pal o' Mine” [1993] includes a description of a number of buildings and their gargoyles
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), Newford is portrayed predominantly through descriptions of what its inhabitants do, say, and dream, not of the physical structures of houses, streets, and parks that constitute the city's architecture. It is an environment defined by relations, social as well as physical, where the street grid and the complex web of personal connections can be mapped, but where houses are very seldom described. Unlike Minas Tirith, and New Crobuzon and Ombria (as discussed later), this city is almost entirely described as a social and mental space—a collection of people, not a collection of buildings.

In this web of relations, the border between the last two domains stands out sharply. It is a social division, the nineteen-year-old squatter Maisie muses in “But for the Grace Go I” (1991), that is not as simple as dividing the city between the haves and the have-nots. “It's more like some people are citizens of the day and others of the night. Someone like
me belongs to the night. Not because I'm bad, but because I'm invisible. People don't know I exist. They don't know and they don't care.”
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The same mechanism is at work when the domiciled members of the city's hegemonic culture relate to the magic domain as when they relate to the “night people”: like the magical domain, unwanted people are pushed out of the mind, made to disappear. Thus, invisibility is also frequently used to refer to Newford's homeless and outcasts, just as it is used in other works of urban fantasy as a form of social criticism,
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linking the metaphorical invisibility of the “night people” to an actual and therefore magical invisibility of the inhabitants of the magical domain. In “The Invisibles” (1997), the narrator sees people no one else sees, and his friend explains a fundamental Newford tenet to him: “Magic's all about perception. Things are the way they are because we've agreed that's the way they are. An act of magic is when we're convinced we're experiencing something that doesn't fit into the conceptual reality we've all agreed on.”
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Be they urban fairies or “night people,” such figures are made invisible through the same mechanism of denial.

“Night people” is not synonymous with “homeless,” however. “Everybody who spends most of their time on the streets isn't necessarily a bum. Newford's got more than its share of genuinely homeless people,” Maisie explains in a later story, but “it's also got a whole subculture, if you will, of street musicians, performance artists, sidewalk vendors and the like.”
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This subculture, or alternative culture, consists of people who do not accept the majority's view of what a proper way of life should be, people who at least to some extent do not subscribe to the consensual reality. It is to this subculture, or to people closely associated with it, that many of the Newford stories' central as well as minor characters, such as Maisie, belong.

Despite the attempts of the mundane society to ignore its opposites, those opposites remain. Together with domains of alternative culture and magic, the penetration of wilderness challenges Newford's city culture from within. One of the numerous epigraphs to the stories illustrates how de Lint weaves together the three domains: “There are seven million homeless children on the streets of Brazil. Are vanishing trees being reborn as unwanted children?”
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This quotation from the “Poet Laureate of Deep Ecology”
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links environmental concerns about deforestation to social concerns about street children. In a fantastic context such as de Lint's urban fantasy, the link between social and environmental issues—the transformation of trees into children—also suggests
something magical. In “The Forest Is Crying” (1994), a social worker is asked to consider how the spirits of cut-down trees might literally turn into children, and evidence of the world's magical nature eventually persuades him not to dismiss that possibility (“Forest” 68–76). He is made to accept a basic premise of Newford: nothing should be dismissed as impossible simply because it has always been considered as such. If spirits or fairies are living in the trees, it would be equally plausible that the felling of a tree would result in yet another unwanted child on the city streets. Such is the reality of Newford, where the changing world kills spirits with concrete, polluted air, and poisoned water (see, e.g.,
Forests
253). The epigraph thus highlights the links between the three domains that are so central to the Newford stories.

The intersections of the three domains create “bubbles” in the hegemony, free from and thus undermining cultural control. In such bubbles, the links between domains are readily identifiable but are brought out in different ways. Four prominent bubbles of wild nature are considered in the following discussion, of various sizes and relations to the city culture. Stanton Street and All Souls Cemetery are both fairly small, contained areas. The former is a quiet residential street and as such seemingly a part of Newford's social hegemony, the latter a cemetery deserted by that hegemony. Both offer impressions of wilderness and prove to be associated with the magical domain as well as with alternative culture. The two largest bubbles in Newford, for their part, do more than give the impression of wilderness—to a great extent, they are wild: Fitzhenry Park, although linked to city culture along its edges, is wild at heart, a place of wild nature where the magical and alternative cultural domains have the upper hand. The Tombs, finally, is in many ways the park's opposite. The wilderness it contains is feral without any hint of cultural control. It serves as a reminder that the denizens of the subjugated domains are also dangerous, be they magical creatures or social outcasts.

The oak-lined Stanton Street runs through the urban center. On the surface, the avenue looks tame; and certainly, trees lining a street offer little of the imagery that can be expected from wilderness. Some descriptions of the oaks along Stanton Street approach the wild, however. As the street narrows, the hundred-year-old oaks give the impression of a tunnel rather than an avenue. The “two once-tidy rows of manicured shade trees [are] enormous now, and [have] more or less gone feral.”
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When Kerry Madan first arrives in Newford in
Someplace to Be Flying
(1998), the quiet of the street makes her uneasy:

There was something claustrophobic about walking under this long row of enormous oaks. The trees were too big, their dense canopy almost completely blocking the sky. They threw deep shadows against the tall houses and the shrubbery collected against their porches and brick walls, throwing off her sense of time. It no longer felt like the tail end of the day. It was too much like late evening now, a time when anyone could be out and about, watching her, waiting in the shadows for her to step too close. Anyone, or anything. (93)

Noticeable in both quotations is that the oaks are described as “enormous,” and to Kerry, they seem “too big”—too big to belong in the middle of a city. Controlling a tree means keeping its size in check, and such control has been relinquished in the case of the Stanton Street oaks. Instead, it seems to Kerry as if the trees control their surroundings. Their shadows obscure the houses, hiding the city's architecture, emphasizing the sensation of wilderness. Kerry feels as if she is walking somewhere dangerous where anyone or
anything
might confront her, and it is not “the usual dangers of a big city” that worry her. Instead, she imagines “other threats, nameless things, creatures with hungry eyes and too many teeth” (93). Her impression is of a place that does not follow the rules of consensual reality, a place of magic. And she is right: Stanton Street is a haunt for a number of inhabitants of the magical domain. Kerry is on her way to the Rookery, where Raven—creator of the world and a being of great mythological importance—lives together with a group of animal people. In
Spirits in the Wires
, numerous Faerie creatures are observed under and among the boughs of the oaks (151). Furthermore, on Stanton Street lies the residence of Cerin and Meran Kelledy,
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a commonly recurring setting that is a rambling house surrounded by oak trees, “a
regular forest
of them larger and taller than anywhere else in the city, each one of them easily a hundred years old” (“Buffalo Man” 104; my emphasis). Although not every description of the oaks around the Kelledys' house is as explicit, their extraordinary size is stressed, just like the size of the other trees along the street. The implied explanation of the immensity of the trees is that Meran Kelledy is the oak king's daughter. When Meran visits a bookstore, the house fairy there sees her as a “piece of an old mystery” and “an old and powerful spirit walking far from her woods”;
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but to most people, she and her husband are simply a duo playing traditional live music. It is also in a coach house off Stanton Street that the troll-like Rushkin teaches Isabelle the art of the numena
paintings that can provide spirits with physical bodies.
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Similarly to the Kelledys' home, Rushkin's studio is flanked by an oak tree, and the Rookery has an immense elm shading the lawns behind it (
Memory
32;
Someplace
86).