Magic and art, myth and creativity. Part of why they go so beautifully together in stories is because it’s often hard to tell the difference. Poet or wizard? Musician or changeling? Spell or song? We don’t properly know where creativity comes from, so we revere it and distrust it in equal measure. That’s the thing about humans, isn’t it? We both love and fear anything we can’t put away in a cupboard at the end of the night or tuck into the bottom of our bag. It’s hard to say who treats the muse with more subjective awe—consumer, or creator. Those who don’t create are mystified by those who do, imagining them plunging into an abyss and returning with art. But those who create are equally mystified. Why am I like this? Why can’t I stop?
And that’s where the magic always begins to creep in.
As a fantasy reader, I cut my teeth on stories of fairies stealing away ordinary musicians and returning them as troubled geniuses, weavers knotting the future into mystical tapestries, men climbing mountains and returning as poets with fraught and mystical tongues. As an artist, I adore this senseless blurring of the lines between art and magic. All of these stories are really struggling to define where our creativity comes from, what the weight of it is, if there is suitable reward for the toll it takes, what becomes of us if it goes away, whether it is separate to us or intrinsic.
My latest novel, Call Down the Hawk, is about Ronan Lynch, who can manifest things from his dreams, and Jordan Hennessy, a skilled art forger—both of them artists and magicians in their own way. Although Hawk is a weird frolic and a tangled thriller and a family story, it’s also a way for me to talk about what I think about the pleasures and responsibility of creativity. It’s a way for me to talk about how, at the end of the day, both art and magic are only limited by imagination… which isn’t always a bad thing. Some dreams are too dangerous to see the light of day.
In honor of Call Down the Hawk’s artsy magic, or magical arts, here’s a list of five fantasy books with artists in them.
Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones
This 1984 novel retells the romantic legends of Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin, both stories about men stolen away to Fairyland by the fairy queen. In the first, the harper Thomas Rhymer returns to the human world, but with complicated fairy gifts, and in the second, Tam Lin must be rescued from the shimmering lies of fairy by his true love. In Fire & Hemlock, Polly must sort through her unreliable memories to rescue the cellist Tom Lynn from the far-reaching clutches of the Fairy Queen. High myth and dreary reality blend seamlessly on the ordinary streets of ‘80s Britain in this novel; music and magic are inseparable in it. Jones (author of Howl’s Moving Castle) has written many novels, but this is the one I return to the most. With its dreamy, tongue-in-cheek style, it feels more like a memory than a novel.
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Fire and Hemlock
Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly
I’m a sucker for stories about geniuses, and I’m a sucker for stories about musicians, and I’m a sucker for stories about acidic young women, and this novel is about all of these things. Andi, a grief-torn punk teen and brilliant classical guitarist, loses and finds herself in Paris while researching composer Amade Malherbeau and the French Revolution. Donnelly doesn’t mince words as she describes musical obsession or grief, and Andi’s characterization is sharp as guitar strings under unpracticed fingers. The fantasy element—a slippery time-blending magic—creeps up as quiet and certain as a basso continuo behind the main melody in this genre-defying young adult novel.
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Revolution
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
This lengthy tome is now considered a book club classic, and for good reason—there’s plenty to talk about from multiple angles, and the speculative element is conveyed seamlessly enough that even non-fantasy readers won’t balk. Come for the emotionally wrought time travel, but stay for the excellent depiction of an artist at work. Claire, Henry’s girlfriend, is a paper artist, and it’s not difficult to tell that Niffenegger is an artist herself. The pain and joy of tactile art-making comes through the prose clearly as Claire struggles to define herself beside someone and without someone who exists in all times and none at all.
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The Time Traveler's Wife
Taran Wanderer by Lloyd Alexander
This is book four in Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain Books, a high fantasy middle grade series about an assistant pig keeper becoming a hero, for better or for worse. The first three books of the series are traditional adventure tales, but in this one, instead of facing up great battles and comedic banter, Taran instead looks for his origins, hoping to find that he has worthy and noble lineage. When I first read this one as a child, I found it the most dull—why did I have to read about Taran apprenticing with various craftsmen and artists while sulking that he was probably unworthy for a princess? When I reread it as a teen, I loved it the best of all of them. Taran takes away a lesson from every artist and artisan and warrior he meets, and the hero he is in book five is because of the student he was in book four.
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Taran Wanderer
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
The end of the world has come and gone, illness ravaging the population, and what is left in its wake? In St. John Mandel’s vision of the end of the world: artists. Actors, to be precise. We have ever so many apocalypse stories that show us the ugly side of humanity, but Station Eleven stands out for highlighting the opposite. Yes, there are survivalists with shotguns and ugly truths in this version of the end of the world, but there’s also art, creativity, synthesis, the making of a new culture. This introspective novel follows a Shakespearean troupe across a wasteland and ponders what it means to be a creator in a world that by all rights, should care more about survival than art. In the end, which one really is the more human impulse?
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Station Eleven
Originally published in November 2019.
I would add the Chronicles of Amber where all interdimensional travel is dependent on one’s ability to draw one’s destination (or to borrow a drawing done by someone else).
The Emperor’s Soul is a very worthy addition to this list.
Steven Brust’s The Sun, the Moon, & the Stars is about all of that. Artists sharing a studio, their creations and tribulations.
Framed by a fairy tale about a Hero who hangs the aforementioned Sun, Moon, & Stars.
Par Murphy’s The City, Not Long After
also, I think most of Patricia McKillip’s work could fit the list
I would very much like to thank Ms Stiefvater for recommending Donnelly’s Revolution on this very site a little while back. I devoured it, it was all that was promised and more.
As for my own recommendation, I would like to submit Mary Gentle’s Illario, who is (among other things) an interesting painter in a very interesting alternative world of her Ash book.
Discount Armageddon by Seanan McGuire features a competitive ballroom dancer/cryptozoologist among the (mostly) sentient cryptids of New York City. First in the series.
The Dream Years by Lisa Goldstein, in which a young writer hanging with the artists of the Surrealist movement in 1920s Paris becomes entranced with a singer from 1968 Paris and things get stranger from there. Standalone.
Lord Demon by Roger Zelazny and Jane Lindskold is centered on a “demon” whose art is making magical bottles whose magic might be more important than even HE realizes. Standalone, although Lindskold has written one or two additional stories that tie into it.
Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille by Steven Brust is centered on a banjo player in an Irish/folk music band reacting to a time-hopping bar, but you should remember up front that musicians, like authors, are unreliable narrators. Standalone.
I saw the title of this article and thought, “ooh I’ll read it and see if a Stiefvater book is on the list, because it totally should be!” I proceeded to read the intro, realized that Maggie Stiefvater wrote the whole list. I’ll check more carefully last time!
Revolution is such a gem! I stumbled across it in my local library years ago and loved it.