If you could spend a day as your favorite book character, who would it be?
I wanted to think outside the box a little bit here and choose a character lesser known than, say, a certain famous hobbit. Then it hit me: Anodos!
Anodos is the name of the main character in the Victorian fairy story Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women written by George MacDonald in 1858. If you have never read George MacDonald, you should. His stories are full of imagination, and he is incredibly influential in the fantasy genre. Many are unfamiliar with his name, but he rubbed shoulders with some of the most famous writers in Western Literature. C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, acknowledged his incredible literary debt on multiple occasions. In fact, George MacDonald takes the place of Virgil as guide in Lewis’ The Great Divorce, a modern interpretation of The Divine Comedy. Lewis would say this about MacDonald’ Phantastes in his own book Surprised by Joy:
It was as if I were carried sleeping across the frontier, or as if I had died in the old country and could never remember how I came alive in the new. . . . I did not yet know (and I was long in learning) the name of the new quality, the bright shadow, that rested on the travels of Anodos. I do now. It was Holiness. . . . It was as though the voice which had called to me from the world’s end were now speaking at my side.
In Phantastes the main character, Anodos, awakes one day to find himself no longer in his own room–he is in Fairy Land. The story follows Anodos through Fairy Land on his strange adventures as he seeks to escape the wiles of the spirits of the Ash Tree and the Alder Tree. At one point, even, he has confrontations with his own, evil shadow, an element that would later remind me of Ged in Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series (another must-read for all fantasy lovers). I kind of felt like Phantastes was an adult Alice in Wonderland: more plot, less nonsense, and deeper moral imagination all amidst a strange, Alice-like journey through a magical place (this is an especially appropriate example since MacDonald was a mentor to Lewis Carroll and his Alice publication). I don’t want to ruin the story, but you must read it!
Therefore, the character I pick is Anodos. I want to wake up in Fairy Land and learn bravery and beauty and mystery through magical forests even if it is risky.
Yet I know that good is coming to me—that good is always coming, though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it. -Phantastes
How about you? If you could spend a day as your favorite book character who would it be and why?
a great, real place 