My two favorite fantasy authors, Diana Wynne Jones and C.S. Lewis, both sometimes write about what happens frustrating “normal” people are pulled unwillingly into fantastical worlds or situations, and how they cope, or, often, fail to; it’s almost a revenge fantasy, though with hope for redemption (hello to Eustace Scrubb, who almost deserved his name).
Invisible Frogs begins in the same vein: three college students studying ancient Egypt at the fictional Carter Institute try to cheat on an exam and find themselves pulled into the myth they are trying to get out of studying (my hot take: Professor Castle knew exactly what he was doing when he left The Book of Thoth in the copier). Written by Geraldine Harris Pinch (Oxford Egyptologist and author of the young adult fantasy series The Seven Citadels), Invisible Frogs came out in ebook last week, and I was lucky enough to get to design the cover (see my last post).
It’s an enjoyable premise, but what ensues when Paula, James, and Andrew find themselves floating in the primordial ocean is much stranger and more complex than a reader might expect from that alone: a lyrical, dreamlike, extremely nonlinear sequence of events wherein the three main characters experience and embody episode after episode of Egyptian myth.
Dream logic is one of my favorite things — and also something I’m incredibly picky about. Diana Wynne Jones and C.S. Lewis are both favorites in large part on account of how brilliant they are at this. Kafka’s The Trial has this quality perhaps even more — the plotline feels at once impossible, deeply real, terrifying, and (in the sense of enormity) exhilarating.
When I first read the beginning of Invisible Frogs in high school, it did not hit this bar — for the same reasons George MacDonald’s Phantastes did not, so it’s not what you’d call a damning judgment, and I am almost sure it is a failure of my imagination in both cases: I cannot feel uncut beauty deep in my brain, as the underlying — logic may not be the right word, but — something like that? It felt a bit arbitrary. And, as with Phantastes, the imagery and events stuck with me intensely all the same.
But, leaving aside the subjective angle, I couldn’t have been more wrong in feeling the sequences of events to be arbitrary, although they do not adhere to the logic of the modern world. The book mentions that Egyptian deities slip disorientingly in and out of one another, and they certainly do in the plot, but that’s only the beginning. I’ve been reading Pinch’s Egyptian Myth: A Very Short Introduction, which I highly recommend as a companion volume, and each series of events, the locations where they take place (marshes, red land / desert, black land / fertile earth), have their parallels in Egyptian history and mythology, and the fact that the Marshes of Chemmis stuck powerfully with me turns out to be correct indeed (when other mythologies send their heroes into the woods, Egyptian mythology sends them into the reeds, and a papyrus marsh is an Egyptian idea of heaven). Subtler aspects too — how characters find themselves transformed into gods, how the creation of the world and the defeat of chaos occur again and again and are seen differently by each character, and the startling juxtaposition of farce (swimming in a lake of Bloody Marys, cream pie fights) and the numinous — seem to come straight from the myth.
You might not think there’s a lot of room for traditional character development in something like this, but you would be wrong. The characters begin as rough sketches — a nerd, a shy woman, and a joker. They remain true to those outlines, but grow into round and deep characters, and the myth itself serves as a vessel for exploring who they are and why they are that way. Shy Paula becomes goddesses, turn protective and vengeful; nerdy James faces deep fears; and the dangers of a shallow and flippant approach to life are manifest in Andrew, who tellingly thinks not of Egyptian myth but of nursery rhymes when he tries to understand what’s going on; all three of them grow a lot.
One of the things I admire most, though, is that the gods are neither window dressing nor only a metaphor for the characters’ psyches; they are genuinely divine. It’s a study in the multifarious roles mythology plays — and it also brings mythology into the present day (and the present day into mythology), in a way that respects both (the ending is thrilling for this).
Of Elsewhere 