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The Skinny House Between the Worlds

Magic Street by Orson Scott Card. Ballantine Del Rey, 2005. hardcover. 416 pages. $24.95

I have admired Orson Scott Card’s writing since his splendid Ender’s Game, in which a video game about an extra-terrestrial invasion of Earth – the kind of game kids usually play much better than adults – turns out to be the real thing. Beyond his immense skill as a science fiction writer, Card is a first-rate novelist who is never scared to take risks in developing new voices and themes. For his new urban fantasy, Magic Street, he has borrowed the fairy cast from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the novel, the quarrel between Titania and Oberon spills on to suburban lawns in a comfortable middle-class black neighborhood in L.A.   
A magical child called Mack Street – who proves to be the “good” aspect of Oberon, transferred to the surface world – has the gift of dreaming into other people’s dreams. In particular, he is able to dream their wishes. He discovers that unfortunately, what they wish has a way of playing out unpleasantly. A professor who longs for the poetry he writes in secret to be out in the world is horrified to find his poems spattered all over the internet like a virus, and drawing ridicule from critics. A girl with a huge butt who longs to attract men is the near-victim of gang rape. A man who wishes to fly wakes to find himself in mid-air, and is damaged when he crashes to the sidewalk. As Mack becomes more conscious of his gift, he is able to take action to tame the enactment of such wish-dreams. He and we learn in the process that the wish-dreams are part of the magic by which Oberon is trying to escape from his confinement in the underworld, arranged by Titania.

Titania and Puck appear in the shapes of the “ponies” they are riding, humans who were out of their bodies on drugs when the fairies came in: a sexy “hoochie mama” on a motorbike and a bag man in dreads. “We don’t take bodies somebody actually using,” says Titania in the voice of the biker girl.

The “wanderer” part of them is in the bodies they are riding. Their “souls” are inside “lanterns” in Fairyland, caged there by Oberon. They need Mack and another psychic bodyguard, a rookie cop who becomes a giant on the Other Side, to bust their souls out of jail and guard them from the defenders of Fairyland, who include birds who will try to eat them when they shrink to miniature size after crossing over. (Film canisters with air holes are used as transporters at one point).

Card shows us that the gates of the Otherworld open from where we are. The mouth of the underworld – through which Oberon pushes dark energy into the world – is a drainpipe at the foot of a well-clipped hill that sometimes grows fiery red. Mack’s usual portal into Fairyland is a “skinny house” between two regular houses on his block that is visible only when you look out of the corner of your eye – until you get in, when the furnishings and food and clothes on offer will exactly match objects from the regular world (and may actually be stolen from it).There’s a hint that the Skinny House may also be a place of choice and maneuver between alternate realities. When Mack returns from a first excursion into Fairyland, missing his pants, he is offered a choice between six pairs of pants. They are all the same, and all his own, each containing his emergency $5 bill except that they are in different condition - one pair ripped, another bloodied, another fresh-laundered – reflecting different outcomes he might have experienced.

As so often in Card’s work, the weave of fantasy offers glimpses of what is wholly real: that a part of the self may be exiled, or stolen; that healing comes through bringing together our divided selves; that wishing is doing, and so we want to be careful what we wish for.