Like most millennials, I grew up reading Narnia and Harry Potter. The fantasy hero’s journey, popularised by Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), defined my literary imagination. After Rowling relieved us of suspense, and we said our last good-byes to Harry and his friends, I looked elsewhere for the classic tale of destiny, bravery, failure and rebirth, reimagined with new characters to befriend, new worlds to explore and new enemies to vanquish.

Casual library browsing brought me to Garth Nix’s Keys to the Kingdom, which echoed the Potter series in its seven volume journey of escalating peril and wonder. The protagonist (none-too-subtly-named) Arthur battles to execute the mysterious Architect’s final will and testament. Instead of Voldemort and Death Eaters, he faces a pantheon of semi-divine denizens, each enthralled by one of the seven deadly sins. The Christian mythos, the thematic revisiting and reimagining, the overarching mystery drawing the hero through a menagerie of adventures — all of it answered my every wish.

Then the ending gave me a rude awakening. The Architect reveals herself a nihilist. Weary of sovereignty, she is intent on destroying her creation to get some rest. Too late, Arthur realises the sinful denizens wanted nothing but the preservation of reality and the salvation of their world. By defeating them, he brings about the apocalypse. This cosmic struggle turns out to be no epic clash between the forces of good and evil, but the wretched unveiling of a child’s naivety, rewarded with annihilation.

Nix is not alone in achieving a meta-literary subversion of the epic fantasy genre through subverting the expectations of the characters themselves. Fantasy author Erin Morgenstern followed up her debut triumph with The Starless Sea (2019), a sensuous journey of a self-aware protagonist who studies video games narratives. Zachary Ezra Rawlins rescues the god-like Fate from a cycle of reincarnations by taking her place.

If Nix has subverted the Creator God, then Morgenstern reverses the redemption of the Savior God. On the eve of his crucifixion, Jesus offered wine to his disciples, saying, “This is my blood of the new covenant, which is poured out for many for the remission of sins” (Matthew 26:28). In the Christian gospel, the divine sacrifices for the human. In Morgenstern’s novel, the human dies so that the god can escape. Worse, Zachary has no choice in the matter, never realising until too late that Fate intended his demise all along. His final reunion with his lover is overshadowed, as several readers have suggested, by the implication that they have become the new prisoners in the endless resurrection cycle.

I have declined to read “The Problem of Susan”, but I understand it unpicks the Narnia mythos in a similarly sinister vein. Authored by another celebrity of the fantasy genre, Neil Gaiman, this short story reveals that the other Pevensie children never reached heaven. Instead, they guilelessly gave themselves up to a lion god — who devoured them.

Something visceral undergirds the terror here. It is not just satirical or mean-spirited. The relationship between God and hero has shifted, from a champion and sovereign, to threat and victim. 

This attitude towards the divine coheres with the postmodernist philosophy suffusing our society, culture and politics. Postmodernism holds that all relationships featuring a power imbalance involve an element of abuse. Consider this assumption in light of the realities of human nature: we are not interchangeable. Our most fundamental relationships form a structure of hierarchies such as father and son, state and citizen. These differences must result in disparities and yield different advantages to different parties.

If only the weak and vulnerable are virtuous, what can an all-mighty God — the epitome of power imbalance — represent to us, but the enemy?

Postmodern art works out to its logical conclusion in that the hero does not prove himself by defeating the cosmic enemy. That would involve an exercise of power, after all, an establishment of dominance. He instead falls prey to the inimical force: a kind of sacrificial lamb without the efficaciousness. There is no salvation. His death only reveals the desperateness of our situation, without promising any remedy. The postmodern hero has circumvented Nietzsche by embracing the logic of the Ubermensch but then identifying with the oppressed.

Critics often hail this type of art as daring, ground-breaking, but in fact there is no innovation in exploring the tension between reverence and terror. That phrase well-known even in secular circles, “the fear of God”, has long since encapsulated it. Lewis acknowledges this tension in his choice of a lion as Narnia’s divine king and Christ figure. “He’s not a tame lion,” as the last King of Narnia protests to the rebellious dwarves.

The children love Aslan but they also fear him on an instinctual level at times; Eustace even undergoes the agony of Aslan flaying the skin from his flesh. It is dragon skin, however, so what seems an act of violence turns out to be liberation. In a sense that the self-inflicted violence of transsexualism and transhumanism never achieves, it makes him more human — more himself, not less.

By contrast, in a Narnia knockoff series beginning with The Magicians in 2009, Lev Grossman selected twin ram gods. Perhaps he intended them to hint at the Lamb of God, the complement to Lewis’ lion, but they substitute a superficial cuteness (with “fluffy” wool) for purity. Then they confuse the victory of martyrdom with impotence, when one ram discards its innocent pose to charge the enemy — and falls flat. Instead of awe and terror, the postmodern god mixes triviality with violence.

Perhaps no fantasy author has illuminated the paradox of God’s adorable fearsomeness more skillfully than Lewis’ great literary predecessor, G.K. Chesterton. Subtitled “a nightmare”, Chesterton’s masterwork The Man Who Was Thursday pits a band of heroically-minded police detectives against an anarchist plot. In a climatic chase that mixes farcical with surreal, the detectives pursue the anarchists’ enigmatic and formidable leader “Sunday” across the city. (An elephant and a hot air balloon both feature, though not at the same time.)

During a lull, the detective Gabriel Syme describes a sudden and unpleasant reversal in perspective. The shock has upset his grasp on reality, leaving him with a nightmarish sensation:

I was suddenly possessed with the idea that the blind, blank back of his head really was his face—an awful, eyeless face staring at me! And I fancied that the figure running in front of me was really a figure running backwards, and dancing as he ran.

During a book club discussion of this novel, a friend admitted that the scene unnerved him. He feared for the characters. “I was afraid of what Sunday would do to them,” he said, “if he caught them.”

This fear for survival is not at odds with the Christian faith. It comes nearer the truth than the sham Gospels assuring us that our every fleshy desire will be met, if only we ask nicely enough. The Gospels do promise death for those who believe: the grave of sin, life laid down, joining in the sufferings of crucifixion. 

Death precedes glory in the Christian account. The innovation is doubting the latter, not detecting the former.

Harry himself grapples with this deep-seated fear in the final book of the series. When rumours of Albus Dumbledore’s dark past destabilise his trust, he begins to question his unswerving loyalty to the longtime mentor and protector. Many fans reacted to these anxieties by vilifying Dumbledore, embracing the black image that the notoriously deceitful journalist Rita Skeeter paints of him in her salacious biography, but the book itself commends the opposite response. 

Harry doubts, feels betrayed, abandoned. He suffers through the “dark night of the soul”. A term from the poetry of the Christian mystic St. John of the Cross, it describes a time bereft of experiencing God’s love and grace. As Harry unravels the final mystery of Dumbledore’s plans to defeat Voldemort, he faces that most visceral of terrors: the fear that when Christ calls us to die to self, there is no life beyond the grave — he is really calling us to just death. 

At the critical moment, Harry does not rebel. He does not declare his independence, act out in defiance or forge his own path. Instead, he submits his will to a mysterious guiding providence that has proved its beneficence and loving care countless times, even though it seems indifferent and even hostile to him now. He chooses faith. 

Dumbledore is no divinity; when he and Harry are finally reunited, he confesses his human foibles and begs Harry’s forgiveness. Nonetheless, Harry’s faith is rewarded. Thematically, he “remains steadfast under trial”, as St James urged in his letter to the twelve tribes. His sacrifice, unlike that of the postmodern heroes who followed, breaks the power of evil and frees the wizarding world.

Perhaps Harry was the last of an age of Gospel heroes, presented in popular fiction. The push for public secularism has bled the Biblical mythos from our collective imaginations. Christian fantasy still exists — The Wingfeather Saga by Christian music artist Andrew Peterson achieves moments of profound beauty in the two books that I have read so far — but it circulates in niche markets, for select audiences. Not coincidentally, a self-consciousness permeates it. Today’s Christian fiction takes care to distinguish itself, for instance, from boogeyman phrases like “Follow your heart”.

“Don’t follow your heart,” an old mentor warns Wingfeather’s young heroes. “Your heart will betray you.” I don’t fault the sincerity or even contest the truth of this counsel. In its own way, however, it is as derivative as the ram gods in The Magicians. Both are reacting against something, instead of telling their own story — or even giving another name and face to the greatest story ever told.