Sime~Gen Inc. Presents

ReReadable Books

(September 2007)

"The Soul's Journey: Discovering Power"

By

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

In July 2007 we took a superficial look at Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files, a book series and TV series. But as I discovered in my interview with Butcher, there’s more to this series and this writer than you might think.

I asked when and where he’d learned about "Magic" and Butcher told me that he went to the spirituality section of a bookstore and looked at various beliefs. He mixed common elements that seemed useful to tell Dresden’s story through the theme Power. Any character, Butcher said, who uses Magic in the series makes a statement about himself.

Butcher paraphrases Dresden: "There’s no truer test of character than how you use power." To build Dresden’s world, Butcher sketched the character and his conflict and built the world systematically around Dresden, choosing the laws of magic to illuminate Dresden.

Butcher is a Spider-man fan. He had the thrill of a lifetime getting to write a novel of Spider-man titled The Darkest Hours. Butcher loves to quote the great quoted in Spider-man: with great power comes great responsibility.

So Butcher built Dresden’s world to throw problems at Dresden, but also to support him as his power brings him responsibility. He included elements in Dresden’s world to balance the forces – e.g. the Holy Knights balanced against the Dark Knights.

Harry was designed to be the character who tips balances. Butcher did not learn that in his writing class, nor in his reading of The Hero’s Journey which is the pattern for Dresden’s life. But note he did study Karate.

Balance is a static – a tipped balance becomes dynamic full of conflict, change and thus story material. Tipheret, the Sepherah on the Tree of Life which represents "beauty" is at the central balance point of the whole Tree, resolving the force diagram of Strength (Mars/ Geburah) and Mercy (Jupiter/ Chesed).

In fact, "balance" is a good definition of "beauty." All art is based on "composition" – elements juxtaposed in balance, or deliberate, dynamic imbalance that topples towards a new balance – or destruction. We perceive the singularities of balance in our world as beautiful.

Dance, figure skating, pole-vaulting, circus flying, even some videogames are art forms of dynamic balance/imbalance creating new balance points.

What intrigues, thrills and glues us to these art forms is how the composition is analogous to the soul’s journey toward manifesting power without collateral damage.

Oriental cultures have long made a study of the dynamic beauty of balance-points: Yin/Yang, Japanese Zen sand gardens, feng shui, martial arts.

These things fascinate because again they are an attempt to externalize what we experience internally as "life" – change, searching, finding our power, being overwhelmed by it, struggling through destruction to mastery.

The Orient has given rise to a new artform that incorporates these older arts visually, and emotionally, in story-form: anime.

Anime uses an innovative Japanese animation process, and has become a style of it’s own – with a certain "look" to it, but also a certain type of story which bespeaks the Oriental view of life. Search "anime" on amazon.com DVD’s and you get over 8,000 results.

When I asked Jim Butcher if he had deliberately designed the Dresden world to be cinematic or as a TV series, he told me of growing up as anime came flooding into the USA market to influence the whole SF/F field. He internalized the style unconsciously. When he writes Dresden novels, he is seeing the action play out anime style.

But most importantly, he is seeing the relationships shift, change, grow – seeing the emotional action sizzling fast during the pauses between physical bouts. In anime the intense, poignant emotional scenes that give the form its distinct charm occur in those moments of stillness in the action, so the story as a whole moves constantly toward a new "balance" point. Butcher loves that pacing, and it seems to me that made it easier to translate to the TV screen.

When we first meet him, Harry Dresden has reached a point in his soul’s journey where he has found his power (or it found him) and he is struggling to attain balance atop this geyser of magical power, black and otherwise.

In one scene I noticed as Harry and the White Council Warden who has power of life or death over him direct power into a spell, Harry’s power stream is gray compared to the Warden’s pristine white.

As a private detective, Harry helps people, and in doing so has found a new Talent – the ability to empower others, to help them find their own inner power.

I have four novels here worth reading with the graphic origin of the Dresden Files in mind.

Lorna Freeman’s Borderlands Novels are set in a fantasy world where sentient species crossbreed and suspect magical talents abound. In The King’s Own, a young mage in training has been chosen as the King’s heir and the Kingdom’s only official mage. His power is undeniable – his control of that power yet to be learned. And his situation is easily as politically complex as Harry Dresden’s.

The King’s Own stands on its own even though you’re coming into the middle of the story. It’s an easy, breezy read despite the complicated background. The characters, however odd, become real people as you walk a "mile in their moccasins."

Fern Michaels, long a national bestselling author, has recently salted paranormal elements in her romance-mystery mixes, but in Trading Places, she pulls up just short of Kay Hooper’s Hiding in the Shadows (reviewed last month). In Hiding, a psychic takes over the body and life of a coma victim. In Trading Places, Fern Michaels deals with a similaropsychological displacement when two twin women change places to solve a crime the police can’t handle. In this twin-switch story, the soul’s journey toward finding inner Power is delineated very clearly.

And love is the key it always is. Life’s journey is a team effort, and it isn’t just romance that binds a team together. Siblings have a special relationship that can empower. This novel raises the question of whether all power users should assume another’s identity for a year.

In The Future Scrolls, Fern Michaels toys with the supernatural, leaving us unsure what is real. The novel opens with a diary entry by someone claiming to be writing prophecy from God about the future –us. The scrolls, in the keeping of one family in South America, become the source of their worldly power. Dani Arnold, an American woman encounters the youngest child of this family alone on an American street, thus meets the father and her fate.

How much does divine direction shape our lives? How much real power is put into the hands of human beings?

I’ve been reviewing the Novels of the Noble Dead by Barb and J. C. Hendee in this column since Dhamphir in 2003. It’s easy to be caught up in the lives of the characters who are tangled into difficult, exotic relationships spiced with a good dollop of half-elf/ almost human romance.

In this 5^th novel in the series, Rebel Fay, we accompany the three characters from the first novel on a quest. We have Magiere whose strange power discovered in Dhamphir is the ability to kill vampires. We have Leesil, a half human Elf trained as an assassin. We have Chap, a magical "dog" who is sentient. They all search for the origins of problems that have dislodged them from the balance point in life they created for themselves in the first few novels – owning and operating a tavern in a port town which they now affectionately call home.

In Rebel Fay, Magiere learns more of how she was created – we follow a vampire who is chasing after her and we know more than she does of her danger. Leesil learns the fate of his mother, an elf held prisoner as bait by those who want to grab him. And Chap learns of his own fellows, howling from another dimension, endowing him with major magical powers but not the training to use that power.

Chap is a Fay, a Rebel Fay. Leesil and Magiere were each bred to be the others’ nemesis – only the plan got foiled just a little when they fell in love and began to plan their marriage much to the dismay of their creators. This incredibly complex fantasy universe is still being revealed a bit at a time, characters gaining possession of their hidden powers, learning to use that power, forging values and relationships, and standing steadfast against fates that are chosen for them rather than by them.

It’s a series about the freedom to choose your own path into exploring your own soul to discover your own power and if not to decide your own fate, at least to choose your path to it.