Rec Room: Meakin Armstrong: The Magical Key

Before I’d walked into what could have easily been the saddest bookstore in the southeast, I’d never heard of The Golden Key, by George Macdonald. I was stuck in that woebegone and depressingly sparse store while I waited on a family member to get out of church. I wandered around, and thumbed through the remaindered bestsellers and out-of-date guidebooks, when I came across The Magical Key: it’s small, a paperback, and only 85 pages. But this is what interested me: this particular edition had the illustrations by Maurice Sendak and its afterword was by W.H. Auden. What was this book?

It turns out its author was Lewis Carroll’s mentor (Carroll had even called George MacDonald his “master”). He wrote fairytales and fantasy novels. He was prolific and in his time, well-known. We owe to him, Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, because MacDonald had encouraged Lewis Carroll to write his stories down, rather than just tell them to children. He was a preacher who believed that all will be saved by God, and that nothing is predestined; he was in other words, no proponent of fire and brimstone.

The Golden Key is the story of a boy and a girl who wander into “Fairyland ” where they meet and fall in love. They hunt for the meaning of a golden key the boy had found at the end of the rainbow. Along the way, we wander through the lower parts of the world “where the shadows fall,” and meet the aeranth, a fishlike flying beast, along with the child at the center of the earth.

Yes, it sounds stupid.

But the world needs these kinds of stories. Or, as Auden who wrote in the afterword, “Every normal human being is interested in two kinds of worlds: the Primary, everyday, world which he knows through his senses, and a Secondary world or worlds which he can only create in his imagination, but cannot stop himself creating.

A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.”

Bio: Meakin Armstrong is Guernica’s fiction editor. Read his last recommendation here.