Book Review: Magonia

If there was a novel that was written for me, it would be Magonia by Maria Dahvana Headley.

It has everything. A veritable fountain of Fortean weirdness bursts fully formed from the pages, causing me to giggle aloud with delight—something I haven’t done while reading a book in EVER so long!

Flying ships (with anchors!), cities hidden among clouds, flocks of strange birds, changelings, men in black, and a very sarcastic main character who also happens to be dying of some strange disease where she cannot breathe and is slowly suffocating.

Aza Ray Boyle is her name: she’s fifteen years old, and she’s spent her life literally drowning in air.

Her doctors have no idea why that is, and the only reason she’s alive is because her medical researcher mother created a drug that helps her nearly non-functional lungs take in and absorb oxygen. She’s well enough to go to school, though she often has to be taken from class to the hospital in an ambulance, where she is stabilized and released into her parents’ care.

Then, she eventually returns to school and reconnects with her best friend, maybe boyfriend, Jason Kerwin. He’s a genius who invents marketable gadgets in his basement and so has become independently wealthy. He uses his money to try and come up with ways to help keep Aza alive longer.

The two are nerdy companions who have spent most of their days together researching interesting things like giant squid and whistle languages, and their relationship is rather cute, though thankfully not cloying. I do have to admit to thinking at first that Kerwin was a bit too much of a boy wonder for me to suspend my disbelief easily.

It’s the whole genius thing that’s just a little bit too convenient, but since I knew a young man very similar to Kerwin in my own life, I give him a pass. Such boy (and girl!) wonders do exist in the real world, so I loosened up and went with the flow, ESPECIALLY after he started talking about Magonia.

This happened because during a fit of breathlessness at school, Aza heard something outside the window calling her name during a storm. When she looked up, she saw part of a sailing ship in the sky before she nearly passed out and was taken to the hospital. She of course told Jason what she saw and he began looking up sailing ships in the sky on the Internet and found Magonia.

Yes, Magonia. I’m sure you noticed that was the title, and yes, that is WHY I bought the book and dove right in. I was easily captured by the first person, snarky, unsentimental voice of Aza Ray, but it was the promise of Magonia that grabbed me and compelled me to read it in the first place.

For those who are unfamiliar with what Magonia is—it is a mythical kingdom in the sky peopled by humanoids who look mostly like us. Known primarily from a tale told by St. Agobard, the Bishop of Lyon, in his 815AD treatise against the practice of weather magic called “De Grandine et Tonitrui” (On Hail and Thunder),

Magonia is well known to those of us who study UFOs and other Fortean subjects. This is thanks to Dr. Jacques Vallee’s foundational book, Passport to Magonia, where he set forth a very compelling series of comparisons between ancient magical and fairy lore and modern UFO encounters. Written in 1969, Passport to Magonia is still highly relevant to the field of UFO research today, and as such is probably on the bookshelves of most serious Forteans.

Along with the Agobard story, Kerwin also learns about an incident that happened in Ireland in 956 AD when an anchor attached to a rope fell from the sky and struck a church. Parishioners ran out and beheld a ship in the clouds above from which the rope had come. The anchor was stuck by one of its flukes in the stonework of the church, so they saw a sailor “swim” through the air to cut the rope. and they saw the ship sail free and disappear. (I remember reading that story for the first time in John Keel’s Operation Trojan Horse, then later again in Passport to Magonia.)

Almost immediately after Kerwin finds these stories about flying ships and Magonia, poor Aza has another episode of breathlessness and is taken back to the hospital in an ambulance during a freak snowstorm. She had just heard her name being called out in the storm again, and looked out to see her yard being covered by an anomalous mixed flock of birds—blue jays and owls, and crows and a hummingbird and hawks, all together on the grass as it is quickly covered in snow. Her lungs give out again, and she falls to the floor gasping.

A heart-wrenching scene occurs—I’m not going to tell you what—because—SPOILERS!—-but it made me cry.

And then, Aza wakes up able to breathe in a sky ship.

In the land of Magonia.

And the adventure begins.

And that’s all of the plot I will give you, because any more and it’s too spoilery and I don’t want to be one of THOSE people who write book reviews that tell you the whole story.

Let it suffice to say that I had so much fun reading about things I knew about. I knew about the sky ships, the anchor stuck to the church, I knew about the sounds coming from above, crops being stolen during storms, all of the tales of Magonia that survive to this day. It was a joy to read those combined with some of the ideas of Trevor James Constable. His book, The Cosmic Pulse of Life, postulated that UFOs were some sort of living plasma beings that populated the sky and were nearly always invisible except under certain conditions.

In Magonia, Headley masterfully mixed these historical, folkloric and Fortean ingredients with a heavy-handed dash of her own imagination, and created a modern high-fantasy young adult book that is just a plain old cracking good read. It’s a fun frolic through a well-realized invisible world that lives symbiotically with our own, full of its own politics and peopled by a cryptoterrestrial (cryptoaerial?) race that lives removed from humanity, but dependent upon us for its survival.

There is a sequel, Aerie, which is a novella—and it is good. However, Headly added more elements to the story that seemed to muddy the plot a bit. If the story had been longer, those additions could have been fleshed out and they would have added depth to the plot and world. As it was, however, these elements seemed just sort of tossed in offhandedly and in my opinion, could have been left out.

My only real critique of Magonia has to do with it being a young adult novel—it was too simple a narrative. It could have done with more development of the world, more character development among the secondary characters and more fleshing out of the reality and culture of Magonia.

Headley’s world-building is superb, but it all seems written in shorthand. And then, there’s the question of genre—is it fantasy or science fiction?

For all that science is an important part of the lives of the main characters—Aza’s mother is a medical researcher and one of Kerwin’s mothers is an ecologist and agronomist, while his other mother is a doctor—the Magonians and other beings peopling their world make very little evolutionary sense. Climate change plays a large role in the plot, as does weather, as does technology—but the biological realities of Magonian physiology are more poetic than biological.

Aerie has even more of this tension between science and magic, a tension which is so great it nearly tears the narrative asunder in places.

You see—the imagery used to describe the world of Magonia, the endless sky and sea, the clouds and the beings that live there, the ships that ply the storms—all comes across as more of a poetic dream. A heavy, surrealistic dream, painted in broad swathes of brilliant sunset, twilight and night sky colors. It’s this beautiful descriptive language with which Headley brings the narrative to life that saves the novel from my mind worrying it apart at the scientific seams as I tie my willing suspension of disbelief into sailors knots to keep from breaking the spell she’s woven.

That’s why I call this a fantasy novel rather than a science fiction one, though, I think it’s truly neither of those.

It’s Fortean.

And it’s grand.