A Review By Rev. David Boulton

 In March 1916, on a cold, spring day, the seventeen-year-old C. S. Lewis bought a book from a railway book store. He was later to write of that book, that he had no idea of what he had let himself in for. As he read the book that night, it changed everything for him. He was to feel that it ‘baptized’ his imagination. It certainly set the then atheist Lewis on the road to becoming one of England’s foremost Christian apologists and writers of the twentieth century. George MacDonald’s Phantastes was that book.

Before Lewis, Tolkien and Williams, collectively known as the ‘Inklings’, there was George MacDonald, who was the real godfather of Christian fantasy fiction. In Phantastes he created a vivid and dreamlike ‘otherworld’ as a setting for some powerful expressions of Christian truths.

Phantastes is a haunting and disquieting novel. It links the dreams of medieval Romance with the new awakenings of the Victorian age in which MacDonald wrote. In opening a long-lost door to the forgotten realm of Faerie, it became a daring and challenging forerunner of modern fantasy novels. This is what the poet W. H. Auden wrote: “George MacDonald… in his power to project his inner life into images, beings, landscapes which are valid for all, is one of the most remarkable writers of the nineteenth century. 

This particular volume is one of a welcome number or reprints of George MacDonald, which also includes his Lilith. It is reproduced complete with the original pre-Raphaelite line-drawings to accompany the text, and with a special introduction and notes by Nick Page, himself the author of over 60 books on topics which range from seventeenth century poetry to biblical history.

This book was, for me, a real find. I had been searching for it for many years, It did not disappoint. The reader will either love it or hate it.