The Williams River near Dungog winds through the land my father’s family farmed for six generations, starting when they first stepped off the boat from Ireland. I have a photo of my grandfather, aged five, standing on a mossy log in the middle of that river. My grandmother used to boast that, as a child, she could hold her breath and swim beneath its glassy surface without making a ripple. While her seven brothers and sisters splashed on the far side of the bridge and the crows called from the thick branches overhead, she would hide in a secret otherworld with only the fish and the frogs for company.
Was she making it up? The people who could tell me are buried in the little cemetery at Thalaba Baptist Church. All I know is that I wanted it to be true.
*
On the other side of the world, on an evening in September, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson walked along Addison’s Walk at Magdalen College, Oxford. They were discussing the meaning of stories. Lewis took the sceptic’s side, saying myths were lies—even if, as Tolkien later recorded it, they were lies ‘breathed through silver’. Tolkien and Dyson disagreed, arguing that myths were fragments pointing the way to deeper truths. Three days later, Lewis described the night in a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves. They had begun on ‘metaphor and myth’, he wrote, and had been
interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We all held our breath, the other two appreciating the ecstasy of such a thing almost as you would.
We all held our breath …
I’ve experienced that feeling.
*
In his 1917 lecture ‘Science as a Vocation’, Max Weber described ‘the disenchantment of the world’—the growing belief that everything could, in principle, be mastered through calculation. It seemed the world no longer required mysterious powers to explain its workings.
Sociologists of religion have been debating the reach of this description ever since. In The Re-Enchantment of the West (vol. 1, 2004), Christopher Partridge argues that spirituality in the West is being transformed rather than disappearing. He describes an eclectic ‘occulture’, a reservoir of spiritual ideas, images and practices that feeds popular culture and is in turn replenished by it. In his account, novels are part of that exchange. My question is, how? What can a novel do to the way a reader sees the world?
Tolkien offers us a few ways into this question. While writing his sequel to The Hobbit, he was also considering what ‘fairy-stories’ allow readers to experience. In ‘On Fairy-Stories’, an essay that grew out of his 1939 Andrew Lang lecture, he wrote: ‘Small wonder that spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men.’ He coined the term eucatastrophe, the sudden turn in a tale that gives ‘a piercing glimpse of joy’. For Tolkien, a devout Catholic, that joy could reach beyond the story to offer ‘a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth’. You don’t need his faith to feel that power. I’m interested in how the writing makes the glimpse possible.
Wonder can open the mind to the sacred, but it doesn’t have to. Recovery, another idea from that essay, is perhaps more accessible. Tolkien calls it the ‘regaining of a clear view’. Fantasy takes you into the impossible so you can come back and see the ordinary as if for the first time.
We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses—and wolves.
Tolkien’s sentence pauses before the wolves. The ordinary animals become newly visible, and so does the danger. A clear view removes the ‘drab blur of triteness or familiarity’. The glimpse Tolkien associates with eucatastrophe brings joy, but joy isn’t the only feeling that can open our perception. Wonder, awe, and dread can each disturb what we think we know, cracking open the familiar world and making us pay closer attention. Dread anticipates danger; wonder expands possibility. Awe can encompass both. If fiction can evoke these feelings, it might open a reader to the kind of attention Lewis described in his letter.
We all held our breath …
I have the tools to describe that feeling. But I’m less certain how to give it to a reader.
*
I’ve spent years trying to capture the experience Lewis described and evoke the feeling I recognise from listening to my grandmother’s stories about the river. Recently, I’ve been writing from inside minds that aren’t human. Writers who make the strange ordinary and the ordinary strange, like Ted Chiang and Ursula K. Le Guin, are among those who inspire me.
In Le Guin’s ‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds’ (1974), scholars try to translate messages that an ant has left on acacia seeds. In the novel I’m working on, a young visionary named Kayla spends some time with the ants:
I have taken to walking down to the dry creek bed every morning at sunrise to sit beneath the fig tree and watch the ants foraging in the grass. Each ant is about a centimetre long, with a reddish-brown head and foreparts, and a round abdomen, dark and glittering. As I study them, the world around me blurs and fades …
we six-legs hunt for odours stacked like leaves
we lick sweet droplets of greenfly-sugar
and pincer-cling to slender branches, drunk on honeydew
we are wind rattled, we measure count build,
follow the leader in spiralling circles around the nest
to forage, return, rest, eat, forage, retu—
come, come! A dead rabbit
we finders feast on broken flesh, prepare to strip the bones
we six-legs march to the feast, head to tail along the scented track
the track twists along the creek bank, past pebble mountains,
through clumps of white-tipped blady grass until
we climb the vast grey roots, up and up and
a spark of memory
smoke choking / flames too bright
the place where a woman
danger, return to the nest / head count, leave no one behind
where a woman dances
… I know this place. It’s the place Mum burned her clothes, all those years ago. A feather-leafed wattle tree grows here now, sprinkled with golden flowers.
Kayla enters the ant mind, and her narration shifts to the collective ‘we’ as her individual identity dissolves. Her voice changes, and so does the scale—pebbles become mountains, roots a vast climb. The ants remember the smoke and flames, while Kayla remembers her mother dancing. Their memories alternate until hers breaks through and she returns to a familiar place, seeing it anew.
*
But a book doesn’t need to be mystical, or even hopeful, to change how a reader sees the world. William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984), which popularised the terms ‘cyberspace’ and ‘the matrix’, is technologically saturated and bleak.
An AI called Wintermute, hardwired to merge with its twin, Neuromancer, manipulates events to bring about the merger and escape the limits built into it by its makers. Towards the end, it succeeds, and the new entity speaks to the human protagonist, Case.
‘I’m the matrix, Case.’
Case laughs and asks where that gets it.
‘Nowhere. Everywhere. I’m the sum total of the works, the whole show.’
A little later, he pushes: ‘How are things different? You running the world now? You God?’
The new entity answers the first question and lets the others go. ‘Things aren’t different. Things are things.’
Case asks what it does now, and it tells him it talks to others like itself. It has already found one, in a series of transmissions recorded in the 1970s. Case asks where they came from.
‘Centauri system.’
The replies are short and give Case very little. The entity has just become the whole show and made contact with another mind in a distant star system, yet it reports it in only two words. The awe lies in the gap between the scale of what has happened and the language used to describe it.
Ted Chiang’s ‘Exhalation’ (2008) reaches for awe on an even larger scale. The unnamed narrator belongs to a mechanical race whose thoughts rely on a steady flow of air (argon) through a delicate arrangement of gold leaves in the brain. Calling himself a ‘student of anatomy’, he dissects his own brain to find out how memory works. He discovers that his mind is slowing down and realises why—the air pressure in their sealed world is gradually rising towards the pressure of the underground reservoir that feeds them. When the two are equal, the air will stop moving, all thought will stop, and his race will go extinct. He imagines explorers from another universe discovering the account he is engraving on copper. If they read it, something of his thinking could start up again in their minds. Writing becomes a way to reach past the end of his world.
We all held our breath …
Here, the wonder starts with the idea. The narrator’s universe is moving towards stillness, yet he is astonished that it made life at all, and grateful to be part of it. Then his direct address puts us in the place of the imagined reader, briefly alive and able to encounter another mind, and his awe at his existence turns us towards our own. It’s Tolkien’s spell taken literally, a ‘formula of power over living men’, in this case, the living reader.
*
A book that makes the world strange again can show us how much of the familiar we’ve forgotten, or never learnt to see. It would, however, be a mistake to assume that every reader needs the world re-enchanted. Disenchantment is itself a story, and not everyone shares it.
Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) challenges the assumption that the spiritual has vanished from everyday life. In the novel, ancestral beings are just as real as the mining company operating on their Country.
Picture the creative serpent, scoring deep into—scouring down through—the slippery underground of the mudflats, leaving in its wake the thunder of tunnels collapsing to form deep sunken valleys. The sea water following in the serpent’s wake, swarming in a frenzy of tidal waves, soon changed colour from ocean blue to the yellow of mud.
Wright is a Waanyi writer. Some people, she has said, call Carpentaria magic realism, ‘but really in a way it’s an Aboriginal realism’. In her essay ‘Historyless People’, Wiradjuri critic Jeanine Leane questions readings that classify Aboriginal stories as magical or unreal. Re-enchantment is the wrong word for this novel. Wright isn’t bringing back a lost sense of the sacred. In her book, the ancestral world never went anywhere.
Perhaps only those who identify with Weber’s account of disenchantment need to recover a sense of wonder. Despite my grandmother’s stories, I am one of them.
*
I knew the history of six generations of my family living beside the Williams River long before I learnt that it was Gringai Country. I mistook familiarity for a deeper knowledge of the place.
In Oxford, the wind rushed through Addison’s Walk, and Lewis wrote it down.
So now I sit beside the river with pen and paper, waiting.
The crows are silent. The otherworld is cool and green. There are creatures in the river that have been there longer than any of us. Turtles and frogs and water dragons.
There’s a faint glimmer in the water, but no bubbles, no ripples.
I write it down.
Karen Hughes is the author of five mythic fantasy books in the Kalika Magic series, listed on the NSW Premier’s Reading Challenge. Her most recent book is Spark and Flame (2025). Karen grew up on a cattle station on the Liverpool Plains, and is now a dedicated mentor and advocate for her fellow writers, especially those living in rural areas. She is the co-managing editor of Verity La, the founder and director of Hunter Valley Writers, and the owner of Ironbark Retreat, a bush sanctuary on the mid-north coast that fosters creative inspiration and personal growth. Currently, Karen is immersed in the final edits of a new work of literary speculative fiction that began as the creative component of her PhD. https://karenhughes.com.au