Rainbow Rowell has been much-acclaimed: in 2013 she published two books that were named among the best young-adult novels of the year by the New York Times. The first, Eleanor & Park, a teenage love story set in Omaha, Nebraska in the mid-1980s, is arguably the better-known of the two, rising quickly on the bestseller list partly due to word-of-mouth from booksellers, librarians and the YA literature community.
But for my money it’s the second of Rowell’s books that year, Fangirl, that’s her true achievement: it’s arguably the first-ever novel about fan fiction to see mainstream success. Now her fifth novel Carry On is set to push the format even further. Is it fan fiction? A novel? Or some meta-commentary on both?
Fangirl was published in a growing spotlight on fan fiction and other transformative works. Fan fiction-like practices, filling in the gaps, or shifting the perspective of a story, or using fiction to engage critically with a text, are embedded in literary tradition. Every novel, play or poem about a real-life historical figure does this in some way, from King Lear to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. Fan fiction-like reimaginings have been a key critical and novelistic tool in the 20th century, in books like Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which famously constructs a backstory for the character of Mrs Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, or Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête, which reinvents The Tempest from a postcolonial perspective.
But for years fan fiction has been relegated to the shadows, in part because copyright infringement concerns limit the means of publication. Moral objections – to this day, plenty of authors and their readers assert that it’s “wrong” to borrow others’ characters, even if most of it’s for fun rather than profit – have kept fan fiction underground, too. And it’s never helped that overwhelmingly, the writers of fan fiction are female. The internet exposed and expanded the reach of fan fiction, and recent commercial successes – 50 Shades of Grey chief among them – have encouraged media scrutiny into the practice. But few of those mainstream portrayals of fanfic and the communities built around it have been as knowing – or as sympathetic – as Fangirl.
For Fangirl’s alienated protagonist, Cath, fan fiction has always been a mode of survival. She has found comfort in her obsessions with a fictional canon: the world constructed in her beloved Simon Snow books, a series of eight children’s novels by British author Gemma T Leslie. These books circumstantially resemble the Harry Potter series – the Wiki entry that opens the book foregrounds this, describing hundreds of millions of copies sold and boycotts by Christian groups – but they touch on all sorts of fantasy themes and texts. The Simon Snow books are clearly core texts in Cath’s world; fan fiction is her way of talking back to them, just as millions of Potter fans were talking back to JK Rowling’s texts in real time. Fan fiction is a way for Cath to retreat from her real-life problems and her struggles with original writing, but it’s also integral to her growth, both as a writer and a young woman.
Last year, Rowell announced that her next book, Carry On, would have its roots in a previous one, with the magical hero of her stories-within-a-story, Simon Snow, set at a fully-fleshed out Watford School of Magicks. The response was electric – and also somewhat confusing.
People called it fan fiction about fan fiction (more than a few “fanception” jokes went around), which isn’t quite right: when an author borrows her own characters for another original work, it certainly isn’t fan fiction; it’s just fiction. Earlier this year, Rowell tried to simplify the twisted paths people were creating between her books, telling Time, “I don’t think it’s fan fiction, I think it’s more like canon!”
In Carry On, Simon Snow is the “worst chosen one who’s ever been chosen”. Simon accepts his assigned role with good grace, but he’s completely unable to control his magic. His world is under attack, rent asunder by class-based politicking and by something called the Insidious Humdrum, an ambiguous figure that wants to drain the world of magic. He is deeply loyal to his best friend, somewhat indifferent to his girlfriend, and overly fixated on his roommate and nemesis, Baz.
Rowell’s magical world is finely drawn: its old resentments and divisions are driving a conflict that Simon, by way of his frustratingly absent mentor figure, the Mage, is supposed to solve. Its battles are about who has power (here expressed as magic), and about who deserves access to education to learn to harness that power.
The novel gives us the third of three coexisting texts about Simon Snow: Gemma T Leslie’s “canon”, Cath’s fan fiction, and now Carry On, which can stand alone but is made richer with the knowledge of its source. “I’d written so much about [Simon] through these other voices,” Rowell says in Carry On’s author’s note, “and I kept thinking about what I’d do with him if he were in my story, instead of Cath’s or Gemma’s”. It can start to feel a bit dizzyingly meta in the manner of much more pretentious postmodernists. But then, so can much of fan fiction, when you’re not simply reading to see your favorite characters get together (and often it’s both simultaneously).
Carry On is also made richer by its connection with a whole host of source material, Harry Potter arguably strongest among them. Every book is a conversation, of course: between the author and her reader, but also from one text to another. Carry On is in conversation with much of our popular culture, stories about ordinary “chosen ones” and the way the pressure put upon them exerts itself. For a reader who simultaneously loved and was frustrated with Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, characters and plot points in Carry On can feel like direct rebuttals at times. Like the best fan fiction, this is one of the book’s chief pleasures: the way it simultaneously talks to these texts, pushes back at them and challenges them critically, while still letting the reader get lost in the world that Rowell has created.
- This article was amended on 8 October 2015 to reflect that Carry On is Rowell’s fifth novel.
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