A Classic Takedown of Theme Park Fantasy

The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones is formatted in the style of a travel guide (the title even riffing on the then-popular Rough Guide volumes, now largely supplanted by TripAdvisor). However, I would actually argue that if it is in any literary tradition, it’s that of Ambrose Bierce and his The Devil’s Dictionary (most widely available these days as The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary). Bierce’s work consisted of various dictionary entries written with satirical intent – to an extent, something which Dr. Johnson did in his original dictionary, but Bierce’s work was all about that. Some entries were terse, some extended, some included little snippets of what we would today call micro-fiction, but all of them had the role of spoofing, parodying, satirising, or commenting sarcastically on then-modern society.

Jones’ approach is similar, but has something of a different focus. The similarity is most evident in the original 1996 edition of the book, which I own and has a few additional short pieces cluttering it up, but the original presentation makes it clear where the focus of the work is; the preamble takes up but a few pages, and then we get to the “Toughpick” section.

This is essentially Jones’ riff on The Devil’s Dictionary as it applies to fantasy literature – a particular flavour of fantasy literature, as I’ll be getting into – with the conceit that “Fantasyland” is a tourist destination and that the experiences of fantasy novels consist of the events of “tours”, with the protagonists as the tourists. All this is overseen by an unseen “Management” who are, of course, the authors of the novels in question; the text is littered with carefully-denoted “Official Management Terms”, for instance, which are almost always examples of rather clichéd prose.