Magical Realism

Magical realism is not fantasy. Fantasy builds a new world; magical realism slips the impossible into this one and refuses to make a fuss about it. A man's tall tales might literally be true, a town might rain yellow flowers, the dead might linger at the edge of a kitchen, and the genius of the genre is that no one stops to gasp. The wonder is treated as just another texture of ordinary life, which is exactly how it earns its strange, aching power: it makes the everyday feel enchanted and the enchanted feel heartbreakingly everyday.

Born in the literature of Latin America and now everywhere, it is less a set of rules than a way of seeing, where grief, love and memory are real enough to bend the world a little.

The magic is never the point

In magical realism the impossible is a language for the emotional truth underneath it. Big Fish uses tall tales to talk about a son finally seeing his father, and the genre's masters know that a single quiet miracle, accepted without comment, can say more about love or loss than any amount of plot.

It is, above all, a literary tradition, the shelf where Garcia Marquez and Allende and Rushdie taught the world that wonder belongs in the marketplace and the family tree, not just the enchanted forest.

And games have found a gentle home in it lately, the quiet, wondrous little worlds where you ferry the dead or wander a half-magical road and the impossible is simply part of the journey.