Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader(45)

IMMORTALITY AND ITS

DISCONTENTS

IN WHICH HOLLY BLACK AND KELLY LINK DISCUSS CASSANDRA CLARE’S MORTAL INSTRUMENTS

HOLLY: When we sat down to talk about this essay, it happened to be in a room where Cassandra Clare was hard at work on her next book. We thought we would just have the conversation in front of her and see if she wanted to pitch in.

KELLY: It seemed appropriate, since this is often the way that the three of us work: Everyone doing their own writing, and stopping when necessary to discuss a plot point or read what someone else is working on and make suggestions.

So. Why do young adults (and for young adults, let’s go ahead and make it all readers) like books, like Cassandra Clare’s, about immortal beings like vampires and faeries?

HOLLY: Well, I remember as a teenager being constantly told that I was going to change. That every time I dyed my hair blue or declared my love for a particular band or book or thing, someone (usually my mother) would say that I would regret it once I was older. And I remember thinking that it seemed to me that the way people talked about getting older, it seemed a lot like getting possessed. Immortality is stasis, but stasis doesn’t always seem like a bad thing, especially if the alternative is losing some essential part of one’s identity.

KELLY: So immortality is change, and it’s also stasis. The best of both worlds! I guess it offers the chance to continue to be yourself, even as the world around you changes. And that seems exciting—as if you’re the thing that the world revolves around. And of course, as everyone will say, young adult fiction offers the opportunity, without risk, to explore different kinds of lives and adulthood and choices. Like science fiction, it’s a literature of what-if. And the biggest what-if of all is, What if we didn’t have to die? One of the very first stories is the story of Gilgamesh, which is all about trying to defeat death. Every culture’s first stories are about their gods, who live forever.

HOLLY: Well, living forever seems pretty sweet. As Raphael says to Simon in City of Glass, “You will never get sick, never die, and be strong and young forever. You will never age. What have you got to complain about?” Is there anything to complain about?

KELLY: If there wasn’t anything to complain about, then there wouldn’t be any story. Stasis is the enemy of plot.

When Raphael (vampire) says that to Simon (now a vampire too), Simon thinks: “It sounded good, but did anyone really want to be sixteen forever? It would have been one thing to be frozen forever at twenty-five, but sixteen? To always be this gangly, to never really grow into himself, his face or his body? Not to mention that, looking like this, he’d never be able to go into a bar and order a drink. Ever. For eternity.”

HOLLY: Can he even drink? Like, booze? Caaaaaaassie!

CASSIE: It’s never come up before. He says at one point in the books that he could drink a little bit of coffee. Eating would make him sick.

KELLY: So no booze. No barbecue, Chicken McNuggets, or cotton candy. It’s a bit like keeping kosher only much, much worse. And of course, yes, blood isn’t kosher.

HOLLY: But blood is legendarily delicious in literature. I mean, Simon seems super into it when he’s drinking from a living person.

KELLY: I’ve never tried blood myself. Although I have had black pudding.

HOLLY: I am willing to concede that Simon might have concerns about immortality, but he’s largely speculating about how it will go, since he’s only a few weeks into his new life. He hasn’t yet watched his family age and die. He hasn’t yet lost lovers.

KELLY: It does affect his relationship with his family, though. Becoming a vampire—being an immortal—is taboo, even in contemporary American life. His mother locks him out. That’s the first real time we get that being a vampire (being out as a vampire), for Simon, has a price.

HOLLY: The person we know best in the books who has experienced both the boon and burden of immortality is Magnus. And because the Infernal Devices is set more than a hundred years earlier than the Mortal Instruments, we get to see how Magnus has changed over time. Immortality isn’t a burden just for him, it’s a burden on the people close to him. As his relationship with Alec grows, Alec has to figure out what it means to be with someone who has lived so much before him and will live so long after he’s gone.

KELLY: For the writer, an immortal character offers a chance to tell a lot of different stories, to rework the character in interesting ways. Magnus’ arc as an immortal is interesting to me for two reasons. One, his love life follows a pretty classic vampire character arc: He’s loved and lost and loved and lost again. But because of his apparent physical age, he’s attractive to—and attracted by—young adults like Alec. Sound familiar?

Second, he’s bisexual. (Oh, and he’s Asian. That’s a lot of intersectionality going on!) In terms of audience reaction, his sexual preferences seem much more notable than the fact that he’s immortal. That’s pretty new. There aren’t a lot of bisexual immortals in popular fiction.

HOLLY: Would you consider Anne Rice’s Lestat bisexual? He didn’t really have sex with anyone, just engaged in a lot of biting.

KELLY: Well, yes, but he’s not bisexually active in the books, at least not on the page, not explicitly. There’s a very good reason why it’s appropriate that he was played by Tom Cruise.

HOLLY: The thing that fascinates me about Magnus is that he appears to be the most human seeming of the Downworlders we meet, because he’s so friendly and up on popular culture. He buys scarves at the Gap! Raphael and Camille are more menacing and seem more inhuman.