Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader(46)

But when Magnus thinks about humanity, even as someone with a human parent and who once had a human life, he sees himself as outside of it. For example, “Magnus had always found humans more beautiful than any other creatures alive on the earth, and had often wondered why. Only a few years before dissolution, Camille had said. But it was mortality that made them what they were: the flame that blazed brighter for its flickering. Death is the mother of beauty, as the poet said. He wondered if the Angel had ever considered making his human servants, the Nephilim, immortal. But no, for all their strength, they fell as humans had always fallen in battle through all the ages of the world.” These are the thoughts of a being who might look human, who might try to act human, but who is essentially other.

KELLY: We all want what we can’t have. Magnus immerses himself in humanity to keep himself human. Talking about this helps me understand better why, in books, immortals—especially vampires—like to hang around with young adults. If your baseline condition is one of stasis, you might need regular jolts of chaos, change, extremes. Teenagers are to the immortal as cups of coffee are to the writer, except that the problem for writers is that they have deadlines and the problem for immortals is that they don’t.

HOLLY: So teenagers are reinvigorating?

KELLY:…

HOLLY: Well, reinvigorating to drink anyway.

KELLY: I always wanted to ask Cassie if Magnus was inspired, at all, by Diana Wynne Jones’ wizards Howl and Chrestomanci. Cassie?

CASSIE: By Howl, yes. Not so much by Chrestomanci. I always loved that scene in Howl’s Moving Castle where Howl dyes his hair blue. I wanted to write wizards that weren’t old and gray like Dumbledore. Everybody pictures wise, ancient, beardy wizards. I wanted to write a wizard who was young, a New York raver, a party boy.

HOLLY: It’s interesting that an immortal person who appears very young is much more eerie and alien seeming than an aged character like Gandalf living forever.

KELLY: Most cultures have myths about figures like Magnus, though. Fairies, gods who appear as youths to court mortals, and of course lots of scary children who aren’t what they seem. The child—or the young adult—in fiction represents potentiality, for good or evil. And that’s a big part of all of Cassie’s books—young adults, like Clary, who discover that they are much more powerful than they thought they were and that the world is much stranger. Or else young adults who, like Simon, get changed into something they never expected to become—maybe never even knew it was possible to be. Of course, that’s a big part of young adult literature, period. It’s a literature of discovery and change. You, the protagonist, have to discover the world. And at the same time you have to discover what you are that you didn’t know was possible. You are changed. You change the world. The literature of the fantastic enlarges all of these possibilities.

You know what I find really interesting? Not that there are immortals in Cassie’s books, but that, given the possibility of immortality, her Shadowhunters are so very, very mortal. The blood of the angel Raziel gifts Shadowhunters with many things but not immortality. In fact, as Will Herondale says in Clockwork Angel, “It’s not a long life, killing demons. One tends to die young, and then they burn your body.”

HOLLY: So that the risk of dying young, being a Shadowhunter, being mortal, gets associated with divinity, with the way that things should be. And on the other hand, immortality is linked to the infernal. Only Downworlders get that gift—warlocks, faeries, and vampires—so it must be a by-product of their demon blood. Werewolves are the only Downworlders to miss out on the immortality boat. So doesn’t that imply that immortality is tainted in some way, more burden than boon?

KELLY: Well, it’s always seemed to me that werewolves are the most like us: the most human of monsters. They’re inside us; you’re always a vampire, whereas you become a werewolf once a month. And they’re messy in a way that humans are messy: creatures of appetite, who suffer and die like us.

But yes, immortality comes with several pages of fine print. You stay the same, and everything else changes. Maybe it changes so much that there’s no place for you any longer, no place that you recognize or that recognizes you. Or, more important, no one. We haven’t really talked about how immortality works in Cassie’s romances, that tension between the immortal and his or her mortal lover.

HOLLY: Love is, traditionally, forever and ever. That’s what we say to one another, what we promise—forever. It’s a romantic ideal, but love would be way different if forever really meant forever. Can two people stand each other for that long? Can one person really have a single love that means more than any other over the stretch of decades and centuries? Is that a crazy way to think about love?

KELLY: Cassie’s books are, in large part, about people who find real love. True love. But every love story is a tragedy, even when you add immortals. Either you’re immortal and your lover isn’t. (Woe.) Or you’re both immortals, and after the first forty or fifty or five hundred years, the bloom is off the immortal rose. (More woe.) The immortals in Cassie’s books don’t fare well together.

HOLLY: We really see that with Magnus and Camille. She says to Magnus in Clockwork Prince, “You expect me to have the morals of some mundane when I am not human, and neither are you.” She believes that love between immortals should be fundamentally different—that rules about fidelity, for example, shouldn’t apply. On the other hand, I have always thought that there was something about Camille that seemed more essentially human than Magnus. She’s petty in a way that he isn’t—jealous of his having Alec in exactly the way she criticized him for being jealous a hundred years earlier—and she has a way of showing off that seems to be about impressing just the sort of people she claims not to care about.