Artistic significance: Human problems need human solutions

One of the most interesting things to me is the stories that really should have experienced more success than they did. For me, “The Keys to the Kingdom” by Garth Nix is one of those book series.

Nix is an Australian author with dozens of books. He’s doing well for himself, but when I had this series recommended to me I went, “where have these been all my life?” The seven-part series follows the story of Arthur Penhaligon (an obvious allusion to Arthur Pendragon). Arthur is a regular pre-teen getting started at a new school. He has severe asthma and experiences an attack when made to run during gym class (after explaining insistently that he couldn’t and only just got out of the hospital from his last attack to a teacher who wouldn’t listen). During this attack, a figure appears and throws him a clock hand.

Over the course of the first book, Arthur learns this clock hand is actually a key and by accepting it (which he didn’t technically have a choice on) he’s become the heir to the House, or the epicenter of the universe. Now, if you’re a teacher and you want to teach students about over-arching literary devices, these books are outstanding for it. You have historical references and parallels to Greek mythology before even getting into the seven denizens who currently rule the House and don’t exactly want to give their power up. There’s a lot to talk about with the denizens; they each represent a day of the week and one of the seven deadly sins.

But that’s not the discussion I want to have. See, I got invested in these books. I was excited for the resolution. We’ve spent six books with Arthur trying to hold on to his humanity rather than fully entering the House and becoming another denizen. He doesn’t want to leave his family or friends on earth, but he was thrust onto this journey that, even when he tries, he can’t get off the path of. He’s balancing a lot of things, but the primary drive throughout the series is that he wants to be with his family. He wants to be human.

I wanted to see how these things would be resolved and reading the end of “Lord Sunday,” it disappointed me. It wasn’t what I expected and kind of broke the tradition of that style of story. Normally, the hero wins in the end against all odds and gets everything he wanted. Arthur doesn’t do that. You can actually make a sound argument that he loses; the universe literally gets destroyed by Nothing and Arthur is the only one left (except for the Architect of the universe who is there for exposition).

That’s one reason it disappointed me, but the other thing is what he does with the blank canvas he’s given and told to paint. He puts everything on Earth back exactly the way it was. Arthur makes a duplicate of himself from before this adventure started to stay with his family and continue living the life he could have had. My first reaction, when reading this as a teenager, was that he’s given the opportunity to make the world however he wants and you’re not going to get rid of cancer? What about just a little nudge so that people produce more food and fewer go hungry? There’s so many things in the world he could have fixed and he didn’t. But I guess that’s the point.

Arthur isn’t human anymore. His blood doesn’t run red. These are human problems we’ve created. Humans have to fix them. We can’t rely on some outside force to make everything better. We have to do it.