When Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was first published in English, there was an outbreak of what the late Angela Carter called ‘extravagant silliness’. Márquez’s novel was given a rapturous reception that focused on its wondrous exoticism, with scant regard for its grounding in the social and political reality of his native Colombia. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Carter was prominent amongst English writers who, influenced by South American fiction, began to take an interest in folklore and fairy tales, and to incorporate elements of fantasy into their work. But she recognised that the apparently strange dreams Márquez describes ‘are not holidays from reality but encounters with it.’

Magic realism is by now a well-established literary mode, with its own motifs and narrative strategies, the most fundamental being a deliberate mixing of the credible with the incredible. At its best, it can be a supple and potent technique, but the freedom it grants (undoubtedly one reason so many writers find it attractive) also makes it a difficult style to master. As the conventions of magic realism have become more formalised, they have also tended to become more unsatisfying, largely because they lend themselves to the fudging of serious questions. Often they are treated as if they grant unlimited licence with no responsibilities. The ever-present temptations are to mistake a glittering surface for narrative substance, to overdose on vacuous symbolism, and to treat flagrant implausibility as a mark of profundity. At its worst, magic realism treats the reader like a credulous rube, easily awed by a bloom of florid imagery. If the narrative finds itself in a tight spot, there is always the escape hatch of dodgy mysticism or supernatural happenings; and if anyone should have the temerity to raise the issue of plausibility, it washes its hands of the matter by chalking everything up to the sacred, unquestionable power of ‘the story’.