When I was younger it seemed that wherever I happened to live, the same handful of shows were repeated in a permanent loop in the after-school hours. The Brady Bunch, Gilligan’s Island, and Get Smart! were all staples, and while I enjoyed all three, Get Smart! was by far my favourite; to this day, “Missed it by that much” and “Would you believe …” are valued catchphrases.
I haven’t watched the show in many years, in part because I fear that the Suck Fairy might have visited it. I first heard about the Suck Fairy from a friend, when we were discussing beloved things from our childhoods. My friend admitted that he had recently re-read a favourite book from his younger days; an experience that was, apparently, less than wonderful. “I found that the Suck Fairy had visited it,” was his conclusion.
I asked what he meant, and he explained that the Suck Fairy is the entity which saps all the joy out of something fondly remembered from childhood. It could be a book, a movie, a TV series, or anything else that you adored at the age of 10 or 12, and thought — at that time — was absolutely brilliant. You loved it unquestioningly, with the white-hot passion of 1,000 suns, and that would never, ever, change.
Until, that is, you revisited it — perhaps because you now had children of your own — 10 or 20 or 30 years later, and wondered what on Earth had happened. The thing you remembered as being so incomparably wonderful was, instead, flat, dreary, and boring, and whatever charms it had possessed and enjoyment it had provided had been sucked out of it. That’s right: unbeknownst to you, the Suck Fairy had visited it, and cast her magic spell.
Of course, the work hadn’t changed; it was the same as it had been all those years ago. Instead, you had changed: grown older, wiser, more mature, and more able to judge things critically. Young children are many things, but critical isn’t one of them. They love what they love, unquestioningly, and that’s all there is to it.
Anyone who has ever been a parent knows this. How many of you have not, in your time, rolled your eyes and shaken your head as you stop to watch a few seconds of some popular TV show your children adore? There they are, loving every second of it, and all you can see are shouty characters, simplistic dialogue, cheap production values, and jokes so obvious they should have warning signs.
Don’t bother pointing any of this out; your words will fall on deaf ears. When I was 12 I fell in love with the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and snatched up paperback editions of all the Holmes stories. Thus it was that I came across an edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles with a foreword and afterword by acclaimed novelist John Fowles.
I read both with great interest, but was horrified when Fowles suggested, in the afterword, that there were faults to the novel. He pointed out Conan Doyle’s sketchy knowledge of Dartmoor, where the novel is set, as well as the thin characterisation of the novel’s two main female characters, the lack of viable suspects, Watson’s obtuseness, the absence of Holmes himself for much of the novel. and more.
I was shocked and appalled, and also a bit angry. How dare he criticize this thing I loved so much? It was as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to a butterfly.
As I grew older, however, I realized that Fowles was quite right to point these things out as faults. It didn’t affect my enjoyment of the novel on subsequent re-readings — the Suck Fairy has not visited The Hound of the Baskervilles since I first read it in 1976 — but it did help me to understand valid criticism and start working on my own critical skills.
So perhaps I’ll go back and give Get Smart! another viewing. With luck, the Suck Fairy will have stayed far away from it.
editorial@accjournal.ca
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