Soft Skull: The Good Fairies of New York by Martin Millar

The Good Fairies of New York finds two Scottish thimble fairies transported to lower Manhattan. Morag and Heather, who didn't completely fit in back in the old country, are a bit bewildered by their new surroundings, but make do as best they can. They're not entirely alone-as it turns out, New York is heavily populated by fairies, including Italian, Chinese, and black ones.

They glomp onto some humans; Morag joins Kerry, who suffers from Crohns disease (complete with colostomy bag), while Heather hooks up with the asocial (and unmusical) Dinnie. The humans aren't entirely enthralled by the fairies, with Dinnie telling Heather: "I've decided not to believe in you in the hope you'll disappear." His efforts are, of course, ineffective.

Some of the other fairies aren't too enthusiastic about the new foreign presences intruding on their turf either-and then there are the fairies back home, too... Whimsically and precisely, with a fun plot that turns corners on a dime, all sorts of delicious mayhem ensue.

These fairies enjoy drinking, eating magic mushrooms and passing out but they still manage to help a couple of humans to get their lives together along the way. Moreover, inhabited by a fascinating range of human ccharacters who are self centered and hedonistic but at the same time incredibly kind and loyal, Good Fairies is probably the only book out there in which race riots and Crohn's Disease are treated with lightness and good-tempered humor.

If you've ever wanted Johnny Thunders of The New York Dolls to come back from heaven to find his lost guitar, or if you've ever wondered why reels can be so tricky on the fiddle, or if you've tired of some of the more traditional types of fantasies, this book's for you.

From the Introduction by Neil Gaiman:

I owned this book for well over five years before I dared to read it.
It was not that I dislike Martin Millar's books. Quite the reverse. I've been a fan of his work for almost twenty years. I fell for his prose, wry and honest and gentle and smart, the day I picked up Milk, Sulphate and Alby Starvation. I fell for his characters: I like an author who likes his own characters, and Mr Millar's characters always seemed like people that he had very much enjoyed spending time with. I enjoyed his plots, which have that enjoyable sense of rightness that good stories ought to have - you don't feel, reading it, that someone made this up, you feel instead that someone found out what happened and wrote it all down for you.

I bought this book several years after it came out, because I had moved to America where they never quite got the hang of publishing Martin Millar novels. And then, once I had obtained it, it sat on my shelf for five years, unread, a book that I knew would be funny, smart, contain great and likeable characters and have a plot that would feel like a proper satisfying story.

Five years...

It was all in the title.

Authors are odd animals. For those five years I was gearing up to write, and then I was writing, a novel called American Gods, all about what happened when the gods and the fairies and the creatures of legend came from the Old World to the New. So, while I owned The Good Fairies of New York, I did not dare to read it. It was, I saw from the back cover, about Scottish fairies who came to New York. I didn't need to read any more. I was troubled enough already. For me, probably for any author, the biggest worry is that someone will write the book that I'm writing, and write it first. Or, at any rate, that someone's going to write a book that looks like a book that I'm hoping to write. If they do that, and they do, then I'm not allowed to read their book until after I've written my book. This is mostly because, if they have written my book, I'll give up on the spot and be very sad. It's also because I don't want to have to worry about copying the other books, and the best way to do that is simply not to read them.

I was writing or at least, in the beginning, thinking about writing a book called American Gods, in which all the things in which people have ever believed had come to America: gods and fairies and dreams; and now somebody, someone whose work I liked, at that, had written a book in which fairies came to New York. I was, I feared, screwed. So I bought the book, put it on the shelf, and only years later, when my book was safely out of my head and onto the paper, did I dare to start to pick up The Good Fairies of New York.

I was relieved to discover that it covered very different territory to my book, but mostly I was happy I was finally reading it, and wishing I'd read it before.

Millar writes like Kurt Vonnegut might have written, if he'd been born fifty years later in a different country and hung around with entirely the wrong sort of people. He makes jokes with a straight face, and never follows the jokes with a nudge to the ribs or a rim-shot on the cymbal, instead he gets on with telling the story, funny and moving and wise and filled with people you care about, even if some of them are very small and others have personal habits that, frankly, leave a great deal to be desired.
Millar started off good, and with his own unmistakable voice, writing books like Milk, Sulphate and Alby Starvation ( a book I was once amused to find mis-shelved under Medicine: Nutrition), Ruby and the Stone Age Diet and Lux the Poet. He was good and then he got better.

The Good Fairies of New York is a story that starts when Morag and Heather, two eighteen-inch fairies with swords and green kilts and badly-dyed hair fly through the window of the worst violinist in New York, an overweight and antisocial type named Dinnie, and vomit on his carpet. Who they are, and how they came to New York, and what this has to do with the lovely Kerry, who lives across the street, and who has Crohn's Disease and is making a flower alphabet, and what this has to do with the other fairies (of all nationalities) of New York, not to mention the poor repressed fairies of Britain, is the subject of this book. It has a war in it, and a most unusual production of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and Johnny Thunders' New York Dolls guitar solos. What more could anyone desire from a book?
When I first read it, I assumed that I would not have to wait long before The Good Fairies of New York became a Broadway Musical, or even a Movie, like Shrek for grown-ups. This has not yet happened, due, I am forced to conclude, to the lack of imagination of Broadway producers and the reluctance of Hollywood people to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Morag and Heather, on Dinnie and Kerry. I do not understand this reluctance at all; nor do I understand why Martin Millar isn't as celebrated as Kurt Vonnegut, as rich as Terry Pratchett, as famous as Douglas Adams. But the world is filled with mysteries.

This is a book for every fiddler who has realised, half-way through playing an ancient Scottish air, that the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it. It's a book for every girl with home-dyed hair and fairy wings who can't honestly remember what happened last night. It's a book for people of whatever shape and size who like reading good books.

I owned it for more than five years before reading it, then lent my copy to someone I thought should read it, and never got it back. Do not make either of my mistakes. Read it now, and then make your friends buy their own copies. You'll thank me one day.

Neil Gaiman,
October 2004
64 Miles from New York