Parallel-world and portal fantasies, involving characters who step into worlds beyond, are perennially popular, especially with children. As in CS Lewis's Narnia, or Alan Garner's grittier Elidor, the young protagonists often discover that they've breached the gap in order to fulfil a prophecy, and have heroic clean-up roles to play. Subsequently, they may return home safely, or even wind up as royalty - or both.
Perhaps portal fantasy goes down so well with children because the idea of being a fate-sent hero in another world contrasts pleasingly with the reality of being a homework drone and washer-up in this one. And teenagers already inhabit the parallel world of adolescence, where all the colours are brighter but the greys and blacks are quicksands of despair. But the Narnia books are falling out of favour, not only because of the Christian only-just-subtext but because of the insidious suggestion that death and sweet fruit in Aslan's country are preferable to growing up and developing an adult sexual identity. Current variations on the theme of travel between worlds seem to be moving away from chivalric escapism, encouraging the reader to see their own world newly vivid instead.
China Miéville's UnLunDun, like Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, features a contiguous fantasy capital, UnLondon, alongside the everyday one. Miéville's poetic, cartographic imagination produces an uncity defended by broken brollies ("unbrellas"), a half-ghost love interest, Hemi, and a contemporary, pollutant villain – the Smog – and his UnLondon is a far cry from Neverland or bucolic Narnia. The fantasy convention he has most fun with, though, is the idea of the prophesied Chosen One (or, in UnLondon, the "Shwazzy"). Of the two 12-year-olds drawn into UnLondon, it's charismatic Zanna who's supposed to be the Shwazzy. But when she's knocked out by a malignant tendril of Smog, it's Deeba – who features in the Propheseers' portentous, ambulant Book only as "sidekick, funny" – who has to take over and save the day, which she does with common sense and aplomb. UnLunDun is both a cracking portal fantasy and a simultaneous deconstruction of the genre.
Rhiannon Lassiter's Rights of Passage series takes a post-colonial look at portal convention, plotting the effect selfish Earth kids might have if they arrived in a world with completely different technology and mores. In Borderlands, four disaffected teens use a worldgate which deposits them in the desert near the fortified city of Shattershard – Alex, modelling himself on his Macedonian namesake, throws in his lot with the desert Hajhim and offers them weapons expertise, while his manipulative sister Laura trades plastic hair-clips for wealth and influence. Subtly, Lassiter indicates that gun-running isn't heroic because it happens in another world, and that you can't leave your morals or your issues at home when you fancy a break from quotidian reality.
More whimsically, Susan Price's Foiling the Dragon is a portal fantasy, in which the people of Angamark, having decided that a dragon with one caprice is more appealing than a monarch with many, import poets from Earth to satisfy his conversational (and eventually gastric) demands in exchange for protection from an irate king. Paul, the latest import, far from being a fated hero, is terrified from start to finish, and fights to get back to the safety of Earth as swiftly as possible, leaving the dragon in victorious possession.
Taking a holiday in another world is one of my favourite pastimes, but I'm more and more drawn to the "working holiday" model of contemporary portal fantasy. Mythological beasts and enchanted swords may be thinner on the ground, but the reading experience seems richer.
