Cassandra Clare turns “monsters like Trump” into allegories in ‘The Sword Keeper’

Madrid, Jul 16 (EFE).- After selling 50 million books with his previous saga, ‘Shadowhunters’American fantasy writer Cassandra Clare now presents the first installment of a new proposal, ‘The Sword Keeper’, which features allegories of “monsters like Trump.”

Cassandra Clare is the literary name of Judith Rumelt, one of the most acclaimed fantasy writers in the world.

A genre in which, he says in an interview with EFE, “he tries to turn, to turn around our fears, those real monsters like Donald Trump, and turn them into allegories.”

And this has been demonstrated in some of his novels, such as the saga ‘The Shadowhunters’, translated into 35 languages, in whose plot there is a movement, that of those shadowhunters, who have as a way of life a literary adaptation of Trump’s political slogans.

“I was able to write regarding a very corrupt politician and how the rhetoric of making Shadowhunters great once more is basically based on eliminating anyone who is different. Which ends in disaster,” he says.

Specific, In ‘The Guardian of Swords’ (Cross Books-Planeta) the author once once more constructs a new world, Castelana, where political relations between its inhabitants coexist in an atmosphere of betrayal and secret agreements.

But Clare remains true to its identity and magic and fantasy are present not only in the environment, but in its main characters: Kel, a young man whose destiny since birth is to protect and die, if necessary, for Prince Conor, and Lin, a doctor unable to cure her best friend without using forbidden practices.

Fate, duty and love. Three ingredients of universal literature that Clare fuses into a plot in which reflections by the Swiss astrologer Paracelsus (16th century) appear: “the only difference between a poison and its antidote is the dose.”

A message she includes to “make a call for moderation.”

“If you have too much of anything you can get poisoned, if you drink too much water you can get poisoned. I think when you look at political extremism and I think Trump is an extremist, people are drawn to it because it represents change, but it doesn’t really represent change, it represents a desire to go back to a past that never existed and in that sense it is poison,” she says.

That’s why ‘The Sword Keeper’ is a work that goes beyond fantasy because it “deals with power and its corrupting effects” and how a forbidden love, “if it gets out of control”, can destroy an entire kingdom.

Despite topping the list of best books in newspapers such as The Washington Post and The Guardian, Clare (1973, Tehran) maintains that critical and public recognition of fantasy literature depends on “continuing to write and promote” her work because as long as she continues to write books with “meaning and sense” for readers, everyone “will come to embrace fantasy.”

According to the writer, a lover of the works of the British author Tolkien – author of ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings’ – this new saga will have four books.

Pilar Martin