ORBzine - 2001.12 Book Reviews: "Lord of the Rings"

ORBzine Book Reviews: "Lord of the Rings" Xmas 2001 Special

"Lord of the Rings" - a re-examination
[By John Kane]
What with the movie coming out (overshadowed by Harry D*mned Potter ), it might be a good moment to take another look at the original publication it's based on, J.R.R. Tolkien 's 1954 publishing phenomenon. My edition is an Unwin one volume collected, in very bad shape admittedly, but still just this side of existence, and it is an enormously weighty tome. I was never actually that clear on the difference between the six books, parts 1 and 2 of each of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and Return of the King, because I read it as I found it, one single fourteen-hundred plus page extended story. As a saga, small stuff. As one, continuous tale, extraordinary. War and Peace only comes, (well, the important parts) to nine hundred, and I have the feeling that the comparison is accurate - a book much more often begun than finished. If I were proved right, it would be a shame, but not a surprise.
I assume I can dispense, between the movie and those who have already read it, with description of the plot and naming of the cast. The critical difference- and something it looks from the trailers as if the movie is going to get atrociously wrong- is the tone of the text. The movie is being sold, first on the heritage, and second, by trailer, on the action sequences. This is not in the least what it was about.
Tolkien denied that he took any significant inspiration from the times around him. This may well have been strictly, factually true, but is spiritual nonsense. It is as much in tune with the mood of the times as modern fantasy - which is often scarcely fantastic at all - is in tune with our times; and the immense gap in style and tone is any things. The modern, a few honourable exceptions apart, is positively submerged in irony- I suppose 'negatively submerged' would mean holed and sinking, which one could only hope would soon become the case- lacking in wit, literary quality most of the time, and the tiniest shred of sense of wonder. For someone more familiar with the history of those times he denied being influenced by, the zeitgeist is clear in contrast.
There is little tongue in cheek in Tolkien's work - some byplay between Legolas and Gimli, that's really it. It possesses in abundance that sense, fairytale-born, of the fragile strangeness of the world; the consistent internal illogic that is necessary to believe in, and the product of a sense of, magic. However, this is a harmonic. In the main there is a very haggard feel to the writing, very much the sort of thing that could well have been composed while listening to the news of the eastern front on the wireless. Most of the humour is faintly hysterical, the sound of people who know they are up against it. Many of the characters are fumbling in the darkness; there is a very real fog of war hanging over events, and nothing is easy; they often act on the basis of guesses, estimates and hopeful inference- usually to the best of their judgement.
There is no predestination, and it avoids being a member of the cosy apocalypse school. In fact, so much is lost or destroyed, or driven to exhaustion, in the course of the war against Sauron, that it scarcely counts as a victory; the lesser of two evils perhaps, but such a very great evil. Remember, the book ends with most of the elder races departing from the world, leaving it a less magical, more mortal place. That sense of fragility exists for a very good reason. The Darkness is defeated, at the cost of the Light, leaving a freer, perhaps more hopeful, but bleaker, much less wonderful world - and if this is not an imperialist's view of the dissolution of the British empire, what would be?
It's not really plausible to describe him as writing like anything other than what he was- a playful antiquarian. In terms of actual light and colour, he often relies on readers to paint a picture for themselves - did the Balrog really have wings? What in fact happened at the top of that tower? What does Frodo actually look like? Generations of fantasy artists have rushed in to fill the gaps, and supplied pictures for us- but I'm not quite convinced. Whenever I try to picture the skyline of Minas Tirith, there's usually a grain elevator in there somewhere. Where he excels, possibly above all others- his true claim to mastery - is in the way he can craft living abstractions, make you feel the events and breathe the intellectual atmosphere of the characters in the story. He can show and explain the fantastic, and draw you into it- without making it seem any less fantastic.
In it's use of time and exposition, it is an arthouse movie of a book. There are long sequences - Rivendell, Lothlorien, chiefly - which serve the background, not the action. Steven Hawking was advised for A Brief History of Time that every equation he included would cause half his readers to give up. Something of the sort must surely be true of Elvish poetry, which I would say is running neck and neck with James Joyce in the creative inefficiency stakes- the least progression of the main story for a given amount of imaginative effort. It is a truly perfect example of Clarke's phrase 'beautiful nonsense.' It is worth the effort in the end, though. That, you see, is what is at stake; that sense of the texture of the world, that tremendous investment in living and being there, that he has to make be. It is also the hardest part of the book to let sink in.
Yes, it has been mercilessly parodied on occasion. On at least one level, it deserves it- and that is the effect it has had on generations of writers. Like the Life of King Arthur produced independently by Wace and Lawman, it inspired multiple generations of cheap knock-offs. Modern fantasy has become a field for hopeless geeks and a term of derision, largely because of the legions of cauldron- boilers who trot out the same old, lame old props, abandoning the immensely detailed whys and wherefores that alone can serve as justification, preferring to churn out heroic fantasy by the numbers. It is appropriate if unjust to blame J.R.R, because without his splendid scene- setting it would never have been so easy to do it with so little creativity, and the horde- or the herd- would be a good deal thinner. No-one else had the same effect. It took a genius the first time; a tinsmith the second, and after. Surprising how much tin there is around nowadays.
It is much closer in spirit to the ancient romances and the Viking sagas than modern- day, high body count, low thought content, Morality Lite fantasy. The last of the old rather than the first of the new; a valedictory farewell, like it's close contemporaries, C.S.Lewis ' Cosmic Trilogy and Mervyn Peake 's Gormenghast. Three pillars that mark the end of the road, and the beginning of the trackless wasteland we inhabit now, when it is no longer possible to take anything seriously, especially ourselves.

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