And here's the thing. These books are something of a sacred cow; much beloved, modern classics, growing more controversial as they age in some ways unfashionably. There are those who have unkind opinions of the leisurely omniscient voice, the structure, the politics, what they presume to be the politics, and so on.
But I am here to tell you, there's a reason these books are a phenomenon of the genre, in print in multiple editions and all over the world, widely (and poorly) imitated, and why they were such an awakening when they were published.
It's because they are fun to read, baby.
That distanced omniscient narrator is funny. Sharp, with a dry sly wit and a strong, rhythmic voice. I got 68 pages into the trade paperback with complete absorption, which--I gotta tell you--does not happen these days. I was sitting on
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netcurmudgeon's couch picking up the book and reading every time he walked away, and laughing.Out loud.
A lot.
And calling into the kitchen to read him passages. Which also made him laugh.
They're good. They're not just worthy. They're good. They're entertaining and interesting and immersive. People don't read and reread them because secretly we're all monarchists who just want daddy to come spank and save us, or we're romantics seeking to abrogate the industrial revolution, or we're seeking escapist, consolatory literature (which I rather don't find them to be.) They read them to laugh and feel chilled and to be swept along by a master storyteller.
I suspect, with tilted head, that the reason these books have endured better-recognized and found a wider audience than other works of similar worthiness--Gormenghast, Lud-in-the-Mist--is just that. They're fun.
It's the same reason Shakespeare's stuck around better than Jonson. Jonson made you eat your spinach straight.
I've read my share of classics, modern and otherwise. And you know the great thing about them?
Most of them are really enjoyable books.* I can't stand Austen or Dickens, but they both have their partisans to this days, and I gotta tell you--Virginia Woolf? Awesome. Moby Dick? Beach reading. The Naked Lunch? Man, that shit is awesome.
The Fellowship of the Ring? Trust me. Six zillion hippie stoners did not wallow in that stuff because it was dull.
Something to consider, though, is that things that are only fun tend not to stick around either. They're fun, and then forgotten.
So be warned. Here in the genre trenches, in addition to being Meaningful, we will expect you to be Fun.
Like Tolkien.
And if you want me I'll be in the tub with my book.
*Except Sons & Lovers. That book has no excuse to exist except to torture undergrads.
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Comments
I do like Austen and Dickens quite a bit, but Moby Dick is a slog...I suspect this is because Melville includes no female characters important enough to be named. I'm determined to conquer him but have only made it about a third of the way through.
You know, I bought the same copy of PotA three different times?
I kep selling it back to the co-op and then rebuying it the next year, and I kept ENDING UP WITH THE SAME ONE.
Flying Dutchman, yo.
I hate that book.
It's actually one of my favorite books, which makes me all the more disappointed that Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake are soooo torturing and pretentious. Though sometimes I fear I'm just not smart enough for them.
As for Sons & Lovers, I'm with you.
You make me want to go back and attempt to read LotR again, since I've never managed to finish it. I just wish I could somehow wipe the cultural knowledge of its plot and climax out of my head, but like the ending of Citizen Kane, it's hard to avoid.
So be warned. Here in the genre trenches, in addition to being Meaningful, we will expect you to be Fun.
QfT. I think the college creative writing professor I had who battled with me over the worthiness (or not) of genre (SF in particular--he understood mysteries and westerns, go figure) did not understand this.
Tolkien tells you in the prologue that Merry survives and goes back to the Shire, after all, which in itself gives you a clue how it *has* to end.
The interesting thing is what happens along the way.
i envy you! enjoy!
Nowadays, it seems to me that writing is taught as a "One True Way" and "One Acceptable Result" business. You've got to GRAB THEM with the HOOK, and then ROLL RIGHT INTO THE PLOT and no foolin' around, and you'd better have a close-in psychic distance and an intimate POV so readers can identify with a character and know just who to root for, and don't use big words or semicolons, and you have to have CONFLICT BOOM POW BAM from the first word . . . and if you do not do all of this holding your mouth just right, well, you deserve to be rejected.
Okay, so commercial/popular fiction will be expected to be a bit more "that way" if it's to be accepted, and possibly literary fiction can appeal more for the voice and the wit and the situations. _The Rachel Papers_ (dry wit, paved the way for _High Fidelity_ and lad lit) isn't for everybody. Willa Cather isn't for everybody (though I admire her work more than most any other novelist's of that era--and probably more than that of any lady since Emily Dickinson.) Some writing teachers, though, say, "This is how it has to be--fast and into the story's ultimate conflict immediately."
But I've never been that kind of reader. I read for voice and vicarious experience. I posted on my LJ about why I write--"What does it feel like to be you?" That's one reason I always liked to act and to play "let's pretend" as a child. The two rules that someone said novels cannot break are "Engage the reader's interest and curiosity and she'll keep reading" and "Don't be boring." Old Tolk knew these two rules. I fell in love with his prose at "eleventy-first" and with his hobbits at the description of the hobbit-hole and the hairy toes. I entered the vivid, continuous dream.
I thought I was hopelessly out of touch with everyone else for liking different kinds of books, even those with omniscient narration. (I prefer Dickens to Austen--way more soap opera and eccentric weirdos to admire!) (Oh, and if you give DHLawrence another chance, don't read _Sons&Lovers_. His other books are MUCH dirtier. And sexy mostly in the "suggestive" sense, not straight out like erotica of today. (GRIN))
I dunno how influential I am, but I am opinionated. *g* And I agree: the whole "You must write pulpy pulp in a pulpy pulp fashion or the readers will not want to read it" thing is stupid.
Those are techniques.
They are not the only techniques.
And Susanna Clarke sold a fuckload of copies.
There are no rules, just ways of telling a story. Some ways work better than others for any given story.
All ways have flaws.
Books should be fun, and they should be meaty. Those are really my only shoulds.
No, I am not joking.
It's amazing how much stuff I read by writers brings me back to Spider Robinson's essay, "Rah Rah RAH", in defense of Heinlein. Two major points he makes in it, vividly enough that they've stuck with me, are that a reader cannot judge the writers' views by those of his characters and that a story must be fun and interesting to be palatable (and to be read at all, by people who aren't forced to) but must also contain some truth or moral to be memorable. Familiar topics, much?
And to me, what makes them worthwhile, is that the characers relate evenn in an odd stoned way to people you meet every day..."She thinks she is Galadriel" "Funny as an Ent" "That guy thinks like a dwarf"
Like those dense twisted "Early Rock Period" Dylan songs. They strike little sparks that help light your way.
Crappy books sell, and crappy books get great reveiws and crappy books get taught in good schools, but great books full of valid archtypes hang around for a long damn time.
Yes. Yes. They show you something that helps you get through the world a little more intact.
Yes.
And you get sparks by, or so Douglas Adams tells me, by banging the rocks together, kids..
I might do better with LotR if I went back and made myself look at it with a slow, attentive eye, but honestly? I don't feel the need. The things I'm trying to learn how to do, Tolkien is not the teacher to learn from. I'll go dissect Dunnett instead (and then contemplate throwing out my keyboard in despair, but that's a separate issue).
Then I went to college, and some people I barely knew bought me The Lord of the Rings. I began reading them, and promptly blew off my schoolwork for a week to finish the books. (I probably shouldn't admit that, no?) They pretty much singlehandedly brought me back to fantasy.
What's always really grabbed me about Tolkien, though, is his world - I remember the first thought I had while reading, which was, "I'd really like to visit that place. And that one. Oh, and that one." Most fantasy worlds don't catch me, but his did.
Woo, I rambled again. Sorry.
(there's your bad Led Zep/Tolkein joke of the day.)
As you touched on earlier about your own work, I think reviewers and critics tend to put more of the author into a fictional work than is usually really there. Still more I think they put in what they want to see (maybe their contribution to fiction is to provide fictional authors?).
The people who see all this "stuff" in the Lord of the Rings seem to have totally forgotten that the stories started out as bedtime stories for his kids. Based on interviews I've seen and read, I'm really not sure that for JRR hisself they ever really moved beyond that point.
And bedtime stories have to be fun or the kids would rather have you read something from Miss Potter or the Grimm boys.
And actually, that's not what I was talking about at all. *g*
Theme does not equal author insertion.
But I do think that a theme read in by someone not the author does not make it correct.
I did both my Honours and my Master's on Tolkien, and every time I re-read it I find something new. (It is absorbing, it is funny, it is witty).
But I think I'm going to print off this post and put it on my wall. Wiser words have not been uttered.
Well, it's so true. People read stuff because it's fun.
people reread it because of what
Also contagious, I found. Every time I reread (or listen to--the unabridged audiobooks read by Rob Inglis are just heavenly) them, my writing style goes all Tolkienesque for a while.
And yes, I found--even watching the Peter Jackson moviezation--that I remembered great swaths of dialogue and text, and my brain would fill in the narration as the movie was playing.
That?
Was cool.
That said: yes, spot on with Tolkien. Add Wagner's The Ring Cycle as your background music and just float away.
I'm not saying those books weren't popular. But there's a reason something becomes an enduring phenomenon. Books can become mad best sellers by hitting the zeitgeist just right. And they can become best sellers by being *good.* (Although alas it may not be as common.)
But no matter how one is moved to poke holes in sacred cows, they become that--sacred texts--for a reason.
Others I love are Jekyll & Hyde, Heart of Darkness and most the twain... oh, and Dracula! How different from what I expected does that wanna be?!?
Star Wars books are cool tooooooo!
If one comes to that with only the movies as context... I mean, in some ways it's a silly book, of course, but then again, it's not.
There's an annotated edition that I read in college. Sheer joy. *g*
Need I say I love the book now?
I know you must have said this somewhere already, but as you don't seem to have a tag for the walking bit of this post, how are you keeping track? Are you going by the maps at the front, or has someone worked out the distances to various landmarks? It strikes me as a very good idea for keeping oneself going.
http://home.insightbb.com/~eowynchallen
Who else can juggle lashings of cake and tea and bacon for breakfast with Elrond discussing a 2000 year old battle with and earthbound angel (of sorts)? No one but a consummate writer, that's who!
Moby Dick? Oh, pass me some more of that stuff, please! I like Dickens, myself; I like it when I read through a particularly involved passage to come to a phrase that startles me in to hilarity. Reading has always been my preferred choice of transport; I don't know of any other way to visit Victorian England, go whaling on the high seas or hang about at the Green Dragon. Patrick O'Brien opened a world of tall sips and gunpowder, friendship, intrigue and natural wonder to me. I am currently re-reading his series.
I'd like to add Gustave Flaubert to my own preferred list--some of his characters sound suspiciously like people I know and he describes situations in such delcious detail that you can cringe with, be horrified with or laugh with the characters as though you are sitting beside them.
I have the sudden urge to go read something. :)
And then there's Midgewater. Or, earlier, the whole gifts scene. "For ADELARD TOOK, for his VERY OWN" onthe umbrella, with the note Adelard had taken many unlabelled ones. Never fails to make me laugh--out loud. Every time.
Maybe the problem is not enough people read it aloud at any point. My mother did that with my brother and I when we were about 12; and we were already Hobbit lovers. The humor is much more apparent out loud; then you can concentrated on the Shadow of the Past. After all that's what Tolkien did; to his fellow Inklings' great chagrin.
That was after he'd read about half of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars series to me. It's no surprise I've grown up with a mad love of grand pulp adventure...
(Well, maybe not plural "years" but...)
Maybe approximately as long as the story is supposed to last. Not counting the years intervening after Bilbo's party and before Frodo moves house, of course, which is one of my friend's pet peeves; she can't get past the part where Frodo kicks around for a few millenia with the ring in an envelope still.
And yes, Shelob's Lair stuck pretty firm. Like the spider scene in the Hobbit, where the dwarves are all trussed up and hanging from trees.
Gosh, Tolkien had this thing with crucial spider interactions, huh?
Personally, though, I can remember me and my brother's relative positions, and his face (and the feeling of my own) when Frodo's finger gets bitten off.
It's just one of those irrevocable moments. Thinking Frodo's dead is one thing; watching him loose a minor limb is a whole different psyche.
Five years and three decent Literature and writing classes later...it's an even richer, more engrossing story. I find myself wanting to read it aloud to someone, and wanting to share the grief and hilarity (Gandalf and Aragorn have the most awesome interactions in TT).
I read it first at nine years old, and every time I reread it I feel like I'm coming home, or spending time with an old beloved friend that I don't see often enough. I adore the work.
Thanks for providing a Tolkienphile with a brief forum. ::g::