Big Books I Have Read: LOTR, Part V

We're continuing to enjoy LOTR aloud.  We've finished fighting at Helm's Deep and we're moving into book 4 (that is, The Two Towers part 2), which seems an excellent occasion to consider some differences between the Tolkien text and the excellent-but-of-course-very-peculiar-because-hey-cinema Peter Jackson movies.

No red-blooded old-school D&D'er who found his way to Fantasy via Tolkien doesn't love seeing orcs hacking and getting hacked.  I suspect that this describes Peter Jackson as much as it does Yours Truly.  The battle sequences in the films are almost all top-notch, even when they go over the top.  No, I don't even mind seeing Legolas shield-surfing into a crowd of Uruk Hai.  That's allowed, given how grimly everything is otherwise going, and anyway those Uruks had it coming.  I fully admit that I choke up a little at the fear in the eyes of Rohan's pre-teen soldiers, and later at the just-in-timely arrival of Haldir's stoic Galadhrim.

Rereading the same scenes in the books again, though, I'm struck at just how little Tolkien seems to be interested in not only action-beat pacing but fighting in general.  Tolkien had been a soldier, let's remember, and in WW1 he experienced the kind of world-ruining awfulness that makes movie-style sword-swinging look not only tame but ridiculous.  ("By 1918," he tells us, "all but one of my close friends were dead.")  What's more, as everyone knows, JRRT was fascinated with the ancient cultures of northern Europe, most of which were concerned with martial virtue above all else.

In the books, however, nearly all of the exciting/dramatic/gory details that make the movie battle so visually compelling are either totally absent or barely implied.  There is a sequence where Gimli keeps count of hewn orcs, but it is brief, and there is no relish in the bloodiness of the fight.  Sometimes JRRT might almost be describing the movement of pieces across a map rather than dwelling on sweat and pain, and he never forces us to look at horror.

Indeed, the most terrifying and disturbing moment in the book's battle of HD is one completely free of blood and gore.  It doesn't even appear in the movie, and it is composed solely of dialogue.  Aragorn has lept atop the wall of the fortress, and he is calling on the endless army of Saruman's orcs to surrender:

               The Orcs yelled and jeered. 'Come down! Come down!' they cried. 'If you wish to speak to us, come down! Bring out your king! We are the fighting Uruk-hai. We will fetch him from his hole, if he does not come. Bring out your skulking king!'

               'The king stays or comes at his own will,' said Aragorn.

               'Then what are you doing here?' they answered. 'Why do you look out? Do you wish to see the greatness of our army? We are the fighting Uruk-hai.'

               'I looked out to see the dawn,' said Aragorn.

               'What of the dawn?' they jeered. 'We are the Uruk-hai: we do not stop the fight for night or day, for fair weather or for storm. We come to kill, by sun or moon. What of the dawn?'

There's a creepiness here that no amount of makeup can produce.  It isn't direct and it isn't allegory, but it echoes the hateful mob that stands in the darkest moment in Western narrative.  "Bring out your king!  We come to kill!"  We are near Golgotha.

Back from Gen Con

Last week I made the pilgrimage (bathing every veyne in swich licour) to GenCon 2012 in Indianapolis, which is no longer Lake Geneva.  I had a terrific time.  This was my first visit to the "original, longest running, best attended,[comma sic] gaming convention in the world."  GenCon is bigger than Origins, and much bigger than Philcon, although I like those very much as well.  I like the Cons.  I do.

I was fortunate enough to stay with my old friend David and with his friends, all of whom know how to do this right.  I made some mistakes.  For instance, I spent money on generic tickets rather than specific event tickets, discovering only too late that the events (that is, game sessions) I wanted to enter were all sold out by day one.  I also planned my return flight for not-long-after-dawn on Sunday morning, which put a damper on what might have been a big Saturday night of playing Werewolf or Mansions of Madness.

Some of the games I, we, or they played and enjoyed (or just stood and watched) include:

Elder Sign, a card-based Cthulhu game of eldritch horror and sanity points.

True Dungeon, which is a kind of D&D haunted house, meaning that you actually roll a character and walk through it.  In the end, though, it's really neither true nor dungeon.

Lords of Waterdeep, in which political/criminal/heroic factions struggle to control territory in a seedy fantasy metropolis, kind of like Monopoly with assassinations.

(A) Game of Thrones, in which the various House factions of Westeros struggle to play Risk and kill each other, just like in the book.

Rex: Final Days of an Empire, which, though set in the full-developed Twilight Imperium universe, is widely recognized as a nearly exact clone of the old Avalon Hill Dune.

An X-Wing Miniatures Game involving expensive little models shooting lasers and photon torpedoes and making maneuvers in what was still (alas, the tabletop) two-dimensional space.

Mansions of Madness, a Cthulhu game that might best be understood as Clue with eldritch horror and sanity points.

Eldritch horror and sanity points are everywhere in gaming, which is a testament to both the power of H. P. Lovecraft's dark imagination and the fact that his work is now mostly out of copyright.   Cthulhu is huge and terrible to imagine, but he is also free of licensing restrictions.  Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl ftaghn, indeed.

(I'm looking at my list, BTW, and noticing how much it is dominated by games from Fantasy Flight.  Thanks, Fantasy Flight!  They certainly rented a lot of space at the Con.)

There are costumes at these conventions.  I didn't have one, but I was impressed with a lot of the ones I saw.  Others less so.  Do not expect too much from your first "Slave Leia."

There are costumes and there are costumes.  Some of these people are clearly talented armorsmiths, seamstresses, and ear sharpeners.  Others look are a little harder to figure out.  ("Is this a D&D Orc or a Warhammer Orc?"  "Is this a Steampunk wizard or Sherlock Holmes?"  "Is this supposed to be Kevin Smith circa 1999?")  It occurs to me that it would be interesting to hold Cosplayers to the same standards as Civil War reenactors, who lose points for wearing contact lenses or anachronistic bathing.  But how would we know?

Big Books I Have Read: (Update!)

We're continuing on with LOTR aloud.  It is still great.  I have had reports from folks who found similar experiences to be less than stellar, but I think we've hit the lucky jackpot.  Still, there are variations.  Orcs are more exciting than Entwives, but we have stayed on.

The boys and their mother took a long car ride to a family reunion.  What should have been seven hours plus seven hours turned into twelve out and eight back.  Fortunately, they were listening to the unabridged Rob Inglis LOTR on CD, and (believe it, parents in the room!) THIS MADE THE CAR RIDE BEARABLE.  Twenty hours is enough to get you from Rivendell to Fangorn Forest (meaning all the way through Moria and Lothlorien and beyond), if you want to know.

This also means I missed reading those portions, which makes me wistful.  Rob Inglis does a good job, however.  I am sorry not to have done the death of Boromir myself, although I probably would have choked up, because, you know, that part will always and forever now retroactively be Sean Bean getting totally *Thunked*.

More on Bad Fiction (Perhaps an Ongoing Series)

One feature of bad fiction is that the author is obviously trying to write a movie.

I don't mean write a screenplay or write a book that will be turned into a movie, but that they're trying to create in narrative prose the experience that they get from movies they love. This almost always results in way too much moment-to-moment description of action and too much visual detail; they're working overtime to create that movie scene in your mind's eye, but all they have is words to do it with. Scenes and plotting are built around movie timing, so everything feels rushed from action-beat to action-beat, with everything in between serving as obvious linear set-up to the next beat. Variety of scenes and characters are limited to whatever makes for easy counterpoint or quickly apprehended irony.

Most of all, words are used only for description of objects and actions, and vocabulary is just to establish tone. There's no composition in the language, which is merely instrumental (or, worse, strained to unnatural elevation). Everything is announced; little is suggested.

I'm not being down on movies. It's just that cinematic storytelling and novelistic storytelling are very different terrain, and you can't do one very well with the expectations of the other.

Here's an example.  You can blame me for this one, but I've seen worse in the wild:

It was dark in the kitchen when she entered. Fumbling for the light switch, she had the sense that it was still early, although she could not see the white, round clock in the dark. The switch flicked at her touch, and it seemed somehow too long a second before the lamps buzzed to stark life and cast shadows across the refrigerator, the toaster, the coffee maker, and other appliances. For an instant, the shadows on the coat rack looked like a man standing in the corner, watching her, and her pulse raced a beat. Of course it was nothing, just her red, hooded Lands-End parka, which was in the kitchen. Reaching across the counter, she picked up the small stainless-steel butter knife. Her right hand tightened on the handle while her left groped for the catch of the zipper on wide blue thigh-side pockets of her canvas cargo pants. She bumped against the edge of the counter, and again there was the usual metallic noise as the silverware clinked in the left-side drawer. Unzipping the pocket, she removed her car keys and house keys and placed them on the counter, next to the whole wheat bread that was already there from the night before. Unwrapping the bread from its cellophane bag, she removed a slice and laid it flat on the cutting board, which was brown and scarred by years of service. She cast her glance across the room for the strawberry jelly jar that should have been there. Where was the jelly? Oh, there, next to the sink. With her left hand she reached for it. Bread and jelly would taste good, she thought. Unscrewing the jar, she took a first dollop of jelly and spread it carefully across the bread. There were gaps where bread still showed, so she used the knife to spread another portion of jelly. She blinked.

 She blinked.

50 Shades of OMG This Is Awful

My experiment with comparative prose yesterday caused me to take another look into This Year's Popular Melodrama Of Illiterate Titillation. 

It's really hard to describe how bad it is. Everything you've ever heard said about terrible writing is there: lifeless prose, clunky dialogue, soap-opera emotions, tired descriptive cliches. The sex and even the musing on relationships are just weirdly written, like someone's unfamiliar imagination of what these things must be like. Everything that's supposed to be edgy just comes off as uncomfortably clinical.

It's been said that most sex acts in fiction are cartoon fantasies bearing little relation to the real thing.  With 50 Shades, this extends to depictions of flirting, studying, and talking to yourself.

Big Books I Have Read Out Loud: LOTR, Part IV

As mentioned, this summer we're reading The Lord of The Rings aloud at my house.  We finished The Hobbit before I began this series, and right now we're starting Book Two of The Fellowship of the Ring.  Fact:  LOTR is a trilogy of six books.

Reading Tolkien aloud is a joy because he knows the sound of sentences.  There is flow and music in his language, as can easily be heard by reading a page of LOTR after a page of any worse novelist (or journalist or blogger).

Bad writing is not hard to come by.  Here's a snippet of execrable prose plucked at random from a lifeless headache of a novel that people who still ought to know better are reading today.  (And reading on the bus, I must add.  Hello?  You may have a Kindle, but it's still porn.)

I roll my eyes at myself.  Get a grip, Steele.  Judging from the building, which is too clinical and modern, I guess Grey is in his forties: fit, tanned, and fair-haired to match the rest of the personnel.

Another elegant, flawlessly dressed blonde comes out a large door to the right.  What is it with all the immaculate blondes?  It's like Stepford here.  Taking a deep breath, I stand up.

These sentences start.  Then they stop.  They pass basically without having happened.  They bear no relation to one another in sound or any other pattern.  The passage seems composed mainly to avoid taxing anyone's vocabulary or ear.  It's like Stepford here.

Now, Tolkien.  Again, almost a random example:

Immediately, though everything else remained as before, dim and dark, the shapes became terribly clear.  He was able to see beneath their black wrappings.  There were five tall figures:  two standing on the lip of the dell, three advancing.  In their white faces burned keen and merciless eyes; under their mantles were long grey robes; upon their grey helms were helms of silver; in their haggard hands were swords of steel.  Their eyes fell upon him and pierced him, as they rushed towards him.  Desperate, he drew his own sword, and it seemed to him that it flickered red, as if it was a firebrand.

This isn't even Tolkien at his best.  "Keen and merciless eyes" may be almost a cliche, but in context I'll take it over "I roll my eyes at myself," especially if I am forced to visualize it.

But read both passages aloud.  Really do it.  I like to think that I'm pretty good at that, as I've always done it in private and I've spent years delivering passages in front of classrooms.  Try as I might, I can't make the first example sound like anything other than someone trying to put captions to a series of pouty fashion photos.  In the end, the language has gone nowhere with me.  We've just agreed to call it quits.

The Tolkien, meanwhile, establishes pacing and tone and rhythm, even though it is anything but sing-song.  Each sentence pulls the voice forward into the next.  It doesn't want to stop.  This is language that wants to be read.

Big Books I Have Read: LOTR, Part III: Tom Bombadillo

Tom Bombadil, if you don't remember the name, is the character in The Fellowship of the Ring that many LOTR readers would just as soon forget.  Some suggest that Bombadil doesn't fit in with the rest of Tolkien's Middle-earth.  Some complain that his dialogue and characterization feel somehow strained.  Some aver that Tom Bombadil is just distressingly goofy.

If you have no idea what TB is about then perhaps you've only seen the movies; TB, like the rather more lamented Glorfindel, has no place in the film.  In the book, he occupies a significant portion of two chapters:  a self-contained episode in the hobbits' journey just after they've left the borders of the Shire and before they reach Bree.  Bombadil rescues the hobbits from a carnivorous Willow in the Old Forest, hosts them in his cozy bungalow, then (again) rescues them from carnivorous Wights in the ghostly graveyard of the Barrow-Downs.  Almost the whole time, he is described as prancing and singing like some kind of manic overgrown garden gnome.

What *is* Tom Bombadil?  He is not man, clearly, as he exhibits a magical mastery over even the most sinister ghosts and foliage.  Neither is he a wizard like Gandalf or a wise and solemn elf from back in the day.  He seems like nothing so much as a personification of Nature, a Green Man from European folk mythology or some sort of hippy Gaia spirit.  He really feels like something imported from a Tolkien side-project about the English countryside and the bountiful joy to be found in a frolicsome relationship to green fields and springtime.  He is a jarringly utopian intrusion of Pastoral into a narrative that is darker and more apocalyptic than that.

What most disconnects Bombadil from the main story of the LOTR, however, is that the One Ring has no effect on him.  He can see Frodo when the latter slips it on.  At one point, TB borrows the ring from Frodo and puts it on his own finger.  Not only does he not disappear, but he experiences none of the angsty helpless lust for power that drives the entire trilogy's plot.  To TB, the ring is just a band of gold with no powers of any sort.  Tom Bombadil comes disturbingly close to undermining everything the novel has been building up about the ring and its history.

After the Barrow-Downs, the story moves on to Bree and the comfortably Quest-centric meeting with Strider and subsequent escape from the Ringwraiths.  At this point, poor Tom Bombadil is effectively forgotten, at least for a time.  Later, whenever he is mentioned again, it is only in the context of explaining that his great power and indifference to the ring are nevertheless of little help to the Free Peoples in their struggle against Sauron.  He is described as being immune to Sauron's power and to the ravages of history so lovingly detailed by JRRT.  You get the feeling that, if pressed, an exasperated Elrond might explain that nobody really knows what to make of Bombadil but that he is strongly suspected of belonging to some other story.

Big Books I Have Read: (update!)

Short post:  in our reading aloud, we have reached the Barrow-Downs.

We didn't skip Tom Bombadil after all.  How's that for thorough?

(Thoughts on Bombadil at a later date.)

Big Books I Have Read: The Lord of the Rings, Part II

My history with Tolkien:

I think I’ve read The Lord of the Rings to completion about five times.  By the standards of die-hard Tolkien fans, that’s not a lot, but I’ve always found reasons to go back.

Where it started:  in 1978 my sister read LOTR on the recommendation of friends or possibly my father.  She may have been trying to get ahead of the release of the Ralph Bakshi animated film, the one that ended with Helm’s Deep and was completed later by other people as a TV movie in a totally different style.  I don’t believe I’d started reading the books before we went to see the movie, but I was thoroughly hooked just a few minutes in.  I dived into The Fellowship of the Ring as soon as we got home.  I was in fourth grade.

This, BTW, actually puts me in the same position as people who saw Peter Jackson before they read JRRT.  I may be snobbish about a lot of things, but I can’t be snobbish about that.  Really there’s nothing to be snobbish about here anyway, since Aragorn was voiced by John Hurt and the Bakshi-matic battle scenes were fully as creepy and ominous as anything that can be imagined with CGI today.

So how did Tolkien matter to me at that age?

Let's get the criticism out of the way.  JRRT is a wonderful prose writer, but his storytelling sometimes sags.  There are pacing issues.  Now and then there's a certain amount of (dare I say it?) preciousness in his narrative voice.   

What saves it from any tedium, however, is the world-making.  That’s the strength of it.  It's all there:  cosmology and linguistics and political history and material culture.  It has been said (by JRRT himself, in fact, IIRC) that Tolkien wrote LOTR so that there would be people to speak the languages and live in the lands that he had already invented for himself.  It's all so totally realized that it's just breathtaking. It's hard to call Middle-earth just a "setting."

Tolkien also came along for me when I was already deep into Star Wars.  We all know that George Lucas suffers from severe storytelling disabilities, but these won’t concern us here.  It can’t be denied that the first movie, back before it was the fourth movie, was perfection in itself.  It, too, had a world of its own, and I’d been happily living there for more than a year and a half when I encountered LOTR.  The Star Wars galaxy was nowhere near as well-developed as Middle-earth, and most of it is all surface polish, but it worked well for me at that age (just as H. Potter probably works well enough for kids today).  It felt like a universe.

What Tolkien offered right away was something much, much deeper and more total.  I’m sure I didn’t compare it much to Star Wars at the time, since I loved both and didn’t need to exclude one for the sake of the other, but it’s easy to see the relative strengths in hindsight.  SW had events and characters, and these were terrific, but LOTR had something more:  it had history and geography and always the sense that you were arriving where much of great importance had already happened, much of it long ago.  It wasn't generic, and I still believe it's more than just Europe with orcs.  There was mystery and a strong sense of firm order on the other side of text.  It was enticingly Biblical that way.

In short, what LOTR had was a vivid and inviting sense of place.  Even then, I think, I was dissatisfied with stories that had shallow roots.  LOTR, meanwhile, felt grounded in a reality that I knew I didn’t know enough about.  I think I always had the sense that I could really get there if I just kept reading.

Big Books I Have Read: The Lord of the Hobbitarillion, Part I

This has been a Tolkien Summer at my house.

My boys (six and eight years old) are finally old enough to appreciate good fantasy, or so I believe, so we started the long vacation with a family reading of The Hobbit out loud.  They loved it, I loved it, and now we're well into The Fellowship of the Ring.  This series of blog posts is to offer a few thoughts on Tolkien and on fantasy and perhaps on reading out loud.

But first, the very important issue:  do you believe it's permissible to criticize good old Professor T.?  This isn't a rhetorical question.  There are people who would be genuinely offended at any complaints about the books of Middle-earth, as (or even more so than) if one had criticized the Bible or Joss Whedon.  I know; I have at times been one of them.

But not so now.  I plan to offer some thoughts and make some digs at dear old JRRT where I believe they are deserved.  I hope you understand that I'm doing so only out of love, the kind of love that could lead someone to commit to reading almost 1,500 pages aloud without skipping a word.

Or skipping no more than Tom Bombadil, anyway.