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| Welcome to the somniloquist
where you'll find a mixture of Christopher Johnstone's fiction and his
occasional wandering monologues about the craft of writing fiction. www.somniloquist.org
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Tolkien: A Biography (audiobook version)
Michael White Clipper Audio Narrated by Gordon Griffin 7 Disc Set (~8.25 hours) I initially thought that this would be a short review, a quick note about an interesting biography on an author who no doubt most, if not all, the readers of Ethel will have some interest in learning more about. But the more I listened to this biography, the more I began to realize that this would have to be more than a review, though perhaps still less than a full essay. The biography itself is fascinating, and Michael White is an excellent and intelligent researcher, writer and shedder-of-light. What immediately struck me was that although I've read a fair number of works on Tolkien, they were mostly or entirely in the vein of The Road to Middle-Earth (T. A. Shippey), in which Tolkien the Writer is discussed, but not really Tolkien the Man. Indeed, it's largely the case that the Tolkien estate seems to do all that it can to only publicize stories about Tolkien's personal life that paint him in the most strictly pleasant of colours. Is there anything wrong with this? Why should a reader even want to know about the details of Tolkien's rather unhappy childhood? Do we truly need to know anything about an author's less than admirable features? I think that learning about the bad along with the good does help with a fuller understanding of the writer, but more importantly this biography brings additional shades of understanding to Tolkien's works as well. A lot of things were illuminated. Small trivial things, like learning that Tolkien's favourite Andrew Lang book was The Red Fairy Book will make me go back and re-read that title again, and far more closely this time. And could the name The Red Book of Westmarch be a tribute to Lang's collectanea of fairy stories? Possibly. It's not really important, but it's an interesting thought. More importantly, for me, learning about Tolkien's life contributed to a more significant level of understanding about his works in general and his most famed work, The Lord of the Rings, in particular. Though clearly deeply in love with his wife, Edith, J.R.R. Tolkien seems to have been unable to fully express this, and their marriage was far from happy for the majority of their years together. If it was half as bad as it seems to have been (one can never quite be certain, biographers are not clairvoyants), then it's a tribute to Edith's character that she didn't either leave Tolkien or think seriously about suicide. She was alone and essentially friendless for many years as a result of having to following Tolkien from town-to-town to chase his career. Her husband generally ignored her in favour of spending time with his friends or working on his stories. Although, when children came along he doted on them, which must have made Edith feel even more like some sort of aberration in his life. It suddenly seems to make a perverse sense that there are very few in the way of romantic elements in The Lord of the Rings, and what can be found is clumsy and self-conscious. Tolkien's relationship with C.S. Lewis was also not what I'd expected. When Tollers and Lewis met, Lewis was an agnostic, and Tolkien went about a serious and concerted effort to convert him to Catholicism. Tolkien then got to experience the meaning of 'be careful what you wish for' as Lewis did listen to his friend, eventually converted (but to Protestantism, not Catholicism) and went on to saturate everything he wrote from Escape from the Silent Planet to Narnia with born-again Christian allegory. Ironically, Tolkien, who loathed allegory, is more or less directly responsible for Narnia being so thick with it. Both men did get a lot from their friendship, they both grew as people and benefited from one-another's company, but Lewis became a rapidly popular and sought-after author, able to turn out books with startling speed, while Tolkien languished, publishing just one book, the modestly successful The Hobbit, and then grew jealous and eventually more than a little bitter about his old friend. Eventually the relationship couldn't take the strain and they drifted apart. From his time on the Western Front to his time in Oxford, there is a lot to Tolkien's life that rings of tragedy, set-backs and struggle. Despite everything, Ronald (Tolkien) and Edith did stick it out together. Despite everything, Tolkien did eventually get his grand vision of a mythology for England into print. And in the end, Tolkien's good traits did outshine his less than perfect ones. He seems to have realized how poorly he treated Edith, and did work to correct this towards the end. This is, in many ways, an inspirational book, a book for fans who want to learn more about their favourite author - but it's also a book that I think that every writer who is currently working in the genre of fantasy, especially the sub-genre of created-world fantasy, needs to read. By the end of Tolkien: A Biography I began to find myself feeling deeply uncomfortable and not entirely sure why. Slowly, with painstaking care, Michael White uncovers all of the life events, credos, tragedies and delights that seem to have contributed towards Tolkien's most seminal works. We get to see, a piece at a time, how the world made the man and how the man made another, more magical world. It was clear to me that I wasn't feeling uncomfortable about Tolkien himself or his works. What I seemed to be suddenly feeling uneasy about was my own writing. Now, I need to caveat this by stating very clearly that I am in no way a professional writer. I've only had a handful of short stories published, a couple of which have gone to pro-markets, but a few short stories does not a career make. I think that I also need to state that I'm a little worried that people may read what follows and take it as an attack on fantasy in general and epic fantasy in particular. This is not my intention. I like the fantasy genre, I read a fair amount of it, I write fantasy works and have produced three fantasy novels (all of them awful and basically unpublishable), and I have always planned to undertake something really epic and sweeping eventually. If there is any criticism in the following it is self-criticism only. It wasn't immediately clear to me why I should so suddenly feel oddly queasy while listening to this biography. I don't tend to write highly Tolkienesque fantasy (although I have always planned to try my hand at an epic fantasy, as I mentioned above). In fact, if you'd asked me a week ago who my literary influences are, I'd have answered without pause: G.K. Chesterton, H.H. Munro, Bradbury and Le Guin, though not necessarily in that order. I might have mentioned Lord Dunsany. I might even have mentioned Dickens, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, if I was feeling unusually pretentious. But I might not have remembered to mention Tolkien at all… yet deep down, like practically everyone working in the genre today, I was hugely influenced by Tolkien when I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time. I spent years in high school and early university creating and recreating Tolkienesque worlds (mostly for roleplaying games). Like many people I suspect, my school books ended up covered with Elven runes for a good year or so after my initial discovery of Middle-Earth. So, although it's been a few years since I last read The Lord of the Rings, listening to the biography brought it all back to me. And hearing about the life behind the book brought it all back in an entirely new way. I got to hear how utterly personal Middle-Earth was for Tolkien. I learned a little more about the deep and long-abiding obsessions, drives and hopes that lay many-ranked behind each paragraph he wrote. I was reminded that at the time, when The Lord of the Rings was published there was nothing else quite like it on the shelves. George, Allen & Unwin thought that they would lose money on the publication, but went ahead anyway because it'd make for a 'prestige publication' - something to impress critics (the gods of irony must have been laughing that day). And it began to seem to me that practically all of post-Tolkien sub-created fantasy, regardless of whether the story has dwarves and elves in it, regardless of the magic, the world, the cultures, the races, plot… all of it in some way represents an author trying to write a story that uses someone else's literary philosophy, someone else's writing values and ethos. Someone else's life. And I don't mean that all fantasy is a bland rewriting of The Lord of the Rings - it isn't - but what I am getting at, is that the very things that were so personal to Tolkien were the things that made his works so great. His tightly held opinion that Shakespeare was rubbish and English literature was too character-obsessed were vital to his work, as was his love of old epics, fairy tales and folklore, as well as his somewhat over-pastoral, luddite opinion that the 20th century produced nothing worth owning other than perhaps the safety razor (Tolkien hated shaving. He gave Hobbits hardly any beard, Elves no beard at all, and Dwarves a complete disinterest in the whole question of shaving. None of them were cursed with their creator's daily chore). So the question that began to run around in my head was this: if I produce a work of sub-created fantasy, and if I don't go to the same length to ensure that it is a work that is profoundly important to me, deeply and personally, if I don't ensure that every aspect of the story is real, both psychologically and logically, then what am I achieving? What am I communicating? I could tell a good story, certainly, it might even move people to emotion, but if I'm standing here and what I'm writing about is way off over there somewhere (to paraphrase Connie Willis), can I possibly do any good with it? Will the story ever be anything other than a thinly veneered tribute to something else that remains significantly greater, grander and truer? I'm at a loss to answer this question. Before trying to address it, however, I should be very clear here. I am not experiencing a neurotic crises about originality of content. That doesn't bother me at all. I know that every story is based either on other stories or on life, and either way, this renders it impossible to be 'original' (1) throughout an entire work . Worries about originality are the curse of the beginning writer, and eventually most writers realize that originality (whatever that really is) isn't what needs to be sought after to make a good tale. So, I'm not worried about originality. What am I worried about? I think, as best as I can tell: psychology. If I'm writing in a genre that is filled with expectations of plot, character, archetype, approach and theme that are so heavily pre-determined by someone else…a single someone else… then, how can the psychology of my story be honest for me? And can a self-deceptive, perhaps even dishonest story, have anything real and lasting to say? One could point out that Tolkien was himself writing within other people's psychological domains. Isn't it the case that other authors before him, notably E.R. Eddison, William Morris and Lord Dunsany were all writing in a similar sort of vein? Well… yes… no… not really. Although they were certainly writing fantasy, their stories were very different to the subsequent works of Tolkien. None of those earlier writers engaged much in ideas of what we think of as epic archetypes. Eddison's heroes are difficult to tell apart from his villains, and Lord Dunsany wrote characters of a more Shakespearian bent who tend to contribute to their own problems and downfalls. World-building in pre-Tolkien fantasy was a haphazard affair. Names were plucked at random. And it's also very difficult (but not impossible) to find examples of fantasy maps before Tolkien. He completely changed our approach to fantasy. And it's Tolkien's approach to fantasy, his influence, that has had the most profound impact on the genre today. He presents a single, over-shadowing spectre. The pre-Tolkien writers fade away behind him (2). Many avid genre readers aren't even aware that there were authors writing fantasy before Tolkien. And even if we dispense with the epic side of fantasy today, the archetypes and the expectations of fantasy plots, then we are still left with the undertaking of 'sub-creation' itself, the idea that an invented world should be entirely consistent within its own bounds - and that is certainly a Tolkien idea. Ever read any Conan? Robert E. Howard never bothered with sub-creation. His stories were sprinkled with ruined jungle cities that exist for no reason other than to provide a place to explore and loot. Conan's world has primitive, savage apemen, Norse frost giants and aliens that look like Hindu gods, all mixed in together - it makes no internal sense at all. So, as a writer, if I undertake sub-creation, but only because Tolkien told me to, or only because I think it'll make for a saleable story or a believable world, or only because it's a bit of fun… well, I'm back at the same point. It's not an approach to writing that I have undertaken because I deeply and truly feel that it is the only and best way to write a fantasy tale. What will the effort conjure? Pretty names, a few painted hills, muslin clouds and cardboard towns? Will not readers just see through it all? Will not they smell the lack of sincerity, grow tired, move on? One could also point out that Tolkien was writing in a yet older tradition, that he was walking in the footsteps of the legends and epics of old - but none of the seminal epics of Western myth really have what we today think of as an epic structure. The Iliad and The Odyssey? One is a pointless, bloody sword-fest, the other is a wandering tragedy, directionless and with only a glimmer of a happy ending. The Anead? Far too complex, too considered and again, there is no epic structure, no building up to an epic point, no climax, no final battle, no denouement. What about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? Structured more like a fairy tale. Arthurian legends? Which ones? Mallory's? Mostly just knights bashing one-another. Tennyson's. Romantic, pretty, nice to read, but not epic fantasy by any stretch. Beowulf? Short, erratic action sequences, no over-arcing plot. The Norse sagas? Basically just a bunch of family histories, there's no narrative structure in the normal sense at all. The Elda Edda and Prose Edda? Well… perhaps… here we do have a single all-encompassing set of factions, enemies, good versus evil, a building up of conflict and a final resolution. It certainly is an epic in today's fantasy genre sense, and both works were certainly an influence on Tolkien. But again, what we come back to is that Tolkien might have been working in the overall tradition of the cycle of Norse mythology, but his reasons for writing The Lord of the Rings were very different to the reasons that Snorri Snorrason (presumably) wrote the Eddas. Tolkien was trying to invent a mythology for England. Snorri was trying to preserve a real mythology that he could (again, presumably) see was on the verge of vanishing forever. Snorri was more like a late medieval W.B. Yeats or Katherine Briggs. Tolkien and Snorri wrote for different personal reasons, and these reasons can be seen throughout the two texts. The Eddas and The Lord of the Rings remain fundamentally very different works because of this. I'm not sure that I'm explaining myself well at all, so I'm going to try and illustrate my point with the works of another successful fantasy writer, Neil Gaiman. It appears to me that both writers, Gaiman and Tolkien, deeply involved themselves with the production of a mythos for a mythless society. Tolkien dipped into the past, and created a myth for an England that was without myths, a pastoral, pre-industrial vision for a society that was growing weary of machines and modernity. Gaiman on the other hand produced a different sort of myth for a different sort of world - Sandman was a global myth, in which everything is relative and everything is real. It's an inclusionist myth, for a generation who can no longer believe that any one, great thing is true and everything else must therefore be a lie. All gods are equally real in Gaiman's world, all truths are equally true. It's a patently anti-sub-creation vision. There is no internal consistency, unless it is the very fact that nothing is internally consistent. Gaiman's was a myth much better suited for the global village, but at its heart, it is also a cycle of stories about mythic people, godlike things and the achieving of victories against the odds. It is, in its particular way, epic. So, although broadly speaking, Sandman and The Lord of the Rings are both epic fantasy, they are utterly different works of epic fantasy, and they address utterly different sets of human concerns and themes in their own different but honest ways. Both authors used their respective works to discuss thing that were important to them. And both The Lord of the Rings and Sandman will likely endure for a long time because of this honesty. As far as I'm aware, both writers also started what are generally held to be their greatest works (3) with a profound uncertainty that the undertaking would be successful at all. Tolkien worked for long years believing that The Lord of the Rings might never reach publication. Neil, as I understand it, secretly suspected that Sandman might not survive more than a year or two before someone in DC came to his/her senses and realised that Sandman was something far too mature and profound, intelligent, unusual and sincere to ever be wildly popular - or perhaps I should say, to ever be popularist, if you'll allow that there's a difference. And yet both writers poured wellsprings of creativity and a lot of hard work into what can only be described as, initially, labours of love. And this, I think is where my thoughts are running. If a writer undertakes a story that is not, in some deep way a personal labour of devotion throughout, if it is not something that has incalculable personal importance, then whatever is produced, it will be a narrative that is a pale, misbegotten thing. A half-made story. An ill-born tale. If I write only in order to create something saleable, then nothing lasting will come of it and nothing honest either - not really and deeply honest, not in the way that is important. But how does one write honestly? What do I write about? That, I don't honestly know. But… I guess… in the end, this is all only a rambling thought, and not a well-formed one at that. You may disagree with me violently. You may think that I've wildly misrepresented things. I don't reserve the right to be correct. I'm probably not. And really, I don't have an answer to my sudden attack of broader nagging worries about writing sub-created fantasy. It's quite possible that I am simply being neurotic. But I do have a sneaking feeling that perhaps I'm onto something here. Even though I can't well articulate it, I do feel that my subconscious has noticed something important, and is trying to work out precisely what that thing is. I'll let you know if I ever manage to find it. ---
1) I should say, more correctly, it's not possible to be both entirely original and readable. I could write a story made up of a stream of consciousness coming from an intelligent interstellar cloud of toaster ovens that have somehow ended up drifting in space, but using only 'hot' and 'non-hot' in place of all nouns, and colours instead of emotions, and the entire thing would also be written backwards because the point of view character is really a psychic entity who is experiencing the stream of conscious second-hand while slipping in reverse through the dimension of time past the hive-mind toaster-ovens. I suspect that this story would be reasonably original. I don't suspect that it would be reasonably readable. 2) Except possibly Mervyn Peake. The New Weird owe a lot to Mr Peake. Yes, that's right, I'm looking at you, Perdido Street Station. 3) To date. I wouldn't like to sound like I'm suggesting that Neil won't produce something better and more marvellous than Sandman in the coming years (and of course, difference people like different works. I know that more than a few consider American Gods to be Mr Gaiman's seminal work, not Sandman, as I've suggested here). |
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